Migrants - FB
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FLORENCE BIENNALE
18 - 26 OCTOBER, 2025
Fortezza da Basso
Viale Filippo Strozzi 1, Florence FI
Opening to the public Saturday 182 pm
Office hours:
- From Monday to Friday9 am to 5 pm
- Saturday and SundayClosed
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Migrants
MIGRANTI/CLANDESTINI. Il Mare di Erode (MIGRANTS/CLANDESTINES. The Sea of Herod)
curated by Marcella Guerrieri
Sunday, 18 October - 4.30 p.m. / 5 p.m.
Fortezza da Basso, Spadolini Pavilion, Theatre Area
Images, numbers, stories
Images of daily chronicles, of escapes along routes of hope, along treacherous and perilous paths. Destinations as unknown as the days of walking, improbable and insecure means, inhospitable and inhuman landings. Wagons, cages, walls, barbed wire, impassable borders that treaties, pacts and conventions had promised to eradicate from minds and never again erect on the ground.
Images of aching humanity on the run. Fleeing from impossible lives, without the certainties of today or even simple and minimal prospects for a future of survival.
Numbers in continuous progression, updating day by day, hour by hour, punctuated by a rigid metal numerator in perpetual motion. One million refugees in Jordan, one million in Lebanon, two million in Turkey. Turkey, an obligatory stopover on the way to Europe, a continent of cultures with common roots and different and opposing reception policies. Openings and closures. Open and closed borders. Travel stories. Beginning and end, beginning of the journey and end of hopes. End of the hopes of Aylan, of his mother, his father, of all the brothers, mothers and fathers of all the Aylan, forever children in the embrace of the Mediterranean, Herod's Sea.
Divided into five chapters, this collective work for the Florence Biennale proposes a dialogue through images, where the bare narrative of the present becomes poetic in the timbral and modulated voices of the artists. And as in Bertolt Brecht's Dialogues of Refugees, it is these artist voices, the analytical testimonies of the present that become history. Conversations and dialogues about society and the fate of a silent and inactive West, confused and lost between commonplaces and dominant thought.
Voices for an open and global debate that must impose itself to review models of coexistence and reception, models of plural cultures and societies with a possible and shared collective future.
In memory of Anna Masala, the first Italian Turkologist, Professor of Turkish Language and Literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, to whom generations of scholars owe their passion for the East and Turkey.