The Bari Enterprise

PROLOGUE

21st May. I am the first Romanian artist to arrive at our hotel. I am worried about my installation: there are slides to be projected and what if they didn’t set it up yet? The opening is on the 22nd after all.

No time to go to the exhibition space, especially since I don’t know where that is. I know the name Fiera del Levante is important, but can everything fit in there? And in what part of Bari is it? This Bari looks kindof like Bucharest, old four story buildings, pretty gray, pretty dirty! It does have a seaside, doesn’t it?
Too tired to find out now about show or seaside, make a phone call, no one replies, go to sleep.

12 Midnight. A strong knock on the door, followed by many more. My first roommate, Lea, is here. We talk a bit and go to sleep only to get woken up six hours later by someone who missed her second flight and had to take the train from Rome: Ramona, who comes from Cluj (Transilvania) and is as panicked about her work as I am.

In the morning we all introduce each other, admire each other’s work and decide to go to this Fiera del Levante together and find out whether we still exhibit or not. (All of us have received emails from the Romanian organizer stating that our work hadn’t arrived three days before the show).

We take a bus, start talking in broken Italian to fellow bus riders, who give us free tickets and show us the way to this famous Fiera. By the way, we later found out, Fiera means Fair and Levante, well, East.
We get there and it’s by the see!! It looks like a huge place and we have to walk for ten minutes inside it to find someone to talk to. No sign of other artists, but there is someone to show us around. I find my installation; they built a whole room for it! Wow! But wait a minute, the gigantic title is wrong. ..
This is the beginning of a long series of small mis- happenings at the exhibition.

Take my advice everyone: Don’t use traditional slides in a show unless it’s your projector, you know how to use it and there is someone watching the projection 24/7! It was the first time to use slides in a show for me, but I thought with the right instructions everything will be fine. People do use slides in art shows and it works.
Here the installation managers didn’t know what type was needed to work in a loop and when it finally arrived it stopped every few hours and made the slides unclear. That’s my little comment to the organization of the exhibition, but I was expecting it too. 700 artists in the same space?
You have to be a ticking clock to manage it without problems.
So the trip didn’t begin exactly on a right foot for my poor work and myself, but interesting discoveries were to be made…

PART ONE

The Opening
After many excitements and arrangements the work is there and thousands of people are walking around to see it. There’s a speech outside and I get very emotional when I hear it. It’s not necessarily the words that are spoken, but the fact that almost each speaker repeats what they said in about three languages. That’s multicultural for you! I came to Italy after three years spent in the US and English was the only language most people could speak. And here comes the mayor of Bari and speaks perfect French, English and Italian! And all around me I can see and hear people speaking so many languages I can’t even imagine. I’m happy to be here.

The next few days follow the same pattern: We joyously find out that transport and food at the canteen are free for Bienale artists, so we travel and eat A LOT! We go to the exhibition space every day to check if everything is ok (hmm..) and then to the canteen to check the menu of the day and follow our trip’s obsession: to meet artists from exotic countries, Romanian artists, any artists..
This last quest proves rather difficult as the tables at the canteen are designed to be occupied by four people only and any disobedience to that design is strictly forbidden.
The canteen becomes very useful for other purposes: There and with its own materials we design a catalogue that has been missing from the Romanian organizational part. We use the napkins as background and each artist draws their work. We then make copies of these and post them at the Information Center with all the other catalogs. People like them!

PART TWO

Did I mention that Bari is a very beautiful city? You have to go to the Castello Svevo where we started and from there enter the old city to get really mesmerized by it. The tiniest streets you can imagine and everyone makes pasta in front of their house.
We visit it almost every day and then we go to lunch and slowly we discover how to meet artists! You have to go to that small café at the corner outside the Visual Arts Padiglione. That’s where everyone sits after their heavy free meal to drink their espresso Italian style. That’s where you get beer and look at your neighbors who also look at you.
How can you start a conversation though? By giving them a (handmade) catalog of course!
Finally we meet the Egyptians, the Palestinians, the Moroccans, the Slovenians, the Macedonians, the Serbians, the Kosovars, and of course the MTV crew. We are popular after all, but soon we have to go home.

EPILOGUE

For details about my project Secret Life of House Plants go to www.deliapopa.com and secretlifeofhouseplants.blogspot.com and for official info about the Biennial go to www.bjcem.org