Pope Francis at the Biennial “With my eyes”: an encounter with art, faith and the least, explained by Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonca

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Your Eminence, let’s start from the choice of the name of the Holy See pavilion: With my eyes. The possessive pronoun, my, plays an important role here. It is a meeting, also the proposal of Biennale (video) it is an encounter with the world of art, with the big questions that contemporary art asks us today. We must listen and see with our own eyes these questions and these realities, there is the desire to engage one’s subject in this research, because today we live in a world subjected to images, everywhere we have devices, filters, it is as if the eyes were postponed to a meeting that no longer happens. It is important to have the naked possibility of looking at reality, even in its complexity and difficulty, with one’s own eyes, making this a moment of awareness, of self-search, of encounter with the world, it is very important.

When he showed this project to the Pope, he replied, will I go and see with my own eyes?

He made this joke. We all know the beautiful communicative spontaneity of Pope francesco which surprises us with its closeness. He reacted by smiling, saying I’ll go and see with my own eyes too, a wonderful surprise. He is the first pope who will go to the Biennale, it is an event that has a very great historical significance, also because Pope Francis has a very great desire to carry on the dialogue with the world of artists. We remember that he met them in the Sistine Chapel last June.

The Pope wants to enhance the contribution of artists in the construction of the contemporary world and its values.

Even the choice of location, the Giudecca women’s prison, is apparently unusual and do some inmates actively participate in the pavilion?

At the beginning it seems strange, a prison is not the usual space for exhibitions and for the contemporary scene, instead, if we think carefully, it is important to leave the usual circles, where a certain automatism is created and find new spaces of reality that can be inhabited, compared with what the artistic experience is.

All the artists we invited reacted in an enthusiastic, positive way to the choice of that place and the collaboration with the detained ladies who will have an important role in creating some works and accompanying the visitors