A Cacilheiro in Venice : The renovation and Conversion Of A Ferryboat By Joana Vasconcelos

How do you appropriate a vessel designed for other uses than the one you have in mind? In transforming an old ferryboat — a cacilheiro, as they are called in Lisbon — into a floating gallery, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos offers her own take on this and other questions. In the context of the Venice Biennale, for which she undertook the project, she also grappled with a problem that faces all artists who are asked to represent their country: how to manage the exhibition of their work in the overdetermined, even negatively connoted decor of national pavilions. Portugal’s case is more complicated still, as it is the only country with a significant artistic and cultural tradition not to have its own building, either among the 29 Giardini pavilions or anywhere else in the city.

In light of these questions, Vasconcelos’s charming and somewhat touristy proposition — the boat leaves the quay with visitors every day for short excursions on the lagoon — is much more significant than it first appears. By recycling a vessel typical of those that navigate the Tagus and by mooring it on the Riva dei Partigiani — in other words, right next to but outside the Giardini (and thus free of charge) — Vasconcelos imports fragments of vernacular Portuguese culture into Venice, at the heart of contemporary art, and revisits the relationship between artists and the sites and history of the Biennale.