In the morning, we sit outside the caravan. A little better dressed than usual for the campsite, cappuccino in hand, perhaps still wondering what to cook that evening. And, actually, already a little excited.
A few hours later, we are in Venice, standing in front of a cut-open floor in the German Pavilion.
In 2022, Maria Eichhorn had parts of the building exposed for Relocating a Structure. Beneath today’s pavilion, traces of the original building became visible — and with them the history of its transformation in 1938, when the former Bavarian Pavilion was remodelled to suit the aesthetic of Nazi Germany.
From the caravan to the Biennale.
That may sound unusual. It is not.
From Union Lido, we head to Punta Sabbioni, board the vaporetto and get off a little later at the Giardini. We are not alone. The boats carry bathers, day-trippers, people with Biennale bags and others whose destination you cannot guess.
There is no reason why camping and contemporary art should not go together. The only things that clash are the clichés about the people who do one or the other.
Clichés, then.
What is it trying to tell us?
We do not consider ourselves art experts. But we like art. Both of us. Even though, at first glance, we approach it quite differently.
Angie starts researching while we are still at the exhibition. Who is the artist? What is the background? Why is that thing hanging there? What does this material mean? She reads the online catalogue, searches the internet and, these days, asks ChatGPT too.
Sooner or later, the question almost always comes up — the one you often hear around contemporary art:
What is the artist trying to say?
Over the past few years, I have become a little more cautious about that question. Not because it is wrong. But sometimes something else interests me first: Why will this work of art not simply let me walk on?
Admittedly, that is not a particularly precise category. For someone trained in theoretical physics, suspiciously imprecise, even.
But sometimes you understand a work and it still leaves you cold. Sometimes you do not understand it at all at first, yet it will not let you go. And sometimes it is only hours or days later that you realise something has stayed with you.
A machine that lives
In the Korean Pavilion in 2022, a huge black construction filled the room.
Tubes, chains, mechanical elements, light. All intertwined, almost like a dragon. And the thing moved. Not spectacularly fast. More in a way that eventually made you begin to attribute a kind of life of its own to it.
The work was part of Yunchul Kim’s Gyre. In his installations, Kim brings together science, technology, philosophy and mythology. His machines change continuously and respond to their surroundings.
Of course you can read up on what lies behind it. We did too.
But first, we simply stood in front of it.
We liked the combination of technical complexity and the calm of the Korean Pavilion. The machine was complicated; the space was clear. Movement and stillness at once.
That stayed with us.
Germany
The German Pavilion has never been our favourite on any visit. The last three Biennales alone give some idea why.
In 2022, Maria Eichhorn’s exposed architecture.
In 2024, Thresholds. Ersan Mondtag set a personal story of migration, family and belonging against the monumentality of the building. The German contribution explored transitions, the past and an uncertain future. Visually powerful, but also deeply oppressive.
Then, in 2026, Ruin.
Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu explore East German history, vanished places, the years after reunification, migration, right-wing violence and memory. Naumann works with furniture and interiors — things that initially seem private and harmless — and turns them into political spaces.
Almost the entire room was rendered in that peculiar green which immediately brings back memories of public buildings, barracks or institutions in East Germany. Furniture hung on the walls. Rooms seemed compressed and displaced.
It was not beautiful. Presumably it was not meant to be.
The German Pavilion is often heavy going. Strikingly often, it engages with the weight of its own history. We no longer expect lightness there.
Even so, we look particularly closely every time.
We want to know what our country is saying about itself.
A head full of birds
In 2026, we stood before a figure by Nick Cave in the Arsenale.
A human body. Above it, where the head should be, a tangle of branches and twigs with birds perched among them.
Cave’s series Two Points in Time – At Once explores grief, memory and loss. Branches, flowers and birds are part of this imagery.
We did not know that at first.
Angie looked at the figure and said, in essence:
That is what my head feels like.
The branches are my brain. And all the time, somewhere, a new thought lands in it like a bird and flutters about.
We do not know whether that is exactly what Nick Cave meant to say.
But it does not matter at all.
The artwork had found something that was already there in Angie’s mind. The image is still with her today.
And by this point, at the latest, our two ways of approaching art are no longer very far apart.
Not everything has to appeal
Of course it does not always work.
At the Biennale, we also walk past things that leave us feeling very little, despite the description, the online catalogue and the best will in the world. Sometimes we read a long text and understand less afterwards than before. Sometimes we understand the intention and still find the work boring.
And neither of us has yet managed to get excited about patched-together tapestries.
That is part of it.
A Biennale is not a museum where someone has already decided which works have stood the test of decades. Much of it is new. Some of it provokes. Some of it fails completely for us.
And some of it follows us around for the rest of the day.
Seaworld Venice
In 2026, that was particularly clear at the Austrian Pavilion, where long queues had formed.
Florentina Holzinger had created Seaworld Venice there. A mixture of performance, theatre, installation, water, technology and human bodies. The pavilion became a kind of cross between an underwater theme park, a sewage treatment plant and a sacred space. It was about purity and pollution, bodies and waste, nature and technology.
During the performances, naked women moved through the space. It was physical, direct, sometimes uncomfortable.
Photography was not allowed.
That was a good thing.
We came out and talked about it. Again later. And once more that evening.
We were both a little excited and a little unsettled.
We could not say exactly why.
What remains
After a day at the Biennale, we are usually tired. Not just from the kilometres.
You have seen so much. Rooms, images, machines, bodies, videos, voices. Some things disappear immediately. Others suddenly resurface hours later.
Angie often keeps reading then. I tend to let the images settle and wait to see which ones return.
Perhaps these two methods are not so far apart. She looks for what the artists have put into their work. I wait to see what stays with me.
Quite often, the two paths meet.
In the evening, the vaporetto takes us back to Punta Sabbioni. Then there are the campsites again, the bicycles, the restaurants, the caravan.
Perhaps we make something to eat. Perhaps we have an Aperol Spritz.
And sometimes we are still talking about a man with a tree growing out of his head, and birds sitting in it.
Then it has been a good day at the Biennale.