From an invigilator

Bedwyr Williams represents Wales at the 55th Venice Biennale 2013 International Art Exhibition in a project jointly curated by Mostyn and Oriel Davies and supported by the Arts Council of Wales.

If you look down within a building in Venice, you are likely to discover that the flooring is either terrazzo or marble.  Terrazzo is a composite material, which is made of remnants that would otherwise be discarded; chips of marble, granite, glass and quartz. Terrazzo is poured into place, much like concrete, cured and then polished to a smooth surface.  It is here, within the chips of a Venetian terrazzo floor, that this exhibition begins.

On entering the The Ludoteca Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, a church and former convent, you are met with a vast terrazzo wall partitioning the space. As you move further in, a spotlight falls upon a white observatory, illuminating it through the terrazzo like a Victorian phantasmagoria magic-lantern show.  Many visitors sit on the bench to contemplate the observatory, the partition in the terrazzo only becoming visible after some time of observation, or a small gesture from an invigilator to suggest that they can cross the threshold.

Bedwyr Williams describes The Starry Messenger to be about how you can escape the here and now, either into the microscopic world of a terrazzo floor or the heavens above with your eye to the lens of a viewing machine.  It is about the universe and our place within it.  The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) was written by Galileo in 1610 and exists as the first published text of observations made through a telescope.  His discoveries had a profound influence on astronomy and cosmology, and the Roman Catholic Church cautioned Galileo against speaking out on behalf of the Copernican claim, which placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the centre.  To situate the amateur’s observatory within the church of The Ludoteca therefore creates a particular poignancy.  Whilst observing the observatory, you as the viewer, are observed by the religious figures painted above the altar, and the telescope directs your gaze to the painted heavens of the church ceiling.  An instrument that is usually installed to witness the universe is here contained within the walls of a religious space that did not welcome its invention. The observatory mediates on this history, but as a viewing machine, it also withdraws the viewer from the here and now and encourages us to escape into the stars of Galileo’s universe or the heavens of the church.

From within the observatory is the sound of a man crying.  It is a theatrical sort of cry, deep and exaggerated.  Unable to see more than a slither of the inside of the observatory, some visitors think the crying is a performance piece rather than bodiless sound.  Williams gives no clue as to why the astronomer is crying, leaving the viewer to add their own meaning.  Through the gap of the door, one can observe a flask next to a laptop, which has as its screensaver an image of space, of shooting through the stars.

After a short while the light that illuminates the observatory is gone, plunging you into darkness after the bright Venetian light of outside.  The opening to the next room is easy to miss in the darkness, but inside is a pond containing a fluid terrazzo floor, the sound encouraging you to imagine the blocks knocking together under the blue light.  It is at this point that many visitors turn back, their eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness enough to see the black starry corridor at the end of the room.  Some need torches; others need only the knowledge that the corridor will safely to carry them through to another space.  The corridor whistles and tiny stars surround you in the darkness.  It’s a disorientating journey that takes you to a place full of oversized pieces of terrazzo, rumbling together as you shrink in size to a tiny chip within the terrazzo flooring.

Light returns as you arrive underneath a giant white coffee table.  Looking up, the glass tabletop is scattered with a constellation of objects; lamps, a clock, a watch, a hover, a magnifying glass, paperclips, suitcases, plants, a microscope, cushions, a torch and a flip-flop, to name only few objects.  As you look up at what we can assume is a carefully selected combination of objects, you are left wondering as to who they belong to; what sort of person these objects create and whether perhaps, they might be the belongings of the crying astronomer.  From underneath the table you see the back of a set of high school bleachers, butted up against the entry into the next room and directed towards a film.  As you walk in, you realise how awkward the bleachers feel in the room; how claustrophobic the room feels housing these oversized white bleachers.

The film is a heady claustrophobic mix of the ideas explored throughout the exhibition, written and performed by Bedwyr Williams and directed, edited and animated by Cardiff based filmmakers Ewan Jones Morris and Casey Raymond.  Williams appears with a mosaic head and throughout the film we are encouraged to imagine ourselves as small pieces, stuck in the rubble amongst other chunks and pebbles.  We are made up of tiles and chips and grit, at one point described as a ‘serious flapjack’.  The film overindulges in surfaces and texture; terrazzo, wallpaper, bondage leather, car interiors, pustules, latex, mosaics, flesh, teeth and jelly.  The music is at times overwhelmingly intense and the scenes at the dentist are particularly uncomfortable.  On reading the guest book, the dentist, or rather, an unwillingness to go to the dentist, is mentioned on several occasions.  The film, like the exhibition, finds great complexity in the smallest of ideas; going far deeper than many of us would dare go.  It is witty and playful, and the visuals are bizarrely hypnotic.

After the claustrophobia of the film, you are outside in an open courtyard with the comparatively calming sound of grasshoppers.  An unfamiliar noise appears, making you question the reality of the grasshoppers and it is with this uncertainty that you arrive in the janitor’s cupboard of The Ludoteca.  An ensemble of sounds emanate from different corners of the cupboard; a cough, a splash, a screwdriver, a screech and it is here, at the doors of the janitor’s cupboard, that you leave the exhibition.  The expressions of visitors as they leave through the doors of the janitor’s cupboard vary somewhat.  Some expressions seem to say, ‘Did I come out the right way?’, and others simply look bewildered.  The best expressions I encountered were the triumphant ones, with a few visitors even remarking aloud ‘I made it!’, or words to that effect.  Many visitors who I spoke to at this point often referred to the exhibition as a journey, a trip, or a voyage and I’m inclined to agree.  The Starry Messenger steers a path between the microscopic world of the terrazzo flooring below, the expanse of the universe above and everything that exists in between.  It draws attention to things of different scales and import, and puts you, as the viewer, physically amongst the chips of a terrazzo floor or within the whistling depths of the dark starry corridor, to ponder their nature, relations to one another and of course, our place within it all.

The exhibition is not accompanied by an exhibition text in the traditional sense, but a libretto is available to pick up prior to entering the janitor’s cupboard. The hinges of the narrative, mirrored in the hinges of the concertina, traverse time, continents, smells and characters, and ends with the thud of a falling book about the universe.

To see photographs of the exhibition please go to the Ceri Hand Gallery website.