The Right of Passage, a collaborative video by Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg has been included within the exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere in the 60th Venice Biennale, as part of the Disobedience Archive (The Zoetrope) curated by Marco Scotini. Zanny Begg will be in Venice for the opening and associated events. This work was create as part of the Australia Council for the Arts, Barcelona Residency.
The 60th International Art Exhibition, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, will open to the public from Saturday April 20 to Sunday November 24, 2024, at the Giardini and the Arsenale; it will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia.
Concept, film editing and production: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Animation and drawings: Zanny Begg
Camera and interviews of theorists: Oliver Ressler
Camera in Barcelona: Carlos Chang Cheng, Roberto Martín
Sound recording: Oliver Ressler
Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudi Gottsberger
Production assistance and translation: Daniela Ortiz, Xose Quiroga
The Right of Passage is partially constructed through a series of interviews with theorists of migration: Ariella Azoulay, Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra. These interviews form the starting point for a discussion in Barcelona, one of Europe’s most densely populated and multicultural cities, with a group of people living “without papers”. The film is set at night, against a city skyline, providing a dark void from which those marginalized and excluded can articulate their own relationship to the arbitrary nature of national identity and citizenship. Spain was chosen for this project as it is teetering on the brink of financial meltdown and is testing the limits of European cohesion.
Maybe the most capricious aspect of today’s capitalist societies is the persistence of the current form of the nation state, an artificial mechanism that creates and maintains zones of political, social and economic inequality. A key element of the functionality of the nation state is the granting – and denial – of citizenship. But can we imagine a world without borders, without the nation state and its monopoly on citizenship rights? In their third collaborative film Zanny Begg (Sydney) and Oliver Ressler (Vienna) focus on struggles to obtain citizenship, while at the same time questioning the implicitly exclusionary nature of this concept.