The Mexican Pavilion presents

WE DISTANCED OURSELVES, WE ALWAYS CAME BACK

By Erick Meyenberg

At the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

Without looking back.

This is how the migrant travels when leaving home to avoid being anchored to the past, transformed into rooms like Edith, who, according to a biblical passage, was warned and could not avoid it.

The migrant, perpetually foreign, desires and wants to return to something that no longer exists, and at the same time never ceases to belong anywhere.

In 2019, Erick Meyenberg, a Mexican artist of German and Lebanese origins, gathered a family around a table in the countryside of Northern Italy to celebrate a ritual of coexistence between celebration and mourning.

The Doda family emigrated over 30 years ago from Tirana, the capital of Albania, to Italy, a country in which they integrated without losing their traditions, achieving an immersion in the local culture while preserving deep ties with their homeland.

The particularities of that family life and their personal habits are what the artist translates into this video installation with an aesthetic and conceptual strategy aimed at communicating the unique things that unite us in our individuality as human beings: ways of honoring, loving, and missing, gestures and emotions that are primordial for all of us.

Thus, an empty chair, left in the video, is the deposit of another ritual: the lighting of a candle awaiting the return of someone who is leaving, a historical reference to the Albanian tradition of the public park Lëndina e Lotëve (The Meadow of Tears)

We Distanced Ourselves, We Always Came Back poetically evokes both the migrant's journey and the possibility of a momentary rooting around a table. Real moments in their cyclical condition between gratitude and pain, coming and going between what has been adopted and what continues to be lost. A tribute, too, to those who have not arrived or are about to arrive at a new reality of life. An invitation to appreciate the foreigner to imagine connections from the most intimate common ground: a wink, a kiss, a caress, or a goodbye as shared vitality beyond coordinates or boundaries.

Location: Arsenale, Castello, 30122, Venice, Italy

Tania Ragasol, curator and art historian

Erich Meyenberg (Mexico City 1980), interdisciplinary visual artist, sees painting as a fundamental element of expression, though he also explores other media such as sound installation, drawing, collage, and video.