Cecilia Alemani’s Milk of Dreams

Cecilia Alemani and I are married, which some might find a conflict of interest, because we are both curators and I directed the Venice Biennale in 2013. But I have been interviewing the directors of each Venice Biennale for Artpress since 2009, so with the editors we thought we would stick to tradition, as long as I didn’t shy away from asking Alemani some difficult questions.

In years animated by fierce debates about identity politics—Alemani has placed the idea of metamorphosis at the center of her exhibition and has chosen as a travel companion the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington—a champion of hybridity, transformation, and escape from narrow definitions of the self. Bound to be a Biennale of many “firsts”—first curated by an Italian woman, first to be postponed since the 1940s, first for number of women artists and perhaps not the first to coincide with the start of a major military conflict but certainly one that feels caught in its heat— The Milk of Dreams is destined to be quite historic.