Venice Biennale Portraits: Caroline Corbetta
Caroline Corbetta
Mara Sartore: This project seems to have a deeply layered origin. It does not stem solely from the experience of Padiglione Crepaccio in 2013, but also from a longstanding interest that has shaped your curatorial practice: a focus on emerging artists and artistic communities still in formation.
Caroline Corbetta: My interest in emerging artists has always informed my curatorial work, even when collaborating with figures who are now fully established, such as Francesco Vezzoli, Maurizio Cattelan, or Ugo Rondinone. After all, Vezzoli himself was still an emerging artist when I began working with him in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
My relationship with Venice, however, began even earlier, on a personal level. It is a city I have frequented since childhood and with which I have maintained a constant bond. Later came the professional connection as well: in 2010 I was invited to join the jury of the Collettiva Giovani Artisti at Bevilacqua La Masa, and there I discovered an extraordinarily vibrant artistic scene. Thomas Braida became, in a way, my “Virgil”: through him I came to understand the existence of a community made up of artists, independent spaces, and collectives living and working together.
That communal dimension struck me deeply and probably also influenced the birth of Crepaccio in Milan in 2012 – an experimental non-profit space founded during the height of the economic crisis, when for many young artists it had become almost impossible to enter the art system. The idea was to create an alternative threshold, a side entrance, placing artists directly in dialogue not only with art professionals but also with the city’s casual passers-by.
In 2013 I felt the need to bring this experience to Venice during the Biennale. Speaking with Thomas Braida and other artists, a shared frustration emerged: while the Biennale drew international attention to the city, it simultaneously tended to overlook the local artistic scene. That was how the first Padiglione Crepaccio came into being: an exhibition staged during the three preview days of the Biennale inside an artists’ house in the historic centre – Ca’ Soranzo – with a remarkable degree of curatorial freedom. The project then continued throughout the duration of the Biennale on Yoox’s online platform.
The domestic and informal atmosphere of those Venetian days attracted a highly heterogeneous audience – artists, curators, collectors, museum directors – intrigued by the possibility of truly entering the lived space of the artists.
Mara Sartore: Walking through the exhibition these days, one constantly senses a dialogue between 2013 and today. I wonder, then, what has changed – not only in the city itself, but also in the way you look at Venice and its artistic scene.
Caroline Corbetta: In the years that followed, there was always a desire to return to Venice, but the right conditions were missing. In 2017 I curated Thomas Braida’s solo exhibition at Palazzo Nani Bernardo, a show entitled “Solo”. The title referred both to the format of the solo exhibition and to the fact that it no longer attempted to narrate the artistic community, which in the meantime had transformed. And yet the memory of Padiglione Crepaccio kept resurfacing, and several artists asked me to revive that experience.
The turning point came in 2024, when Emanuele Farneti invited me to produce a survey of the contemporary Venetian scene for a special issue of La Repubblica dedicated to the Biennale Arte. That research allowed me to observe just how much Venice had changed: the expansion of international foundations, the growth of independent spaces, but also the increasingly aggressive impact of overtourism.
At the same time, I witnessed the consolidation of an extraordinarily resilient artistic community. The artists who live and work here continue to produce, organise themselves, and build networks within a city that is becoming ever more difficult to inhabit. This greatly increased my admiration for the artists who shape the Venetian scene today.
Mara Sartore: At a certain point, after years in which this idea seemed suspended, came your meeting with Katia Da Ros and the Venice International Foundation. Was that the moment when you truly felt it might be possible to reopen this conversation?
Caroline Corbetta: Yes, from the very first meeting with Katia Da Ros and the Venice International Foundation – organised by Caterina Tonini, CEO of HAVAS Italia and Havas Arte e Cultura, with remarkable foresight – it immediately became clear that this was not simply about restaging Padiglione Crepaccio. The question was rather: what has the Venetian artistic scene become today? There was also a shared awareness that Venice cannot survive solely through the preservation of its past, but must continue to produce contemporaneity. After that meeting, Kunsthaus Paradiso.abitare Venezia had already taken shape in my mind.
Mara Sartore: I would like to dwell on the title, because it already seems to contain many of the project’s layers. Why Kunsthaus Paradiso? And why, at a certain point, did you feel that “Paradiso” was the right name for this exhibition?
Caroline Corbetta: At first I had thought of the title Kunsthaus Venezia, but it felt too assertive, almost institutional. Kunsthaus Paradiso, on the other hand, introduced an ambiguity that interested me greatly: on the one hand, the idea of the “house of art”; on the other, that of an imaginary, almost otherworldly place.
Venice itself possesses this suspended and unreal quality. It is a city that seems to be continuously produced through desire and imagination. The reference to Brodsky and Watermark is inevitable, as is the reference to the Caffè Paradiso in the Biennale Gardens – a convivial place where historically artists, curators, and directors would meet, work, and build relationships.
The convivial dimension is fundamental to the project, as is the domestic one. Everything became definitively clear when we arrived at Palazzo Molin Querini. It was not simply a venue: it was an inhabited house, with memory and a living presence. The perfect place for a project structured around the idea of “living Venice”.
This is why the exhibition’s subtitle is precisely Living Venice. The fifty-four participating artists all share a common condition: they live Venice, with all the complexity that this entails today.
Mara Sartore: You have a particular perspective on Venice: you have known it for a very long time, yet you also continue to observe it from a certain distance. Over these years, returning here repeatedly, what transformation have you felt most profoundly?
Caroline Corbetta: The growth of tourism has reached unsustainable levels. Venice is undergoing a process of gradual emptying-out: a loss of meaning, the transformation of urban space into a surface for consumption, the proliferation of clichés and souvenirs.
Many artists, too, have been forced to leave the historic centre and move to Mestre or Marghera because of rising property costs. Yet, at the same time, I have also encountered realities attempting to resist this transformation, choosing to dedicate spaces to cultural production rather than exclusively to tourist profit.
I believe more and more people are beginning to understand that contemporary culture is not an accessory element, but a necessary condition for keeping Venice alive.
Mara Sartore: Fifty-four artists is a very large number, especially for an exhibition that nonetheless maintains such an intimate and domestic dimension. I am interested in understanding how you navigated this scene and how you built such a broad selection without losing that sense of closeness one feels upon entering here.
Caroline Corbetta: I was greatly helped by the very structure of the Venetian scene, which is strongly organised around self-managed spaces and collectives. I visited studios, ateliers, and independent realities such as Spazio Punch, Joystick, Panorama, Aarduork, Deposito 2035, Zolfo Rosso, Lama Farfalla, and many others, most of them connected through the network Come Come. Then there were the Bevilacqua La Masa ateliers, as well as IUAV and the Academy of Fine Arts – and of course, word of mouth.
Initially I had compiled a list of more than one hundred artists. Later, however, the place itself imposed a selection. Palazzo Molin Querini is not a neutral space: it possesses a very precise atmosphere, and the exhibition was built in dialogue with that identity.
I worked in a very organic way, without imposing rigid rules regarding the number of works or modes of display. Some artists are represented by a single piece, others by more extensive groups of works. I wanted everything to find a natural balance within the house.
Mara Sartore: One of the aspects that strikes me most about Kunsthaus Paradiso is that, at a certain point, you yourself became an integral part of the exhibition. You chose to live here, inside this domestic space crossed by artworks and by the presence of artists. How did that decision come about?
Caroline Corbetta: Yes, it felt necessary. If the project revolves around the idea of inhabiting Venice, I could not simply organise an exhibition and then leave. I felt the need to live this space on a daily basis, confronting directly what it means to inhabit the city.
Kunsthaus Paradiso is neither a neutral nor a purely exhibition space: it is a house traversed by presences, habits, and lives. Living here transformed the project into a real experience, in which art and life inevitably became intertwined. Even the sign “The Curator is Present” emerged from this idea – both as an ironic homage to Marina Abramović and as a concrete declaration of presence. It has been an experience of great intensity, one I will hardly forget.
Mara Sartore: After spending weeks here, within this suspended dimension between house and exhibition, I wonder whether Venice has become something different for you than it once was.
Caroline Corbetta: Yes. If it depended solely on me, I would stay here. I would become a new Venetian.
“Kunsthaus Paradiso. abitare Venezia”
May 04 – 31, 2026
Palazzo Molin Querini, Calle del Traghetto, Cannaregio 2179, Venice
Curated by Caroline Corbetta
Participating artists: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Carolina Raquel Antich, Michele Azzalini, Runo B, Ariele Bacchetti, Giulia Maria Belli, Martina Biolo, Thomas Braida, Michele Bubacco, Mauro Campagnaro, Ornella Cardillo, Simone Carraro, Francesco Casati, Paola Cenati, Francesco Cima, Martina Cocco, Damiano Colombi, Giorgio Maria Crescentini, Fabio De Meo, Barbara De Vivi, Nicola Di Croce, Giuseppe Di Liberto, Daria Dmytrenko, Silvia Faresin, Melania Fusco, Greta Maria Gerosa, Silvia Giordani, Ketty Gobbo, Nadezda Golysheva, Bogdan Koshevoy, Hetty Laycock, Rebecca Loro, Marta Magini, Simone Marconi, Augusto Maurandi, Alessandro Miotti, Anastasya Parvanova, Dora Fiammetta Perini, Chiara Peruch, Federico Polloni, Cristina Porro, Guido Ravanelli, Tommaso Ravasi, Francesco Ronchi, Caterina Rossato, Matilde Sambo, Scafandra, Mattia Sinigaglia, Maddalena Tesser, Maria Todeschini, Rob Van Den Berg, Fabiano Vicentini, Lorenzo Vitturi, Qi Zhang
