10/05/2026
A kind of continuous movement. The debut of the Republic of Nauru’s first-ever pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2026 on Tuesday evening unfolded like this: in stages, almost in waves.
It began outside, on the water, between Riva Ca’ di Dio and the Circolo Sottufficiali, where Stefano Cagol staged his Ice Monolith, a block of ice ultimately shattered with hammer blows. An energetic, cold, highly direct gesture. Then the crowd moved to Calle Bosello, where the pavilion slowly took shape, before arriving at the Hotel Metropole for the more official part of the evening, attended by Nauru’s minister alongside the Biennale crowd: artists, curators, and art world insiders. Among them were Alfredo Cramerotti, Aurora Papafava Dei Carraresi, David Elliott, Rachel Rits-Volloch, and Giuseppe Simone Modeo.
AIM Inundated, Imagining Life After Land — the title chosen for the pavilion of the world’s smallest island nation, curated by Khaled Ramadan with Camilla Boemio and Cagol himself — does not depict an apocalyptic future. It does something more unsettling: it speaks about something that has already happened. Nauru, a tiny island in Micronesia devastated by decades of phosphate extraction, becomes here a kind of preview of the world to come. The works — videos, sound pieces, AI-driven installations — all revolve around the same idea: loss as lived experience. Land disappearing, memory fracturing, identity forced to reinvent itself.
The words of one of the featured artists, Kaur Tsitsi — “This island was breathing before the drills” — linger long after. And Cagol’s work We Are All Nauru widens the frame even further: this is not a local story, but a shared condition. You leave without answers, only with a question that remains open: how much time do we really have before this story stops feeling distant?
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Sofia Brogi
