Meloni’s party is pleased with the appointment, but Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has already surprised, at least by embracing Islam.
When Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the new president of the Venice Biennale, asked him in an interview if he was a fascist, the right-wing Italian journalist and intellectual replied: “I am not a fascist. I’m anything else. “
After Buttafuoco was officially appointed this week to lead the world’s largest and oldest cultural exhibition, it’s not just the artists, actors, architects, filmmakers, dancers and musicians whose paintings will be exhibited on all six occasions of the upcoming biennials who are wondering what exactly this “something more” can be.
For Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party, the former head of the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party is their best ideological friend in the war, opposed to what he perceives as an artistic status quo ruled by leftists. “Buttafuoco affirms a momentum of speed that the Meloni government needs to imprint on all the cultural and social centers of the nation,” said the parliamentary vice president of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, welcoming the appointment.
Meanwhile, curators who have worked on previous editions of the biennale worry that the 60-year-old’s appointment is a familiar trend in Poland or Hungary, where right-wing populist governments have recruited ideologically aligned polemicists.
It is conceivable that Buttafuoco, who will not succeed current president Roberto Cicutto until March 2024, could question them both.
Born and raised in Catania, Sicily, Buttafuoco is a national leader of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party created through Giorgio Almirante, who was a minister in the government of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. As a journalist, he began collaborating with right-wing magazines and with the MSI newspaper of the time, Il Secolo d’Italia.
Since then, however, he has proven to be an eccentric conservative guy. First of all, his conversion to Islam in 2015. ” Call me Giafar al-Siqilli,” he wrote in one of his books, honoring the emir of Sicily. Far from being an act of provocation, Buttafuoco insisted that his substitution of religion was a reconciliation with the history of his local region. “Sicily’s identity is Islamic,” he writes. Every market is a casbah, each and every club is a transfiguration of the archaic social code, and if the long-term precept holds, it is the Saracen that still endures. “
While there are parallels between Buttafuoco and Meloni’s political trajectory, their relationship has not been idyllic. In 2015, when Buttafuoco’s call emerged as a possible candidate for governor of Sicily in the right-wing coalition, Meloni used her veto as leader of her party in the House to block his candidacy.
He cited his conversion as an explanation for his objection: “Do we know the cultural message, even before the political message, that we would give to the world?said at the time. ” It is as if a Christian were a candidate and elected in Istanbul. »
He has spoken out against gun rights, a costly issue for the Italian right, and in the past has accused the right of being too demagogic toward immigrants.
Buttafuoco has stayed true to some classic ideas of the right, protecting Italy’s historical cultural identity and opposing political correctness, but he does not formulate them in populist terms. Among the publications that publish her reviews are the left-wing daily Il Fatto Quotidiano and the liberal daily La Repubblica, two publications highly critical of Meloni, as well as the centrist daily Il Foglio and the monetary newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
Few of the former holders of this office have been overtly political. In the 1980s and 1990s, the biennale passed through a slew of architects and film critics, yet for the past 25 years, its presidents have had a more technocratic attitude: They were economists, bank executives, and, in the case of Cicutto, appointed in 2020, a film producer.
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Critics say Buttafuoco’s control experience, a five-year term as president of the regional theater Teatro Stabile di Catania and his current presidency of the Teatro Stabile in Abruzzo, is limited.
The budgets that he will have to manage prudently during his term of office are considerable. The biennale recently secured a €169 million (£148 million) grant from the Italian government and the European Union to present primary paintings in the Arsenale’s exhibition area at Venice’s ancient shipyards and move its archives.
It remains to be seen how much time Buttafuoco will have left to imprint any ideological vision on the festival. While the president of the biennial appoints the artistic curators who outline the themes of the festival’s disciplines, the national pavilions that attract the most attention are arranged autonomously.
One of the upheavals of the Italian right was the conversion of the Italian-themed neoclassical palace located inside the Giardini Park into a central pavilion exhibiting foreign artists, and the relegation of the Italian pavilion within the Arsenale. Some conservatives fear that Buttafuoco, spurred by the Meloni administration’s infatuation with “Italianism,” may be just the opposite of the decision.
Others hope the new president will prove flexible enough to withstand a decline in the institution’s appeal. Francesco Rutelli, a former center-left mayor of Rome and current president of the Italian film agreement Anica, said the biennale’s former strength lies in its role as a tool of liberation. “I’m sure Buttafuoco, a laid-back spirit, will continue this and interpret it in the most productive way. “
Contacted via The Guardian for an interview, Buttafuoco said: “Not now. Let us communicate this when the appointment, God willing, is made official next March.