Adriano Pedrosa announced Foreigners Everywhere as the title and curatorial framework for the 60th Venice International Art Exhibition.
The 2024 Biennale was planned around artists shaped by migration, exile, diaspora and forms of cultural or social exclusion.
A title carrying both fact and threat
The phrase came from a neon series by the artist collective Claire Fontaine, founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill.
Its wording had originally been associated with Stranieri Ovunque, an anti-racist collective active in Turin during the early 2000s.
For Pedrosa, the title carried a double meaning. People encounter foreigners wherever they go, but every individual can also experience being foreign within a place, language or social structure.
Artists moving between South and North
The exhibition intended to focus particularly on immigrants, refugees, expatriates and diasporic artists moving between the Global South and Global North.
Pedrosa also expanded the idea of the foreigner to include queer artists, Indigenous artists treated as outsiders in their own lands and practitioners designated as “outsider” by the art world.
Historical sections were planned around underrepresented modernist movements in the Global South and the Italian artistic diaspora across Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Arab world.
Pedrosa, artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, became the Biennale’s first Latin American curator and the first appointed from the Southern Hemisphere.
The announcement positioned Foreigners Everywhere within contemporary crises of borders, language, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, wealth and freedom.
Its curatorial challenge was to bring marginalised practices into a major international institution without reducing them to identity categories alone.