Petticoat Government at the Venice Biennale 2024

Petticoat Government is a multidisciplinary collective project started by seven people: Sophie Boiron, Valentin Bollaert, Simona Denicolai, Pauline Fockedey, Pierre Huyghebaert, Antoinette Jattiot and Ivo Provoost. They were selected by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and Wallonia-Brussels International to represent Belgium at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, which will run from April through November 2024. Working at the intersection of art, curatorial practice, architecture, graphic design, typography and cartography, the collective takes a collaborative, non-hierarchical approach to exhibition-making, shifting the focus through its chapters and fictional potential. The Biennale has brought the collective’s members together for a physical and symbolic journey. Long-term collaborations, among themselves and with others (who don’t necessarily come from the field of art), have forged this connection. As mediators and critics of the world around them, they question how we view collective and alternative organisations, their mythologies and their ways of sharing.

In keeping with the aesthetic and political intimacy of a so-called ‘digestive process’, and typical of Denicolai & Provoost’s collaborations across different media over the past quarter century, Petticoat Government is grounded in an empathetic view of the world. The forms they develop – based on borrowings from popular culture whose content and form they simultaneously question – make it possible to use other languages, which they allow to be invaded by doubt, fiction and even a magical spirit. In this way they open up possible paths to emancipation. The porousness of Petticoat Government’s images and fields of research is recalls those projects curated and written by Antoinette Jattiot at La Loge in Brussels. Echoing the practices of Sophie Boiron and Pierre Huyghebaert around and within their Spec uloos studio, Petticoat Government’s modes of production involve a global approach that most often calls for a critique of the media and the means they have used. Connected by their teaching practice in art schools and universities, the members of Petticoat Government share a common interest in tools for sharing, the possibilities of consciously building bridges between people and disciplines and the co-creation of knowledge. The collective’s reflections centre on the production systems of exhibitions, their materials and their reuse. These are also the founding principles of NORD, the architectural practice of Pauline Fockedey and Valentin Bollaert, which has been active since 2015. The collective creates meaning with forms and methods that capture and transcend the issues specific to the disciplines that underpin it, demystifying their authority and complexity.

For 2024, Petticoat Government has taken several hyper-local folkloric traditions around the figure of the giant — originating in Belgium, France and the Basque Country —as an ambivalent guiding motif. In doing so, they question the ‘national’ representation implied by their participation in the Biennale. The performative displacement of these symbolic figures from their local communities to Italy, and then to the BPS22 in Charleroi and the FRAC in Dunkerque in 2025, where they will perform variations of possible presentations of their stories, seeks to introduce a joyful disturbance to reality by playing games with scale and creating tensions between the human and the non-human, landscape and architecture, borders and their transgression.

In the first chapter, which will take place on 9 December 2023, Petticoat Government will unveil an XXL perforated white flag in Cas-co Leuven, a textile work that they will use in various ways throughout the journey. On 9 March 2024, on their way to Venice, the giants and communities of Petticoat Government will stop at the Reschen Pass on the Italian-Austrian border, near the Swiss canton of Graubünden. On the shores of a lake covering a submerged village, the performance event will take place in the form of a giant picnic – another chapters to which all are invited.

Rather than stigmatising the model of the individual practice, the project selected for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024 highlights the feasibility of a collective ‘doing with’ as a vector of potential transformation.