It’s weeks away from the opening of the Venice Biennale and most sites in the Giardini, the famous landscaped gardens to the eastern edge of the floating city, are still unfinished, abuzz with activity. ‘It’s hard to see anything because they’re planting trees, and the gardens are like a beehive,’ Yto Barrada tells me over the phone, while taking a pause from installing ‘Comme Saturne’, the project with which the Paris-born, Tangier-raised artist is representing France. 

Barrada speaks lucidly, her thoughts wide-ranging yet precise, unspooling in great detail across references that span mythology, the French Revolution, color theory, textile history, the 20th-century literary movement Oulipo, current global politics, and more, as she explains the genesis of ‘Comme Saturne’. The artist was living in New York when she was invited to take on the neoclassical building, reopened after a year-long renovation. It was the day before the 2024 election that would see Donald Trump returned to office. ‘I said “thank you, but can I think about it?” My brain is completely mixed up.’ Nonetheless, once Barrada had accepted a few days later, she began putting together a team, including the Tunisian curator Myriam Ben Salah. ‘I had an immediate idea’, she says.

Its seed was the fabric technique of devoré, also called ‘burnout’, most commonly used to create patterns in velvet: a cellulose-based fabric (like viscose, rayon, or cotton) is blended with a protein-based one (like silk, wool, angora, or mohair), and the resulting mixed-fiber fabric is painted with a chemical paste that dissolves the former and leaves the latter, resulting in a raised design. Developed in the 18th century, possibly as a cheaper alternative to lace, the process came back into vogue in the 1920s (think shift or drop-waist evening dresses) and again in the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Ann Demeulemeester. 

Barrada, whose work often incorporates handmade, organically dyed textiles into paintings, prints, and sculptures, had a large collection of devoré samples, but didn’t know how the fabric was made, nor its many-centuries-old history. From this special cloth, a series of threads, so to speak, multiplied and interwove between material and metaphor, language and politics, history and revolution. What her Venice exhibition will look like remains enigmatic when we talk, but she says, ‘most of the pavilion is covered in huge drapes of wool,’ the scent of which is powerful, and there are rooms that operate as spaces for thinking.

The burned-out fabric itself, Barrada notes, already ‘holds two dimensions at once: that of destruction and that of beauty.’ The technical term, too, she explains, exemplifies the polysemic aspect of the words used to describe textile processes – an accidental poetry that is important to the artist, who is opening the accompanying catalogue with a glossary of terms that show the slippery nature of language, full of double-meanings, playfulness, and ambiguity. Dye baths, for instance, can be ‘exhausted,’ colors that fade too much are considered to have ‘failed,’ a dulled hue has been ‘saddened.’ Barrada’s focal point, devoré, means ‘to devour.’ It might also be a surname, de Voré, which originates in the Haute-Loire region of France, not far from Lyon, the historic center of silk production where the devoré fabric technique originated.

In Barrada’s practice, how multiple dimensions coincide in one object, image, word, idea, and the implied movement between micro and macro, is vital. It undergirds a sense of both art and life as infinitely complex arenas in which many truths coexist and frequently contradict each other; for instance, something can be ugly and beautiful, destructive and productive all at once. 

Barrada, who studied history and political science at the Sorbonne in Paris, is known as a polymath who works across disciplines including photography, sculpture, painting, film, publishing, and printmaking; her material choices embody wider sociopolitical contexts like pedagogy, urban landscapes, colonial and postcolonial discourse, geography, botany, and beyond. Her work seems less defined by specific aesthetic impetus than intricate, in-depth research that suggests its own formal approach. Past projects have included photography series exploring public life in Tangier, the Strait of Gibraltar, and educational history guides; sculptures inspired by Moroccan human pyramids, French colonial urban planning in Casablanca and Rabat, and plumbing materials; films that montage Super 8 home movies from the 1960s, or document US ‘weather acceleration’ facilities that test the commercial durability of color. 

A 2024 film made for Tate Modern, London, gives a sense of Barrada’s process. In it, she describes The Mothership, ‘an “eco-campus” for growing, making, and learning about natural dyes and Indigenous traditions, and a place for experimental collective artistic practice.’ Ten minutes from Tangier’s city center and overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, The Mothership also hosts artist residencies and workshops, and has been envisioned by Barrada as ‘a place to conjure pan-African ecofeminist practices into being.’ 

The artist is shown moving around stacks of books and papers in a sunny library room, while describing a current project, the colonial design of Tangier, and how she works in the spaces of The Mothership: ‘What matters here is that there are a lot of piles, and that’s part of my work. Moving things around, making associations. There’s an entropy to the piles, they’re alive, and that’s how I start thinking,’ she says. ‘There’s this relationship to the archival material that is very carnivorous. […] I will chew it up and spit it out again.’ 

The French pavilion in Venice promises to give viewers a dazzling array of ideas to navigate. To devour is part of an artistic practice: to consume voraciously, to be hungry for – what? – substance, knowledge, art, beauty, escape, meaning, sense, consolation. They might not arrive, but the chewing up and spitting out creates something new, for better or for worse. ‘We call it a suite for Saturn and the Saturnalian religion,’ the artist says of the pavilion, which references the Roman god who famously ate his own children, leading to his association with time – the edict that time destroys whatever it creates. It’s a kind of madness that, looking around at the ever-multiplying conflicts of recent years, is hard to disavow. ‘The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children,’ is, as Barrada explains, a quote that comes from the French Revolution, when many of its original agitators were executed during the Reign of Terror. 

I suggest to the artist that her use of metaphor and materiality allows for a subtle but forceful relationship to history and the geopolitical context of the moment, as well as the Biennale. ‘The politics of the moment are very much in my mind,’ she says, meaning global conflict and violent state politics, but also the myths of abundance prevalent in the tech industry built on the consumption of global resources – a literal devouring – and what she calls the ‘cornucopians’ of today, including ‘billionaires, tech and military industries.’ In keeping with Koyo Kouoh’s overarching exhibition for this biennale, ‘In Minor Keys’, Barrada’s pavilion will, conversely, foreground the so-called ‘marginal’. The textiles on display will reveal their own making, usually hidden, foregrounding trial and error, and the long process involved in dyeing.

‘The treacherous power of words were a sort of guide,’ the artist says, like signs that demand to be taken seriously, a vocabulary that could mean one thing – exhaust, devour, sadden – or another, depending on how or where it is uttered. ‘It’s very hard to turn your eyes away from anything,’ Barrada tells me, ‘you can only be heartbroken so many times in this special moment where abominations are common currency.’ ‘Comme Saturne’ insists on the importance of metaphor and materiality, art and labor. The world around us ‘can be disabling,’ Barrada offers, ‘but it can also be a force of resistance because there is work to do. I think imagination is one of the last radical places for work to happen and we must insist on it.’