One week after the opening of Personal Structures – Confluences, this moment offers a chance to look back at an extraordinary opening weekend that set the tone for an edition deeply rooted in reflection and responsibility. The opening was marked by a touching inaugural speech by Sara Danieli, Head of Art at ECC Italy, together with visionary French artist and pioneer Madame ORLAN at Marinaressa Gardens. Madame ORLAN’s intervention unfolded as both a call and a warning, an urgent reflection on the role of art today:

“In 2026, I believe that the art world and artists in general carry a great responsibility. We must stand on the other side of the scale against all the horrors currently unfolding in the world. It is essential that everyone in the art world realizes that we can no longer be frivolous, careless, or produce art in a narcissistic way, simply for pleasure, decoration, or market success. No—art today is truly a key, a proposition, a project for society. We must care about what is happening around us and try to change the world, because everything we do—and do not do—is political. …I scream, I shout, I cry—not in resignation, but in active, political rage. This rage becomes artistic material, a driving force of creation, an act of resistance.”

Her words resonated across the opening days, framing the exhibition as a space where artistic practice becomes both testimony and responsibility.

The first two preview days at Palazzo Bembo and Palazzo Mora unfolded as a dense constellation of encounters, inaugurations, and performances. At Palazzo Mora, the official opening of the El Salvador Pavilion marked its debut at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale with Cartographies of the Displaced by J. Oscar Molina, presented by Luis Montano, Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of El Salvador in Rome, and Vidal Oswald Tobar, Consul General of the Consulate of El Salvador in Milan. As part of the Children of the World series, Molina’s installation redefines displacement as an ongoing condition that shapes bodies, personal and collective memory, and space, transforming lived experience into silent, material traces of endurance and presence.

In the same venue, “___________” * *Gaza – No Words – See the Exhibit, presented by Palestine Museum US and selected as an Official Collateral Event of La Biennale di Venezia, opened with a deeply moving intervention by curator Faisal Saleh. The exhibition includes The Gaza Genocide Tapestry, an extraordinary collective embroidery project described as an act of witnessing in real time. Composed of 100 hand-embroidered panels, the work transforms tatreez into a living archive of memory and resistance, where each stitch becomes testimony, care, and survival.

Across the palazzos and gardens, the opening days were also animated by performances and encounters, including a series of Tea Ceremonies presented by B-OWND in collaboration with TeaRoom Collective. Reimagining the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the project presents tea as a relational space to experience the deeper meaning of this celebration of life, in which presence, silence, and difference become integral parts of the artwork itself.

From political urgency to intimate gestures of connection, the opening days unfolded as a shared space of reflection, where art continuously negotiated its role in the present. And this is only the beginning, Personal Structures – Confluences continues in Venice with many more encounters, voices, and stories still to come.