It is possible that, as one ascends the marvelously decorated stairs of the Marciana Library in Venice, an almost existential question crossed one’s mind: what do I know about knowledge?

Walking through rooms where, for centuries, people have studied, trying to preserve and pass on ancient wisdom, is never devoid of emotion, even when it is reduced to an emotional memory of insignificant student anxieties. However, when such an evocative place becomes inhabited by installations by contemporary artists, if one has the sensitivity to stop and listen, the echo becomes inevitable. And here, in the building designed by Jacopo Sansovino in the 16th century, it truly happens: Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda, in the first exhibition of the Fondazione Bvlgari in Venice, a Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Art Biennale, with site-specific works, confront us with a reflection on knowledge, depriving us, if we had any, of our scant certainties.

In the vestibule of the Library, Monia Ben Hamouda’s Fragments of Fire Worship almost seems like an ‘access portal,’ a disquieting test to pass, like in the best Indiana Jones films. Consisting of two opposing red neon sculptures, in which signs resembling broken handwriting chase one another like lava streams, the work evokes a cracked script that has lost its function and, now indecipherable, remains only a gesture, a trace, or a scar: a work which, while drawing on the artist’s cultural heritage, unhinges it from within and, ‘setting fire’ to a writing made silent and unintelligible, speaks to us of the impossibility of a univocal transmission of knowledge.

In a place devoted to order, cataloging and study, Monia Ben Hamouda speaks to us of exclusion and loss, because it is not possible to preserve everything that exists, and read – in the sense of truly understanding – everything that has been preserved over the centuries.Strengthened (or perhaps discouraged) by this awareness, in the Salone Sansovino, Lara Favaretto offers us a metal shelf rack where hundreds of books, donated by university libraries, scientific societies, academies, archives, and private funds, hold an image from her personal archive, randomly inserted between the pages.

This is the seventh and final edition of Momentary Monument – The Library, an installation in which the book is reactivated as a means of transmission. Monographs, proceedings, manuals, in the artist’s work the custodians of deeply different knowledges and languages, become symbols of the vulnerability of knowledge transmission systems, not because they are perishable or obsolete