AIM Inundated. Imagining Life After Land
Nauru National Pavilion

The Republic di Nauru presents the project AIM Inundated, Imagining Life After Land at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Khaled Ramadan with the collaboration of Camilla Boemio and Stefano Cagol, and with works by artists Kauw Tsitsi, CPS (Khaled Ramadan, Alfredo Cramerotti), Patricia Jacomella Bonola, Tedo Rekhviashvili, Sylvia Grace Borda, Ron Laboray, Dorian Batycka, Khaled Hafez, Iv Toshain, and Stefano Cagol. Located in Spazio Castello 3683, the collective exhibition presents Nauru – the world's
smallest island nation – as an early and universal example of loss, adaptation, and resilience, a
warning and guide for a shared future.

AIM Inundated, Imagining Life After Land marks the first participation of the Republic of Nauru, a
microstate in the South Pacific Ocean, to the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di
Venezia. The Pavilion acknowledges Nauru as a site where the long-term consequences of global
economic and political decisions have been materially lived, and thresholds have already been
crossed, and thus reframing it from being a remote or marginal territory to become both a universal warning and a crucial guide for a shared future.
Situated at the convergence of rising sea levels, environmental exhaustion, and the enduring legacies of colonial extractivism, Nauru stands as one of the most impacted sites. The present moment of Nauru cannot be divorced from its extractive history. Decades of intensive phosphate mining transformed the island's landscape and economy, leaving behind a terrain marked by ecological depletion, erosion, compromised sovereignty, and geopolitical marginalisation. A century of extraction in Nauru demonstrates how resource demand can dismantle both ecological and socio-cultural systems, leading to long-term instability, and how environmental loss is systematically produced through global systems of extraction, governance, and uneven responsibility.

The Pavilion positions Nauru as both a specific territory and an emblematic site of planetary transformation. It is a conceptual study of disappearance resisting spectacle and catastrophe imagery, and understanding it not only in terms of physical land loss but also as the erosion of cultural continuity, ecological knowledge, systems of meaning, and political agency. Through this lens, inundation becomes a framework for examining how environmental change reconfigures identity, memory, nationhood, and sovereignty, while also reshaping the parameters through which futures are imagined. Furthermore, the framework of Venice – a city historically shaped by water and increasingly defined by environmental vulnerability – establishes a dialogue between different geographies of risk, foregrounding shared exposure.

Structured through archipelagic thinking, the Pavilion assembles a constellation of visions. The ten invited artists belong to as many nations and different generations, and their works range from installation, video, painting, photography, sound, text, documentary, research, and the use of artificial intelligence. The exhibition takes its cue from the harsh and sincere lyrics of a song by Kauw Tsitsi (Nauru, 1995), which says: "Trapped in the weight of someone else's wealth... The soil remembers every cut... We were more than a resource, more than a deal... This island breathed before the drills, before progress learned how to kill."

In the epic video We Are All Nauru, Stefano Cagol (Italy, 1969) moves between Greenland, Kyrgyzstan, and Texas, staging symbolic acts of environmental violence, resource hunger, and supremacy as exorcisms. He will then present a critical update of The Ice Monolith in public spaces during the Biennale opening days. The installation Sea that Remembers by Tedo Rekhviashvili (Georgia, 1990) crosses the border between painting, sculpture, and sound, using the shell as a symbol of home amidst collective traumas and individual mythologies. Patricia Jacomella Bonola (Switzerland, 1952) exhibits I Used to Go to the Beach, a monumental sail composed of an assemblage of fragments, a symbol of resistance to adverse forces and synergy. Cottonopolis by Khaled Hafez (Egypt, 1963) addresses the concept of colonialism through the former English influence on Egypt. CPS Chamber of Public Secrets (Khaled Ramadan, Alfredo Cramerotti) presents a multimedia archive of the collective's research on ecological distress since 2004. Sylvia Grace Borda (Canada, 1973) draws a parallel with an island on the opposite side of the Pacific, dealing with similar environmental challenges. Dorian Batycka (Poland, 1985) faces manipulation and control in an online project. Iv Toshain (Sofia, 1980) presents a cascade of chains echoing the colors of flags and ideas of hierarchy and power. The exhibition closes with Ron Laboray (USA, 1970), who triggers visual overlaps and collisions between Western systems of meaning, such as scientific classification, myths, and pop culture, and indigenous identities.

Extending beyond the exhibition format, the Pavilion is accompanied by public programmes, performances, seminars, international satellite events, and a publication, reinforcing the Pavilion's role as both a cultural and political intervention within the international art context and positioning Nauru as an active contributor to global cultural and ecological discourse.... read the rest of the article»