Art Brussels 2024

Since May 2023, on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border, but also further south in Europe as in Spain and Italy, various brother-and-sisterhoods, committees and associations, all guardians of folkloric giants have been approached by a collective under the name of Petticoat Government. These still discreet alliances predict a more informal representation of the territorial concept of Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

The collective appointed by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and Wallonia-Brussels International to occupy the Belgian Pavilion has devised a project that displaces the traditional exhibition format through its successive chapters and its fictional, subversive potential. In a collaborative way they have seized a scenario that plays on scale and tensions between the human being, the pavilion, the landscape and the gigantic.

This it does with the help of multiple accomplices: existing local and cross-border figures of giants, from both near and far, set in motion in a new story. Through their displacements, the giant bodies shape in new ways the surrounding space and forms of identification and projection. Inspired by the living base of popular narrative, Petticoat Government diverts the symbolic and political weight of the giant as object. It is thanks to their adaptability and an anchoring in the common body of society that giants, supporters of committed struggles, have emerged in recent years and empower our journey with their joyful militancy. Petticoat Government is a party to which all are invited.