Let’s start with what is undoubtedly an excellent starting point for reflecting on this Biennale: the Greek Pavilion, with "Escape Room", a project by the artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis.

The work takes the form of an immersive installation in which the country’s history is interwoven with the image of a contemporary cave, explicitly linked to Plato’s myth of the cave. Everything is constructed as a sort of escape room: a space to be traversed, deciphered and questioned. A closed, layered reality that compels the viewer to question what they see and, above all, the political and symbolic structures that continue to operate in the present.

The project thus opens up a highly topical reflection on nationalism, fascism and authoritarian forms that seem to be drawing ever closer to the heart of European democracy. Angelidakis, who is also an architect, works not only on the content of the work but also on the very logic of national pavilions: architectural devices created to convey the ambitions, official narratives and political mythologies of the governments that built them.

In this sense, Escape Room collides with the very history of these structures, often linked to fascist, colonial or nationalist imaginaries. The Greek Pavilion thus becomes a place where the past is not simply recounted, but critically reactivated.

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you — it certainly hadn't to me until today — but imagine walking into a Biennale pavilion and being handed a child. Not a real child, of course, but a doll weighing five or six kilograms, given to you at the entrance to carry throughout your visit.

This is what happens at the Japan Pavilion with the project Grass Babies, Moon Babies by artist Ei Arakawa-Nash: a work that moves between performance, video, and playful sculpture, creating a device that is only seemingly lighthearted.

The project stems from a reflection on birth rates and the demographic decline affecting many contemporary societies. From this starting point, the artist opens up a series of questions that concern not only the future of the population but also how we imagine parenthood, care, and the legacy passed between generations.

What does it mean to be a parent today? What should we pass on to our children? And what does it imply, in practical terms, to take care of a body that is fragile, dependent, and present?

These questions do not remain abstract, as the pavilion translates them into physical weight. The doll entrusted to the visitor has the actual weight of an infant’s body, forcing those walking through the exhibition to have a direct experience of that responsibility: you carry it with you, on your shoulders or in your arms, while the project unfolds around themes of birth, adoption, care, and the future of family relationships.

The result is a pavilion that, through a simple and almost playful gesture, succeeds in triggering profound questions. You enter as a visitor and find yourself, for a few minutes, responsible for something. Or rather, for someone.

Another interesting project, also linked to this exploration of the body, reproduction and the biological transformations of the present, is the Danish project "Things to Come" by the artist Maya Malou Lyse.

Here too, the work is grounded in scientific research. The project is inspired by studies conducted by Cryos International, one of the world’s largest sperm and egg banks, which suggest that the use of virtual reality headsets during semen collection resulted in an increase in the volume of semen collected. This finding raises an extremely interesting question: external images—and therefore what we look at—can produce real biological effects on our bodies.

This premise gives rise to the entire installation in the pavilion, which the artist constructs as an immersive environment where science, fiction and pornography converge. But the pornography Maya Malou Lyse explores is not the most immediate or the kind codified in the collective imagination: it is a more baroque, mannerist, almost choreographic pornography, made up of movements reminiscent of dance that transform desire into a complex, ambiguous and liberating visual experience.

The space is thus divided between images, installations and cryogenic containers used for transporting sperm, which in turn become viewing devices. The result is a powerful and unsettling project that challenges the way in which technology, desire, fertility and the visual imagination are redefining the relationship between the body and the future.

Another very interesting pavilion is that of Switzerland, with "The Unfinished Business of Living Together", a project that tackles a very powerful theme and does so from an extremely pop-culture perspective: television.

The exhibition takes its cue from two television programmes: Telearena, which aired in Switzerland in 1978 with an episode dedicated to homosexuality, and Agora, a French-language talk show that in 1984 linked studio audiences in Switzerland, France and Canada via satellite. Two moments in which television did not merely reflect society, but helped to define its boundaries: who could be visible, who was considered part of the public sphere, and who, on the other hand, was treated as a problem to be managed.

What is interesting is that the pavilion does not merely focus on the memory of those programmes, but also on the real consequences they had on the people who took part in them. Some guests faced reprisals, lost their jobs, and were publicly exposed in a context that remained deeply hostile. At the same time, those appearances helped to open up new forms of visibility and advocacy, leading to the abolition, within a year, of the registers of homosexuals kept by the Swiss police.

The project brings together archive material, new works and a multi-screen installation that turns the logic of the talk show on its head. It is no longer the presenter who moves amongst the audience to gather opinions, but the visitor who must navigate through images, sounds, tensions and exclusions. In this way, the Swiss Pavilion transforms television into a political space and demonstrates how the public representation of bodies and identities is never neutral, but can produce concrete, intimate and collective consequences.