THE SHOW BY MEXICAN ARTIST Bosco Sodi at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani divided opinion in Venice last year. What Goes Around Comes Around was described as a reconfiguring of the journey of raw materials which had conventionally flowed just one way into the great mercantile maw that was La Serenissima in its pomp.
For example, the production of the cochineal dye which produced the refulgent glosses of Titian’s draperies was for centuries the principal export of Oaxaca state on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, and Sodi explored its “appropriation” in a “controlled chaos” of, the long central portico which was the traditional locus of Venetian trade.
