I suggest to Žižek that more accountable and direct forms of democracy have been devised using local models – after all, we are speaking in Venice, once an independent republican city state, resistant to the authority of larger political and religious entities. But Žižek argues that city democracy is nearly always run by an urban elite (much like Venice’s Biennale). He points out that many of the problems we face today – from the environment to the migration crisis – require supra-national structures such as the EU.

Žižek’s scepticism about local democracy derives in part from his understanding of the ethnic tensions that exploded in the Balkans in the 1990s. In the NSK newspaper, he writes that “there is nothing liberating about the breaking of state authority... utopian energy is no longer directed towards a stateless community, but towards a state without a nation, a state which would no longer be founded on an ethnic community and its territory”. In this vein, Žižek argues that “it is today’s anti-immigrant populists who are the true threat to the European Enlightenment”. He tells me that our commitment to refugee rights should not be dependent on heart-rending stories of dispossession, but on civic principles: “you shouldn’t like them because they have a nice story to tell – no, you like them irrespective of their story, because human rights are totally abstract rights. We will solve this crisis through geopolitics, not by asking ‘how open will our heart be?’”.

Within an hour of the opening of NSK’s pavilion, there is a lengthy queue to view the main installation. It revolves around a daring and disorientating room slanted at an angle of 45 degrees. The gradation is acute enough to force the visitor to struggle to maintain balance, which is best achieved by adopting the pose of a surfer, or leaning on the display panels. The artist Ahmet Ögüt confirms that the effect is to ensure that visitors are intensely focused – this is not an exhibition for casual perusal. It may not be easy to throw off our inherited identities, but we can at least bring a degree of attention to the issues that confront us, and seek to navigate a solution.

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