There’s a rustling in the shrubbery, a glimpse of sleek, young bodies pale among the foliage. Naked young men eye up the lush foliage and stems. Soon, they are rutting away with the plant life, rooting with the roots. There’s a lot of groaning and wailing and chewing, saliva and chlorophyl.



Filmed in a forest in Taiwan, Chinese artist Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia is replete with groans and panting, the slither and crackle of leaves ripped with teeth and slathered by tongues. Shown on a small screen set up in a bamboo grove in Palermo’s magnificent botanical garden, the Orto Botanico, the action is a demonstration of “eco-queer potential”. It looks like plant abuse to me. The actual fornication remained off screen, but there was plenty of rhythmic bucking and shoving. I didn’t wait for the money shot, if there was one.

Talk about a rumble in the jungle. I have no idea if this is meant to be funny, or made in deadly, desperate urgency. Zheng’s video is one of the silliest contributions to Manifesta 12, perhaps of any Manifesta I have seen. The nomadic biennial has, over the years, taken us to San Sebastián and to a coal-mining town in Belgium, to Zurich and to Ljubljana. It foundered in Cyprus, where an attempt was made to cross the partitioned island, and it was riven by authoritarian difficulties in St Petersburg.

The best thing about Palermo’s botanical garden is the flora itself, the giant ficus, the plants and trees from all over the world. And the best thing about Manifesta 12 is the city. Sicily has seen invasions and cultural cross-pollinations for millennia. It stands at a crossroads in the Mediterranean. The botanic garden, founded in 1789 as a laboratory to integrate foreign species, reflects larger diasporas, travels and returns, a history of integration. Today, more than 26,000 foreigners live and work here: Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis, Romanians and Ghanaians, Tunisians and Chinese. Hindu Tamils worship Santa Rosalia and carry her statue on the Feast of St Anthony. Ramadan celebrations and cricket matches are held on land reclaimed from the ruins of world war two.

Manifesta tries to engage with its location. For once, it isn’t just about flying in a familiar posse of international artists in the hope they will do more than patronise the locals. There is a real attempt to engage the politics not just of Palermo or Sicily, but of southern Europe and its borders, north Africa and beyond.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Your direct line to the CIA … Peng! Collective’s installation Call-a-Spy. Photograph: Wolfgang Träger/Courtesy Manifesta 12 Palermo and the artist

Manifesta occupies churches and palazzos, gardens, oratorios and places rarely, if ever, open to the public. These are worth the price of entry alone, even when they overpower the art. The best of the work in Manifesta is serious, engaging, frightening, dispiriting and overwhelming, even if much of the film and video interviews and documentary work is shown in ways that make concentration difficult. There’s too much to unpack.

Or you could call up a spy for a chat. The Berlin-based Peng! Collective have installed a phone booth outside the Palazzo Ajutamicristo, and you can dial up shadowy government agents in Germany and France, the FBI and CIA. Their numbers have been culled from a secret database. A notice in the booth tells us to use a false name and have a good cover story when making a call. There were so many injunctions (do not sound too cheerful, do not ask the agent’s name, do not say anything judgmental), I was too scared to call.

Secret networks and communication are at the heart of the section, over several sites across the city, called The Out of Control Room. Tania Bruguera and Laura Poitras have each made works relating to the United States’ siting of a military communications ground station in Sicily’s last cork oak forests, which connects via satellite to drone controllers in the US, who conduct their operations at a safe remove. Poitras describes her films – of rockets taking off, a camera approaching the satellite dishes and hovering over the dishes on their concrete pan – as an “immersive installation”. Further, smaller screens flesh out the story with interviews. I felt more confused than immersed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Human tides … an image from Forensic Oceanography’s video and mixed media installation Liquid Violence. Photograph: Wolfgang Träger/Courtesy Manifesta 12 Palermo and the artist

Far better is Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Violence, an examination of Italy and the EU’s decision to cut back on search and rescue operations at sea, and the criminalisation of NGOs that attempt to rescue refugee boats from Libya. Continuing the work of the group Forensic Architecture (nominated for this year’s Turner prize), the installation charts wind patterns and tides, the movement of ships and the towing of abandoned craft. The detail is lulling as well as a frightening accumulation of information.

The dispassionate approach, the affectless as well as relentless homing in on a subject gives John Gerrard’s video simulations their charge. Using online gaming technology, he recreates real places from a few scant images. In an untitled work based on photographs he took near Parndorf, Austria, he has created a seamless simulation of a stretch of motorway. The camera circles the scene, crosses the motorway barrier and hovers over a patch of tarmac and the nondescript roadside vegetation. Here, he located the spot where a truck had been abandoned a few days earlier. It contained the bodies of 71 migrants who had suffocated. Red spray paint on the road, left by the police, marks the spot. The camera goes on circling. No traffic passes, nothing is said nor needs to be.

In the Casa del Mutilato, a striking 1939 building designed by architect Giuseppe Spatrisano as a temple of sacrifice, and with a long quotation by Mussolini still intact on an exterior wall, Spanish artist Christina Lucas has installed Unending Lightning, an ongoing project that documents the history of aerial bombardments and bombings over civilian targets, from the first, in 1911, to the present day. World wars and civil wars, terror campaigns and random bombings are all accounted for. A world map fills the centre screen of this three-channel video. The camera homes in on the sites of bombings around the world. The days go by, month by month, year by year, decade after decade. The bombings multiply, blackening Europe, Vietnam, the Balkans. Guernica, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and 9/11 are fleeting moments on the screen. Bombings flower in Baghdad, in Nicaragua and Sarajevo. The left-hand screen records the tally of deaths and of who bombed whom, while on the right, photographs flash up and are gone. This relentless work, more than six hours long, is a horribly compelling record of more than a century of aerial destruction, a moving map of accumulating detail and corpses. I have a grim urge to sit and watch it all, to count the bombs and name the targets.

This compulsion to record and account is felt nowhere more keenly that in the State Archives of Palermo, housed in a building usually closed to the public. Thousands upon thousands of documents, in leather volumes and in folders tied with string fill a huge room, in shelves climbing to the ceiling and on lower units crossing the floor. Dating to the 18th century and beyond, much of this material is furred with centuries of dust, foxed, damaged, compressed by the weight of paper and centuries of being kept in storage. There is both order and an unbelievable chaos of documents here, a whole history of military tribunals, cases, stories, tragedies, bureaucratic state control and record. And most of all, dust. This place doesn’t need art. It goes beyond the Borgesian labyrinth. Fuck off, Anselm Kiefer, I thought. This is already one of the most overwhelming rooms I have been in. Visitors wander about, subdued, even crushed, by the sheer weight of unreadable, stratified material and what it might represent. But art, of a sort, there is here.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Order and chaos … a marionette surveys the State Archives in Protocollo no. 90/6, 2018 by Masbedo. Photograph: Lucio Convertini/Courtesy Manifesta 12 Palermo and the artist

At the far end of this nightmarish hall, against a wall, a marionette looks over the heaving sea of paper from an LED video screen. He peers this way and that, to the sound of his wooden limbs clunking together. He turns his head, as though hearing a voice. At one point he collapses, slumping as if overwhelmed. In the hall, a light on a small lectern illuminates a single page from the archive, a denunciation, made in 1956, plucked from a folder concerning various artists, film-makers, writers and journalists. The document is a condemnation of film director Vittorio De Seta, who, on account of his work with workers, farmers, fishermen and miners, was suspected of fomenting communist sympathies.

The puppet on the screen represents De Seta. This work, Protocol no.90/6 is by Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni, who have collaborated as Masbedo since 1999. While Manifesta continues until November, this singular, unforgettable work is only open to the public for a few days, after which the archive will be closed once more. It will continue to exist only as a memory, and perhaps as a nightmare, and through its documentation and description. It will continue to live with me in a way art so rarely does.