This image and right De Bruyckere’s Arcangeli are part of the City of Refuge III exhibition, at the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore. It is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia © Berlinde De Bruyckere. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth


depict each of the astrological signs of the zodiac to the rich array of marble displayed in its fl oors and columns. Incorporating the remains of a simpler, Georgian house that had been damaged by fi re, the neo-Gothic sandstone mansion was conjured up by architect Robert Rowland Anderson for the third Marquess of Bute in the late 19th century. But this beautifully appointed mansion and its lavish gardens have not been inhabited by the family since the 1980s. Instead, they are one of the island’s main visitor attractions; the Stuart descendants still own it, as well as the majority of this well populated island, and are thus stewards of its resources and the island’s economy. So the gates are opened to the public from spring to autumn, for walks and events – including weddings – plus an annual programme of artist commissions unveiled each spring to enrich the visitor experience. T is year, Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle was invited to respond to its unique qualities and setting. She has done so by fi lling the Marble Hall with exotic and unlikely fl otsam – salvaged doors and tapestry frames are propped up on stands whose bases are strewn with sandbags, as if to hold them steady


These fleshy, life-sized figures look wounded, dirty, evoking suff ering but also humanity. They are placed for maximum impact around the nave and side aisles


in a violent storm. T ere is more than a whiff of shipwreck to the works, including delicate tapestries that depict brown bodies fl oating (or drowning?) in watery expanses. T ese rippling textiles resonate with the textures of marble pillars around them, and respond to the slightly sub-aquatic light that percolates into the hall from its upper-storey windows. In the fi rst fl oor Conservatory, a door becomes a raft, hovering a few inches off the fl oor: a splintered and painted plinth for shells and weeds that Whittle has gathered in Scotland and Barbados. Beneath it lies a tangle of ropes, to suggest ‘escape and fugitivity’. One ever-present theme running through Whittle’s work is the history of


slavery and migration, of the transportation of goods and people – the willing and the unwilling – across the oceans.


Surrounded by generally calm waters that lead to the Atlantic, the isle of Bute has its own links to these histories, but also the movement of Norse invaders and explorers. In the garden, Whittle has conjured a simple hut, a gathering space she calls An Assembly or Ting (2024), to reference both Scottish bothies and Barbadian chattel houses, but also evoking the gathering spaces the Norse settlers created for assemblies, debates and law-making. Furnished and available for workshops and events, this fl imsy but cheerful house struck, for me, the only wrong note: how likely would it be that any community or visiting groups would feel inspired to make themselves at home here, on private land? We are only here by appointment, and at specifi c times. But that provokes a whole set of other questions, which may well be Whittle’s intention.


Berlinde de Bruyckere’s City of Refuge III, in San Giorgio Maggiore, runs until 24 November; Alberta Whittle’s outdoor work remains until 2026


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