Down a little canal, through Palazzo Zenobio, and past its lawn we found ourselves in a former palace laundry house, in use this Biennale as the Icelandic Pavilion. And as we’re finding at a lot of these little out of the way spots, the trek was well worth it.

The pavilion—titled “Under Deconstruction”—presents three works of the Spanish/Icelandic duo Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson. The first piece in the show, “Your Country Doesn’t Exist,” is a Venetian iteration of an ongoing, global performance in which Libia and Olafur deliver, via various means, the message “your country doesn’t exist” to different communities. For Venice, Libia and Olafur wrote an operatic song that contained the message (as well as some other basic neo-liberal commentary), and had it performed by a singer, guitarist, and trumpeter, in a gondola, traveling through Venice. A video in the pavilion’s opening room shows highlights of the “excursion.” Watching was sheer fun: the camera zooms in on tourists sloppily licking gelato and unfazed by the opera drifting by them, on Venice’s rampant knock-off bag sellers juxtaposed with the puzzling performance art piece, and on the small gondola traveling down some of Venice’s larger canals, usually reserved for motor boats. We bemoaned the rainbows of the Palazzo Grassi, but seeing this piece restored our faith that we really do like having fun with art.

The second piece is along the same lines—a chamber choir and several musicians perform the text of the Icelandic constitution, set to an operatic tune, while video footage shows the “everyday” places of Iceland—the restaurants, malls, homes, etc.

Atop the old laundry house, though, is our very favorite piece.

We’ll set the scene for you: A dozen or so headphones radiate from a large vase placed at the middle of the cement rooftop. Its hard to spot the wall text, so we didn’t really try. We put on some headphones, and heard a dense text being read by a female voice and a male voice, sometimes in unison and sometimes alone. But right away we could tell there was something more than just reading happening. It was as if they were out of breath. Or maybe having a hard time reading the words? We couldn’t figure it out. But the crystal clear audio sucked us into every awkward pause, every elongated breath… so we looked for the wall text. And here’s a little bit of what it said:

“Exorcising Ancient Ghosts, is composed from ancient Greek judicial, literary, political and philosophical text fragments… the collage is read by an English speaking couple, while making love.”

What a caveat. As time went on this became more obvious at moments and less obvious at others. However, it was always subtle—truly some brand of fine-art- pornography where nothing was overdone or exaggerated. The couple came off as if they were any random couple, without performance experience, who had been asked to do this difficult task of reading the Greeks while making love. We could sense an ongoing drive to stick to reading the words no matter what else was going on, and this drive, somehow, became the piece’s narrative. Who would pick up reading next? When would they read simultaneously? When would, against their apparent desire, reading stop?

Down the canal, through the palazzo, and all the way to the laundry house… we’re so glad we went.