Identity crisis: Redefining the other in Fred Wilson's 'Speak of Me as I Am'

At the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Fred Wilson produced a series of discrete but interrelated pieces collectively titled Speak of Me as I Am. Comprised of Venetian Renaissance paintings, kitsch objects, and original work, Wilson revealed the continued marginalized presence of black bodies in the Venetian imaginary. A post-colonial analysis, though apt, provides a limited interpretation of the work as direct critique of race in past and present Venetian culture. It does however fail to recognize how Wilson uses Venice as a subject to express his own subconscious and crisis of identity following 9/11. In Turbulence and September Dream, Wilson encourages the viewer to not only recognize how representations of others inform collective identity, but also how establishing otherness maintains the individual psyche. By re-contextualizing otherness within a feminist and psychoanalytic framework, Wilson's focus on subjectivity during war reinterprets the political gesture in Speak of Me as I Am.