In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish pavilion, told a reporter that the Biennale ìtakes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new… but by now it is an obsolete structure.î Muntadasís On Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, ìI am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense—how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor… by the media, of course, by context and by history.î Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the Biennaleís Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and ìtranslationsî it has undergone over time, and investigating Veniceís status and the space that frames the Biennale. Muntadas notes, for instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussoliniís orders was replaced again after the war.