PRESSROOM launched in Venice today with a series of briefings from Guest Editors. Follow @pressroomvenice to hear our artist-investigators responses!

Kathleen Soriano

Art party or party art? @kclSoriano

Anthony d’Offay

Belonging in the future occupies which @ARTISTROOMS?

Richard Parry

Biennale announces hypnotists to be employed as invigilators. Deeper experience promised. @rhmparry

Documentary to begin filming at Venice today exploring what it describes as ‘honey without the bees’. Feature interview. @rhmparry

Critic mauled by rogue family of gerbils. Scenes of pandemonium. @rhmparry

Biennale to issue artists with canoes in bid for efficiency push. online exclusive. @rhmparry

Dealer and gallery director in selfie stick shame. We have the pictures. @rhmparry

Parallel underwater art fair announced to coincide with biennale. Titled floated as ‘Venlantis’. @rhmparry

Sparks fly over so-called ‘performative text incident’. @rhmparry

Royal couple announce baby as artwork and will form basis of next British pavilion show. @rhmparry

Colony of eagles reported nesting near giardini. Artists and public advised not to feed. @rhmparry

Large nebulous artwork accidentally seen by outsider tourist – quizzical looks observed. @rhmparry

Conclave of collectors spotted in bidding war over most hyped artwork using vongole shells for chips. What did you see? @rhmparry

Emerging artist reported stuck in plant pot. Send us your pictures. @rhmparry

Art writer seen scrawling illegible semi-anarchic graffiti on palazzo door at 4am slurring that going to art parties is the new situationism. Fresh reports. @rhmparry

Four walls, one artist, seven curators, five dealers, eight collectors with spouses, plus a pastry chef. What did you hear? @rhmparry

Mestre decides to sever all links to the lagoon declaring ‘the lion just got up and walked onto the mainland’. Full report to follow. @rhmparry

Annabel Dover

The Wunderkammer of Venice
The 2013 Venice Biennale had the Wunderkammer as its curatorial focus. Massimiliano Gionithe’s Encyclopedic Palace. This year the 56th year of the Bienale, Okwui Enwezor has created a show entitled All the Worlds Futures, a title that to me conjures a post-war ethos and the spirit of the United Nations.

First opened in 1895 and first International in 1907, overtaken in the
1930s as is evidenced by the majority of Fascist chic pavilions.

In 1974 the biennale was dedicated to Chile as a political statement to Pinochet and in 2013 Udo Kittelman the director of the Nationalgalerie, State Museums of Berlin included the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the German pavilion.

For me the biennale will always be a Wunderkammer; an (often male) curator’s vision of a perfect world in miniature. Sometimes the Wunderkammer of the 1600s were completely invented in the mind and didn’t exist in reality at all. Often like Sloane’s they held a herbarium. Venice itself has the atmosphere of an overwhelming and supernatural island that deserves its own collection of curiosities. Your brief for Venice is to visit, read or collect as many of these as you can and create your own biennale Wunderkammer.

Ostaria al Marghelo
Caffè Florian (expensive looking can suffice!)
Swimming at the Lido
Peggy Guggenheim’s house
Arena Chapel at Padova
Natural History Museum
Rumanian Pavilion
Arsenale
Finland pavilion.
Prostitute spotting on the way in.
Lizards
Milky water
Facelifts
Pick some flowers and press them
Collect some water from the Grand Canal

Films and books to read and art to look at:
Venice, by Jan Morris
Casanova’s History of My Life,
Don’t Look Now, Death in Venice, The Comfort of Strangers, The Leopard, any Visconti, John Singer Sargent, Watteau in Venice by Phillippe Sollers, Anne Rice’s Cry to Heaven, Candide, Othello, Merchant of Venice, Fellini’s Casanova

Joanne Masding

Get exhausted. Traipse. Saturate yourself. See the whole biennale @JoanneMasding

Use stealth. Sneak. Make yourself invisible. See underneath the biennale @JoanneMasding

Rise above. Fly. Find yourself a bird’s eye view. See the biennale straight on @JoanneMasding

Peckham Platform

Calling all investigators to consider what could be socially relevant art in the context of Venice 2015? @PeckhamPlatform