Manifesta: Placenta Europa

“Chapter 7: Manifesta: Placenta Europa” portrays Manifesta as an organization that translated the European Union's unification agenda into the spaces of so-called high art, projecting a classed project of European unity that gathered private and public interests on the municipal, national, and supranational levels around the new art biennial. It interrogates the biennial's mission in terms of a new European Union cultural policy agenda and widespread notions of art exhibitions' pacifying agency. The chapter looks at two artworks by collective subREAL and artist Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, and argues that Manifesta helped advance the European Union's new goals of supranational integration through cultural action.