In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain at the Spanish Pavilion, told a reporter that the biennale "takes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new� but by now it is an obsolete structure." Muntadas�s On Translation: I Giardini, the lastest 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 says, "I 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." Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the Biennale�s Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and "translations" it has undergone over time, and investigating Venice�s status and the space that frames the Biennale. Montadas notes, for instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussolini�s orders was replaced again after the war.