Venice in May. Green water, muted light, the racketing of tourists’ wheeling luggage across damp stone. Now the Biennale has opened there are new sounds, sometimes protest chants, sometimes the footsteps of marchers. Or perhaps they are old sounds. Venice: a stage for spectacle and protest since the upheavals of 1968. The clamour of a world that cannot agree what is beautiful or just continues.

This year, it is called In Minor Keys, conceived by the curator Koyo Kouoh. She did not live to see it open. But the show must go on, and what a show it is, part circus, part folly, but with something to say, perhaps no more so than this year. And the best, perhaps the only way to see it, is to walk.

Past the arguments and the banners and the grief, past the 2,000 protesters who clashed with police outside the Israeli pavilion, past the Pussy Riot march that wound through these ancient streets with the clarity of purpose that most pavilions would envy, the Holy See has made something quiet, and all the more powerful for it: a micro pilgrimage.

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, it unfolds across two Venetian venues, the Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi in Cannaregio and the Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello, inspired by the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. You walk through a 17th-century garden with music in your ears, Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Patti Smith, FKA Twigs and some twenty commissioned artists in all. The idea? The city falls away, and what remains is just the sound and the path and your own attention. It’s about listening, about the sounds, the scents of the gardens, the presence required to walk with attention, an experience that cannot be streamed, generated, or consumed from a screen. As Pope Leo XIV has said, “the logic of algorithms tends to repeat what works, but art opens up what is possible”. The slow quiet walk as resistance to the sabre rattling of war. The walk as the poem.

Continue to the Japan Pavilion where in Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Grass Babies, Moon Babies, you’ll be handed a weighted baby doll and asked to carry it through the exhibition and into the garden. It’s a simple act but surprisingly powerful. In an age anxious about what AI can make, this kind of meaning, clutching, swaddling an endearing baby doll, is a literally touching, embodied experience, a souvenir of childhood innocence, and a reminder that we make the art by being there, by inhabiting it.

Belgium’s Miet Warlop builds a storm and puts you inside it: IT NEVER SSST turns the pavilion into something between an arena and a construction site, performers moving through waves of noise and flying plaster. An experience not for the faint hearted. Elsewhere, Alvaro Barrington’s Labor Day Parade ’91 conjures the kinetic memory of Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade through painted textiles and metal figures; the Bahamas Pavilion calls up its dead through Junkanoo, through costume and procession and an older understanding that moving is a part of mourning, in a tribute to the late artist John Beadle. At the Qatar Pavilion, Rirkrit Tiravanija has pitched a tent, literally, on the future site of Qatar’s first permanent Giardini pavilion, where visitors are invited to enter, wander, linger, eat, and be together. Again, movement, connection, presence.

These walking works, and I use the term loosely, generously, because they all direct our attention towards the act of moving through the world with our eyes open, our bodies present, our hearts still open. The best of them insist that art is not a product or object but an experience to be lived, and that the body, irreplaceable and unhurryable, remains its truest medium.

Pussy Riot knew it when they led their march through the streets of Venice, collapsing protest, performance and procession into one unscripted, uncurated event. The Holy See, it seems, knows it too. We are always, in the end, just human, in our bodies, walking. The art is in how we do it, and why, and who we walk beside.