By Shumon Basar

The historical fragility – and fuzziness – of Europe abounds in Bolzano, the second venue of Manifesta 7 (if you're heading south from the Fortress at Fortezza/Franzenfeste). The town's Austrian history is audible today in its German- and Italian-speaking locals. Mussolini made it a priority to overwrite the Germanic history, and as a result Bolzano has some notably intact pieces of Fascist architecture that remind you how talented those designers actually were.

One ruined specimen of Bolzano's Fascist industrialisation is the gargantuan Alumix aluminium factory, one-tenth of which is the setting for Raqs Media Collective's contribution to Manifesta 7, called The Rest of Now. In their curatorial statement, Raqs ask questions centred on the pervasive ambience of disuse and dereliction: 'What gets left when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered?'


Outside the Alumix aluminium factory / Inside The Rest of Now

In a discussion on the opening day of the exhibition, artists and architects tested out ideas about the future of the Alumix building (now assigned monument status), which here stood for a paradigmatic contemporary condition: what is the most appropriate political and sentimental approach to historical residue? Jorge Otero-Pailos, a professor at Columbia University, reminded us that, "Preservation is sometimes a process of destruction." Too much past, and there's no room for the rest of now.


Work by Yokoko, Wright and Harwood (left) and Zilvinak Kempinas (right) in The Rest of Now

The c.50 artworks in the show are mostly threaded together through the plural histories of the building, and the haunting of its former use and ex-occupants. Yokoko, Wright and Harwood's reconstitution of the phone network that ran through the factory is augmented by mobile phone technology. Analogue meets digital, and aluminium symbolically confronts Tantalum, the precious metal used in cellular phones, abundant in the Congo, and the cause of violent conflicts over its mining. Zilvinak Kempinas runs hundreds of metres of video tape from one of the skylights down to the floor. It wafts gently, like streamers for a forthcoming Emo party. Other works, like Jaime Pitarch's monstrous Matrushka doll, entitled Chernobyl, invoke industrial disasters and fraught legacies. Franceso Gennari's chemically petrified tree is pure post-apocalyptic nature as eerie corpse aesthetic.


The Rest of Now, installation view / Work by Jaime Pitarch

Not all contributions plug into the defunct factory semantics. Katarina Seda creates an epic portrait of her relationship to her grandmother through the display of 650 items, including a fantastic matrix of drawings and videos. David Adjaye's Europolis is also a theoretical monster: the combination of Europe's 27 capital cities into a single 100 million city-state. I drifted from one piece to another, in the vast concrete hall, like a slightly desultory pin-ball, struck by deja vu.

Does Raqs' Rest of Now fall dutifully in line with the current curatorial mannerism, that is: the nostalgic recuperation of industrial pasts and their attendant architecture? I think it does. We saw it at the 2007 Istanbul Biennial too, hosted in old textile factories and 1970s cultural centres. This trend goes back at least to the (recently demolished) Palast der Republik in Berlin, which, for a few key years early this century, became an unlikely anti-monument monument for leftist romantics. But is fuzzy sentimentalism really enough? As Rem Koolhaas put it in the book Manifesta Decade (2007), 'We are living in a completely paradoxical moment of modernisation … [that is all] driven by nostalgia.'


Trento's train station / Inside the Palazzo del Poste, venue for The Soul (Or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)

In contrast, Manifesta 7's third southern-most venue, curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, feels more decidedly 'now'. Set in the picturesque and indisputably Italianate town of Trento, Franke and Peleg's architectural vessel is the Rationalist 1929 Palazzo del Poste. The show's title has a neo-Platonic feel: The Soul (Or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls). As nearly twenty years have passed since the Iron Curtain fell, the curators claim that 'in a moment where the enthusiasm regarding the European integration process seems curbed or suspended, this chapter is conceived as a moment of introspection.'

What follows is a slow and precisely curated sequence of cellular rooms, each one dedicated to a single artist. Five 'Miniature Museums' are dotted throughout, each one guest authored – by Jimmie Durham, Sina Najafi, Florian Schneider and others – and are led by a specific concept that might make up a future museum of the soul. They’re clearly indebted to the tradition of the ethnographic museum, where fact melds with wonder.


Trento Museum of European Normality / Video installation by Marcus Coates

Animism mixes with animalism in Marcus Coates' multiple-video installation, in which various individuals are seen in their homes, unmoving, each accompanied by a soundtrack of birdsong that they have attempted to mimic. In Angela Melitopolous' video, we see thrill-seeking tourists scare themselves silly on a rollercoaster. Althea Thauberger's film-play Death and Misery imagines a village where Death is trapped in a tree 'and the gravediggers have nothing to do'. Rosalind Nashabishi's 16mm diptych follows an anonymous woman through London's Southbank complex, as seen by a spectral stalker. Eyal Weizman presents evidence from his ongoing project on the idea of 'the lesser evil' in politics and humanitarianism. The soul, today, can be secular or sacred, it seems.

Compared to the hubbub of Bolzano, Franke and Peleg's The Soul is diminutively orchestrated. Its sobriety is what makes it compelling and metaphysically substantial. The overarching theme (familiar to anyone who has followed Franke's long-term interest in the border between inner and outer psychic states) is defined enough to embrace the disparate works on show, but without subsuming them in a dictatorial imperative.

Is there 'much trouble' in Manifesta's soul today? Perhaps. Recall its founding principle: to invent an agile European art event liberated from the usual institutional deadweight. And now? Manifesta 7 is four towns, 188 artists, 130km and 111 days large. Probably no one will be have the means and the time to properly engage with all of it. I'm left wondering just how much bigger and geographically adventurous biennials can become. Now a district, then a country, soon after, a whole continent. And finally, the world. If only Ryanair did airmiles. Around the World Biennial in 80 days…