Some time around midday on Saturday 9 May, a slow procession entered the Campo San Polo. At its head walked Chief Ngondonga of Murehwa, or rather his ceremonial figure, inhabited by the Zimbabwean multidisciplinary artist Shumba Maasai: robed, deliberate, accompanied by a small entourage and an array of audio equipment. The party paused. Headphones were unspooled and offered, one set at a time, to anyone who would take one. There was no concert; nothing was diffused into the square. For perhaps forty minutes, passers-by (Biennale visitors, tourists, residents) were drawn individually into the work's private acoustic interior: the layered recordings of DARE, Maasai's audio-visual project, listened to intimately, in headphones, while the unsoundtracked life of the campo continued around them. Then the chief packed up. The procession moved on, threading through San Polo toward Castello, repeating the gesture at three further campi before delivering itself, after sundown, to the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

The conceit is, of course, borrowed. Joseph Beuys supplied the basic grammar a half-century ago. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Düsseldorf, 1965) remains the unavoidable reference for any practice that pairs costume, ritual gesture and the conferral of a quasi-honorary office: an artist who assumes a shamanic function, treats public space as material, and proposes that the social itself is sculpture-in-progress. Maasai's DARE, the audio-visual project from which Saturday's interventions emerged, sits within this lineage and is forthright about the inheritance. But the body of the work and its means of address belong to different traditions, and the friction between them is, finally, what makes the piece interesting. The civic carriage (the procession, the costume, the offered authority, the public square) is Beuysian. The address to the listener is not. Headphones distributed one at a time, in the open, on the artist's invitation, place the work much closer to Janet Cardiff's audio walks and Susan Philipsz's outdoor sound installations: a private acoustic interior built inside a fully public site, entered by one person at a time. DARE hybridises the two. Where it then differs from Beuys, and from the long arc of post-Beuysian Sozialkunst that runs through Suzanne Lacy and into Tania Bruguera's arte útil, is in its source of authority. Maasai does not invent a private cosmology and then dress it in tribal allusion. He routes the gesture instead through an actually existing institution, the chieftaincy of Murehwa, and proceeds under its borrowed sanction. The artist becomes the chief's avatar; the chief, conversely, becomes the artist's durée. Whether this is a sharpening of the social-sculpture proposition or a complication of it is one of the questions the work asks.

The campi were well chosen. Venice has, for the duration of every Biennale, a parallel cartography in which civic squares, built for deliberation under the Serenissima, temporarily double as exhibition annexes. Maasai's procession exploits the slippage. Dare and campo share, etymologically and architecturally, the assumption that public matters are best transacted in open air, witnessed by neighbours, and that authority is performative before it is administrative. The Murehwa dare is also, importantly, a precolonial institution that has outlived every state which attempted to supplant it: the Mutapa, the Rozvi, the British South Africa Company, the Smith regime, and the present. To install one, even provisionally, in a Venetian campo is to make a temporal claim against the Biennale's habitual presentism; to argue that the form on display is older than the one hosting it.

A second strand of the work cuts against any reading of it as purely symbolic. Throughout the procession, the company carried an announcement from the Murehwa community: the completion of a new borehole, a piece of village infrastructure delivered, in the literal sense, by the chieftaincy that the artwork ventriloquises. Beuys's 7000 Eichen, in which the planting of an oak across Kassel converted documenta's exhibition economy into ecological deposit, is the obvious antecedent; arte útil the obvious framing. Yet the borehole, unlike a Kassel oak, was not made by the artwork, only declared by it. The status of the gesture is therefore ambiguous and, productively, underdetermined: is the work the procession that announces the borehole, or the borehole the work whose procession is merely its publication? Maasai, characteristically, declines to resolve the question.

Risks attend a project of this kind, and the procession's mode of presentation suggests the artist is alert to them. The most immediate is the ethnographic charge: that a Western audience, encountering a chief in ceremonial dress in a Venetian campo, will receive the work through the colonial framing of exhibition primitive. The choreography pushes back. The campi were not staged sets; the surrounding life of gelato kiosks, tourist eddies, indifferent residents, was not arranged out of frame. The crucial refusal, however, is acoustic. Nothing was performed outward. The recordings were not played into the square but offered through headphones, one listener at a time, on the chief's invitation. There was, by design, no audience: only a sequence of individual encounters, each conducted in a small private silence inside the public site. This is the move that disarms the ethnographic charge. Spectacle requires spectators; the work withheld both. The chief did not deliver speeches but, by all reports, asked. He did not announce; he hosted. The viewer, having accepted a headphone, did not watch from a remove but stepped, for as long as the listening lasted, inside.

What followed at the Zimbabwe Pavilion, where the procession concluded after dark, was perhaps the most institutionally contested moment of the day. Over the past three editions of the Biennale, the pavilion has become a serious presence: the Zimbabwean contribution to the contemporary art system's belated discovery that African modernisms long predate it. To deliver the procession to that pavilion is to ask whether the institutional frame can absorb the work without flattening it, or whether the work, having travelled under the chief's authority across half a city, recodes the pavilion in return. The evening's discussion, conducted with diaspora artists, curators and the international audience the day's interventions had collected en route, suggested the latter, though the longer answer will depend on what DARE does next.

It is too early to call the work a success in any of the terms usually used to score these things: visibility, virality, institutional uptake. What can be said is that Maasai has, with this intervention, made a clear and adult claim on a particular lineage of practice (civic, Beuysian, post-pavilion) and has done so without the embarrassment that often attends artists who pick up that vocabulary. The chief, on Saturday afternoon, was not a costume. He was a structure. The procession was not a performance. It was an argument about who, in 2026, gets to convene a public square.