La Biennale di Venezia - International Architectural Exhibition
How Will We Live Together
Giardini - Central Pavilion
The 17th International Architecture Exhibition, until November 21 at the Giardini, Arsenale and Forte Marghera is entitled How Do We Live Together, curated by Hashim Sarkis is organized by La Biennale di Venezia, presided by Roberto Cicutto. 112 participants represent 46 countries, the exhibition is organized into five scales at the Giardini and the Arsenale.
"We need a new spatial contract
In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities,
we call on architects to imagine spaces in which
we can generously live together."
Hashim Sarkis
Artistic Director - 17th International Architecture Exhibition
principal architect of Hashim Sarkis Studios with offices in Boston and Beirut
and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT
President of La Biennale - Roberto Cicutto and Hashim Sarkis
"This imagery evokes existential anxiety and an implicit threat to social structures, a dread that provokes in us the need to rethink contemporary social and cultural structures... this project starts with reality, films real people in real places, so human particles in the artist's work are concrete people moving through situations. It could be them; it could be us. How can we do the best for us, for them, for all?"
Culture-C1 - 2021
Michael Rovner
"Experiencing caves that geologically date back millions of years is a celebration of the rich architectural heritage of cave inhabitation by early and more recent ancestors across the planet...Obsidian Rain is a transported section of the Mbai cave in Kenya, which was inhabitated in the middle of the 20th century by anti-colonial freedom fighters who used it as a commune chamber to plan their resistance... The Anthropocene Museum here is not confined to the often-innocuous activies of a conventional museum building or its politics that often provide little freedom to overtly challenge the status quo of the prevailing times. It is a (re)construction of sorts of this age-old institution and the practice of architecture itself within the African context, while still in our own way contributing to the global consciousness and discourse surrounding the new geological age we live in - the Anthropocene."
The Anthropocene Museum: Exhibit 3.0 - Obsidian Rain - 2017
Kabage Karanja - Stella Mutegi - Cave_bureau with Densu Moseti
"The World Turned Inside Out cracks open the world, the one we think we know...it calls for an unexploring of the earth. It mobilises practices of redacting, rewilding and otherwise unclaiming the known. If one turns the world inside out, what will be unearthed?"
The World Turned Inside Out - 2021
Joyce Hsiang - Bimal Mendis - Plan B Architecture and Urbanism
"This 8 x 4m plan-relief model represents a new theory of architecture and the earth's infrastructure. It offers a new vision of the gigantic accumulation of infrastructural fragments. The fictional geography of the rectangular Earth enables one to decipher the fundamental conditions of infrastructure. Each major entity corresponds to an earthly element - the air, the sea, the ground, the living, energy - and tells a story of associated infrastructures - lines, surfaces, volumes, pieces, metamorphoses. Together they form an intercontinental epic that traces the history of earthly infrastructure and opens new horizons for architectural fictions."
The Earth is an Architecture - 2015-2020
Pierre Alain Trevelo - Antoine Viger-Kohler - with - David Malaud - Mathieu Mercuriali - Oceane Ragoucy - Sarah Sauton - Antoine Bertaudiere - Alexandre Bullier - David Enon - Victor Francisco - Amaury Haumont - Michael Loconte -Stela Moceanu - Jihana Nassif - with the support - Fanny Maurel - Maider Papandinas - Mathilde Pichot
"Melting Landscape is an installation of a modern version of 'Yukimuro', a traditional snow storage method used to preserve food on the mountains of Japan.
The installation represents research on new ways of using snow and new
technologies to apply it to. The study wants to set the bases for the
design of the future of the ephemeral landscapes. The use of storage
methods, from valleys in small villages to empty plots and gardens of
dense cities, that can generate clean energy and bring attention to this
disappearing resource. A new typology of architecture can branch out,
one that works together with natural phenomena."
Melting Landscape - 2021
Kei Kaihoh - Kei Kaihoh Architects - with - Giulia Chiatante - Kentaro Hayashi
"Future Island is an experimental project that captures in miniature, through architecture the planet's response to climate change... Future Island consists of two parts:
1. The experience: One of the stones from Future Island, an original prototype of a heated rock, has been transported from Sweden to Venice and installed in the exhibition. It is heated by a solar collector installed on the roof of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini.
2. The wall: Architectural and process drawings explore past and future stories of adaptation, questioning and contemplating the obstinate tendency of global society and architecture to focus on mitigating climate change in order to preserve an artificial way of life, rather than adapting to it."
Future Island in Venice: The Time of Stone - 2017-2117
Eva Pfannes - Sylvain Hartenberg - OOZE Architects - Marjetica Potrc - with - Jesse Honsa
"Humans can't live without biodiversity, and yet we are actively perpetrating the sixth extinction. Biodiversity is not just about saving pandas; it is a proxy for healthy ecosystems, and it cuts across local, regional, and global scales of projects and artworks of this installation."
What We Can't Live Without (at 3 scales) - 2015-2020
Richard Weller - The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design
"Geoscope 2 is an immense, inflatable, multimedia split sphere occupied by the public. Starting with the legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller - 1895-1983 - whose planetary thinking aimed to measure physical experience into an ever-expanding pattern of relationships. Geoscope 2 joins a century-long exploration of the world as an architectural project. It is a capsule and cockpit from which to experience six decades of architectural thinking at a planetary scale."
Geoscope 2: Worlds - 2021
Daniel Lopez-Perez - Jesse Reiser - Nanako Umemoto - in collaboration with - Julian Harake - Katherine Leung - Lukas Fitze - Jan Pistor - Pablo Kobayashi - Lars Muller - Kira McDonald
Jesse Reiser - Nanako Umemoto - Daniel Lopez-Perez
"A perfect stainless steel circle built in the middle room represents the thin layer of human life on earth. Its thickness is based on the inhabitable realm of the planet, a shallow zone given by the topographical differences of 5.098 metres between the highest and the lowest human settlements."
Satellights: Orbiting the Thin Layer of Human Life - 2017
Angelo Bucci - spbr arquitetos
"Resurrecting the Sublime allows us a glimpse of an extinct flower, lost to colonial activity. The vitrine is filled with the smell of the Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, a flowering tree once indigenous to ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, before colonial cattle ranching decimated its habitat. On display are various smell molecule combinations: there is no 'exact' smell. The lost landscape is reduced to its geology and the flower's smell; the human connects the two as they become the specimen on view."
Resurrecting the Sublime - 2019
Christina Agapakis - Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - Sissel Tolaas - above -
Ginko Bioworks - IFF
"Through a specific design project sited at the confluence of three rivers - Black, Amazon, and Mindu - Manaus argues for a new contractual agreement between city and territory by looking beyond the traditional definitions of cities and what constitutes the urban context of the Amazon Rainforest."
Manaus: A New Contractual Agreement between City and Forest in Urban Amazonia - 2020
Anthony Acciavatti - Filipe Correa - Devin Dobrowolski - in collaboration with - Konstantina Tzemou - Evan Shieh - Inhwi Hwang - Chengxin Sha - Xingyu Zhang
"All-purpose focuses on differences and similarities, analogies that bring together cultures through architecture and by highlighting their non-heirarchical yet intricate dependencies. It challenges established relations of knowledge supremacies in order to imagine new possible ways of living together."
All-purpose - 2020
Elias Anastas - Yousef Anastas - AUU Anastas
"Welcome to Borderland explores the reality of border away from the geographical lines that define it via the prism of plants. A critical take on botany, identity, and space enables us to explore a tension, a nexus of architectures, social constructions, imaginaries, objects and discourses."
Welcome to Borderland - 2021
Justinien Tribillon - in collaboration with - Cecile Tremolieres - Misia Forlen
"This installation proposes a new reading of the Alpine landscape as an 'ecological island' at the centre of the continent, integrating various disciplines such as art, natural sciences, engineering, and landscape architecture. Seen as a European framework unprecedented features arise: a resource space for - immaculate quality - water and energy, a hotspot of biodiversity, a tourist destination with pleasant climatic conditions, a cultural space free of the stress of dense populations, and a unique landscape."
The Common Water: The Alps - 2020
Gunther Vogt - Amalia Bonsack - Thomas Kissling - Andreas Klein - Max Lieb - Roland Charles Shaw - in collaboration with - Julian Charriere - Alessandro Tellini - Rolf Weingartner
"The fluid imaginary space connects the Niger delta to other waterways emerges at the interface of aquatic ecologies and multiple figurations of Yemoja - the Yoruba goddess of the sea.Taking crude oil-spills as a point of departure, the installation connects oil-fuelled trade degradation with the lived spatialities of these polymorphic landscapes. Yemoja presents a lens to introduce not only oral histories and culture to the discourse on oil, but also an eco-feminist, and deeply rooted critique of oil culture."
Liquid Geographies - Liquid Borders - 2021
Olalekan Jeyifous - Mpho Matsipa - in collaboration with - Wale Lawal - Dani Kyengo O'Neill
"Antarctic Resolution advocates to urgently remove the goggles of Heroic Era explorers and reject the pixelated view of Antarctica offered by the world of Big Data companies, to construct a high-resolution image of the continent's geography, governance system, contemporary geopolitical, and extreme inhabitation model."
Antarctic Resolution - 2020
Giulia Foscari - UNLESS - in collaboration with - Arcangelo Sassolino - David Vaughan - Lars Muller - Scott Polar Research Institute - The Polar Lab
Giulia Foscari
"For nearly a century, fluctuations in the Israeli-Palestinian borders have affected both humans and nature.... Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip traces the transformation of a small farm in Kutzazh, an agricultural village situated along one of the most militarised borders of Gaza and Israel. The installation tells ten stories that highlight daily life in the farm. It links mundane objects such as watermelons, sardines, sand, and sediments to bureaucratic protocols, Israeli-imposed restrictions, and continued violence, met by collective acts of survival, resistance, mutual aid and solidarity."
Watermelons - Sardines - Crabs - Sands - and - Sediments: Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip 2010-2020
Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory - with contributions - Amir Qudaih - Qudaih Family - Yael Berda - Sandra Kassenaar - Malkit Shoshan
"As climate change progresses and sea levels continue to rise, island nations and coastal regions face a growing risk of going underwater. With more than 40% of the world's population living near coastlines, it is imperative to find novel approaches to address the mounting treat. Through research on self-assembly and self-organisation, this project proposes to collaborate with the natural forces of ocean waves and the accumulation of sand to be able to grow sandbars, islands, and beaches over time."
Building with Waves: Growing Islands and Coastlines Through Wave Energy 2020-ongoing
Skylar Tibbits - Schendy Kernizan Jared Laucks - MIT - with - Sarah Dole - Hassan Maniku - Ivena - Tencate
"The ocean in this project has six chapters. Each chapter belongs to death: Plastic - Dark - Phantom - Acid - Stifled - Hollow - Oceans. Although as of 2021 we are witnessing some of these effects - such as new types of skin disease that affect dolphins and lobsters or the endangerment of Artic spies - a high resolution picture of what awaits oceans is highly speculative. Hollow Ocean is an installation intended to provide a glimpse at potential future changes to maritime environments.
Hollow Ocean - 2021 - left
Pinar Yoldas - Merve Akdogan - Ege Dogan - Uzay Dogan
"In Planisfero politico - 2017 and in a series of ongoing collages, fragments of oceans, seas, rivers and lakes mask the land of different world maps, suggesting an alternative image of the world where water becomes an instrument of deterritorialisation and dematerialisation and addressing the notion of citizenship, territory, and sovereignty."
Unlanded - 2015-ongoing - right
Giuditta Vendrame
Please Note
The text is edited and taken from the catalogue
Biennale Architettura 2021
How Will we Live Together
published by
La Biennale di Venezia
