#BiennaleArchitettura2023 - National Pavilions - U.S.A. - Germany - Poland - Giardini - Part 3:3

 U.S.A. Pavilion

Everlasting Plastics

Curators: Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving
Exhibitors: Xavi Laida Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague, and Lauren Yeager

Petrochemical polymers known as plastics were developed in the United States as a revolutionary material. Today the global urgency to reframe our approach to the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets is clear. Exploring our fraught, yet enmeshed, kinship with plastics, Everlasting Plastics considers the ways these materials both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment. This exhibition highlights our unseen dependency; demonstrates how plasticity has created expectations for the behaviours of other materials; and points to plastic’s unknown, long-term, and indelible impact on our futures.

Lauren Yeager - Salvage Installation

Lauren Yeager - Salvage - Longevity

Norman Teague - Form - Re+Prise

Xavi L. Aguirre - Function - Proofing: Resistant and Ready

Xavi L. Aguirre - Function - Proofing: Resistant and Ready

Simon Anton - Matter - This Will Kill _ That

Simon Anton - Matter - This Will Kill _ That - detail

Ang Li - Mass - Externalities 

Ang Li - Mass - Externalities 

Germany Pavilion

Open for Maintance - Wegen Umbau geoffnet

Curators: ARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / BURO JULIANE GREB - Anne Femmer, Franziska Godicke, Juliane Greb, Christian Hiller, Petter Krag, Melissa Makele, Anh-Linh Ngo, Florian Summa

The German pavilion's installation is dedicated to matters of care, repair, and maintenance. Made entirely using leftover material from the Biennale Arte 2022, which left behind hundreds of tons of trash, the pavilion will become a productive infrastructure, promoting principles of reuse and circular construction in tandem with architecture’s social responsibility. By squatting the German pavilion through a series of maintenance works, the contribution renders visible processes of spatial and social care work typically hidden from the public eye. The project demonstrates that ecological sustainability is inextricably linked to the social question.

Germany Pavilion

Open for Maintance - Wegen Umbau geoffnet

curators - Franziska Godicke and Juliane Greb

Germany Pavilion

Open for Maintance - Wegen Umbau geoffnet

Poland Pavilion

Datament

Curator: Jacek Sosnowski
Exhibitors: Anna Barlik, Marcin Strzała

The development of civilisation and technology has made our everyday life irreversibly dependent on the production, collection, and processing of data. Information produced in unimaginable quantities, processed by ever more technologically advanced computations, creates an illusion of truth about the world – the establishment of data that is a starting point for making decisions with very real consequences. The Datament exhibition brings us closer to data in its raw form, allowing us to experience it as it is, beyond its field of interpretation. Starting with the basic need to have a roof over one’s head, Datament shows the importance of data and the problems it can cause in terms of architecture and urban planning.

curator - Jacek Sosnowski - exhibitors - Anna Barlik and Marcin Strzała

#BiennaleArchitettura2023 - National Pavilions - Belgium - France - Denmark - Japan - Part 2:3 - Giardini

 

Belgium Pavilion

In Vivo

Curators: Bento and Vinciane Despret
Exhibitors: Bento and Vinciane Despret with the collaboration of Corentin Mahieu, Juliette Salme, Corentin Mullender, PermaFungi, BC materials, Sonian Wood Coop

How can we rethink architecture in a world of finite resources? It is urgent to rethink production itself, which is still too often considered in the context of an extractivist policy. It is also urgent to invent new ways of living.  We propose to experiment with enviable alternatives for our territories and our cities, alternatives that would be forged with and from the living - an alliance with mushrooms, which can constitute a highly available, sustainable, renewable material.The In Vivo Pavilion offers a time and a place for critical thinking, particularly because questions of responsibility, of taking other beings into account, and of justice will be discussed in relation to living and building. But its strength will be defined above all by concrete and inventive proposals for an enviable future of living.

Charles Palliez and Corentin Dalon

Belgium Pavilion

France Pavilion

Ball Theater

Curators: Muoto and Georgi Stanishev

The Ball Theatre is an installation designed to reawaken our desires for utopia. Its hemispherical shape elicits multiple images. It can be interpreted equally as a terrestrial globe or as a mirror ball, a kitsch icon of an era when partying was still possible. This party aura suggests a new approach to today’s crises, one in which the emphasis is no longer on emergency, but on the possibility of alternative futures. This is enacted in the theatre for the duration of the Biennale Architettura 2023 by an alternation between moments of contemplation and immersion in a landscape of sound echoing with foreign and far-off voices, and periods of intense occupancy in the form of variations on the theme of the ‘ball’, an interplay of workshops– residences between artists, researchers, and students.

Tata Foxie

La Deliche

France Pavilion

Ball Theater

Yves Moreau and Georgi Stanishev

lead curators France Pavilion

Denmark Pavilion

Costal Imaginaries

Curator: Josephine Michau

Exhibitors: Schonherr Landscape Architects, David Garcia, Giacomo Brusa Cattaneo, Laurits Sporon Boving Genz, Dejle Zaradesht Mohamad, Iisa Eikaas, Katrina Wiberg, Anna Aslaug Lund Christian Friedlander

Coastal Imaginaries is an exhibition of nature-based design solutions in an age of human-based environmental destruction, as well as a training ground for emerging ecological imaginaries addressing the current crisis of the coastscape. The exhibition offers a catalogue of proposals for a coastal future grounded in seven nature-based principles, addressing the perspective of the urgencies of floods and storm surges. Beyond being mechanisms of resilience, these strategies can serve as CO2 sinks, foodscapes, material banks, and spaces for human recreation and more-than human habitation. Offering a way to (re)synchronise with nature, the septet of principles opens up a new re-enchantment with natural ecologies through changing practices within the architectural profession.

 Christian Friedlander - Mermaid Bay Installation

curator, Josephine Michau and exhibiting artist + exhibition designer, Christian Friedlander

Denmark Pavilion

Costal Imaginaries

Japan Pavilion

Architecture, a Place to Be Loved - When Architecture Is Seen as a Living Creature

Curator: Onishi Maki
Exhibitors: Hyakuda Yuki, Tada Tomomi, Harada Yuma, dot architects - Ienari Toshikatsu, Doi Wataru, Ikeda Ai, Miyachi Keiko - Moriyama Akane, Mizuno Futoshi

Even after the pandemic, when the importance of coexistence is reconsidered, faceless developments continue to overtake the city. In such a world, do we have grounds to believe that architecture is loved today? Architecture, a place to be loved, is possible when architecture encompasses its engraved memories and stories and embodies the backdrop and the activities that took place, giving the architecture a broader meaning. It is also possible to perceive architecture as a living creature, rather than an entity separate from nature. The members of our team have many different specialties: textiles, ceramics, photography, design, editing, and architecture. Through the Japanese pavilion we create a spatial experience that invites visitors to think about architecture as a place to be loved.

Japan Pavilion

Architecture, a Place to Be Loved - When Architecture Is Seen as a Living Creature

 

Venice - Not Only Biennale - Beatrice Burati Anderson - An Unexpected Space of Freedom - Emilio Fantin + Marzio Zorio

Beatrice Burati Anderson 

An Unexpected Space of Freedom 

Emilio Fantin + Marzio Zorio

In the two gallery spaces of the Beatrice Burati Anderson Gallery, the exhibition - An Unexpected Space of Freedom  - until August 13 - is curated by Carla Subrizi, presents the site-specific installations by Emilio Fantin and Marzio Zorio. Sounds, lights, voices, drawings and some very essential objects, redesign the gallery's spaces in both a fascinating and quite radical way. The artists explore subtle and imperceptible territories. Emilio Fantin by drawing a kind of intimacy’s landscape in the space of relationship - Marzio Zorio by focusing on the sense of disorientation and distance, as they become ways to find a condition of balance. An unexpected space of freedom is here unveiled, right in that silent, often unreachable condition belonging to both individual and collective consciousness. 

Emilio Fantin

Emilio Fantin, investigates the most hidden and imperceptible states of sensibility. Through the flow of narratives, almost waking dreams, of the performance and installation Improvvisazione interiore 2  - 2023 - made by six people - areas that usually escape perception by remaining indecipherable re-emerge. Fantin redesigns the space through the presence of six metal stools, high enough high enough not to keep their “feet on the ground”, and a series of drawings in pencil, felt tip, lime and titanium white on plasterboard, to which he gives the name Archetypes - twelve elements - 2023. This is the starting situation for the generation of primary or unexpected images, taken from the multi-voiced narrative of the six participants who together give free rein to live exercises of inner imagination. The installation constitutes the further phase of a long research work on states of consciousness that Fantin has been pursuing for years. The drawings on plasterboard, moreover, perceived as fragments of plaster or portions of walls subtracted from pre-existing architecture, redefine space: they are presences or traces of the work on imagination.

Emilio Fantin - Archetypes - twelve elements - 2023.

The artist Marzio Zorio puts technology, albeit used, to the test, transforming it into the trace of an archaeology of the present, which invites us to think of sound resonance or the reverberation of lights as a communication reduced to the smallest signs and without words. He conceived a site-specific installation that connects the two wings of the Gallery, on either side of the water canal that separates them. With the intervention by the public, on a wooden pole installed on one side, the response occurs at a distance, through the switching on of lights on the other side of the canal. The phenomenon is repeated on both sides, building, in the immateriality of sounds and lights in dialogue - touching the wooden element produces both sound and light effect - an interstitial bridge-space, previously nonexistent: an architecture of sounds and lights, of exchange and communication. 

Marzio Zorio - Untitled - Coppia di Aste - 2023

"The exhibition builds an unprecedented path of sensibility, explores intimate and imperceptible territories, draws geographies of intimacy in the space of relationship -Emilio Fantin - dwells on the disorientation and distance that become unprecedented states of seeking a balance between things - Marzio Zorio - glimpses and reveals “an unexpected space of freedom”, precisely in that removed, silent and hardly traceable condition of individual and collective consciousness." 

Carla Subrizi 

curator

Beatrice Burati Anderson

gallerist

Another work by Marzio Zorio, Untitled - Bussole - 2023, completes this reversal between physicality and immateriality, between equilibrium and disequilibrium, focusing on the effects that on a series of compasses, instruments used to orient oneself in space, are produced by the voices and noises of the people in the space, to the point of causing the total disorientation of the objects, no longer able to indicate the directions of the cardinal points.

Untitled - Bussole - 2023

Emilio Fantin's other drawings from 2023, traced with felt tip on stage paper, - Numero immaginario, Algoritmo ricorsivo - Triangolo di Sierpinnski - Testa contro testa, Ab), reflect on the States of Consciousness (2) by translating into geometric formulas and stylized forms, the apparently scientific nature of imagination. 

 

#BiennaleArchitettura2023 - National Pavilions - Great Britain - Switzerland - Australia - Giardini - Part 1:3

 Great Britain Pavilion 

Dancing Before the Moon

Special Mention Award: curatorial strategy and design propositions celebrating the potency of everyday rituals as forms of resistance and spatial practices in diasporic communities

Curators: Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham
Exhibitors: Yussef Agbo-Ola , Jayden Ali, Mac Collins, Shawanda Corbett, Madhav Kidao, Sandra Poulson

The Great Britain Pavilion's  installation is dedicated to matters of care, repair, and maintenance. Made entirely using leftover material from the Biennale Arte 2022, which left behind hundreds of tons of trash, the Pavilion becomes a productive infrastructure, promoting principles of reuse and circular construction in tandem with architecture’s social responsibility. By squatting the German Pavilion through a series of maintenance works, the contribution renders visible processes of spatial and social care work typically hidden from the public eye. The project demonstrates that ecological sustainability is inextricably linked to the social question.

Curators - Meneesha Kelley and Joseph Henry - Exhibitors - Sandra Poulson 

 Mac Collins

Yussef Agbo-Ola - Muluku: 6 Bone Temple

Madhav Kidao - Bardo

Sandra Poulson - Sabao Azul e Agua

Mac Collins - Runout

Shawanda Corbett - A Healing is Coming

Switzerland Pavilion

Neighbours

Curators/Exhibitors: Karin Sander, Philip Ursprung

The artist Karin Sander and the art historian Philip Ursprung exhibit the Swiss pavilion as such, instead of using it as a container for an exhibition. They highlight the proximity of the pavilions of Switzerland - 1951–1952, Bruno Giacometti - and Venezuela - 1954–1956, Carlo Scarpa. Of all pavilions in the Giardini, they are the closest. They share a wall.   A carpet in the main hall depicts the two combined ground plans. A temporary opening, cut into the brick enclosure of the courtyard, makes visible the connection. The dead plane tree has been cut at a height of about eight metres. The iron fences shutting off the openings of the Swiss pavilion have been temporarily removed.

Philip Ursprung and karin Sander

Switzerland Pavilion - Neighbours - detail

Austraila Pavilion

Unsettling Queenstown

Curators: Anthony Coupe, Julian Worrall, Ali Gumillya Baker, Emily Paech, Sarah Rhodes

unsettling Queenstown explores and participates in the questioning and reimagining of Australia’s colonial inheritance at the end of the second Elizabethan age. Weaving between real and fictional Queenstowns, the exhibition encompasses a ghostly fragment of colonial architecture, immersive sounds and imagery, and representations of the country ‘demapped’ of its colonial patterns. Pertinent tactics gleaned from current practice offer an open archive of ideas for Venice’s Laboratory of the Future.  Donning lenses of narrative and temporality, this exhibition probes the relationship between operations of deconstruction and reconstruction to narrate hidden pasts and posit alternative futures.

Creative Directors

Anthony Coupe, Julian Worrall, Emily Paech, Sandra Rhodes , Ali Gumillya Baker