Various national pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale
While standing between ceiling-height shelves, I notice a person adjusting the products. He is a perfectly believable supermarket worker; only the suit reveals him as Biennale staff member. That, and the fact that the products on the shelves are printed cardboard copycats, generated via AI. We are in the Latvian Pavilion, where the curators dug into the archives of the Venice Architecture Biennale and transformed previous national pavilions into household products. Chile’s 2014 Monolith Controversies project appears as a box of cookies; Singapore’s contribution from 2010 cosplays as laundry detergent; Pakistan’s 2021 Mapping Festivities pavilion becomes a bottled strawberry smoothie. There are drinks, snacks, vegetables, breakfast cereal, and a frozen section— it is “a supermarket of ideas.” As she shows me around, Austra Bērziņa, the pavilion’s project manager, tells me that “architects think a lot about homes and workplaces, but nobody thinks about supermarkets. We thought, ‘Why not use the supermarket?’”
The show features every national pavilion exhibited in the last ten editions of the Venice Architecture Biennale. It is well-stocked by Biennale standards, but even such an abundant offer is limited in variety, putting on (literal) display the concern of this year’s main exhibition: namely, the largely Eurocentric quality of the national pavilions. An exhibition can be defined as much by what is being shown as what is being omitted, so in the spirit of taking or giving up space, a number of this year’s national contributions take on curator Lesley Lokko’s themes of decolonization and decarbonization.
The Unfolding Pavilion, a recurring fringe event, addresses the very thorny presence of a global event in such a small city. This year’s iteration includes a set of small, unsanctioned interventions designed to question the encroachment of the Biennale on the Giardini, a public park commissioned in 1807 to fill a pressing need for the densely built-up city. A red staircase, a ladder, and a banner placed strategically around the park’s boundary address the expropriation of what little public land there is in a city besieged by the constant flux of foreign tourists and capital. In the Austrian Pavilion, a pedestrian bridge devised to connect part of the building with the neighboring residential district of Sant’Elena is brutally cut short. Inside, the exhibition explains that despite a year’s worth of negotiations the project was refused permission from the Biennale and related authorities.
Other contributors consciously decided to address historical absences by making space for minority or indigenous groups. The Nordic Countries pavilion houses a Sámi library, gathering artifacts, furniture and books relating to this indigenous group inhabiting parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Kola Peninsula. The Brazilian Pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for the best national contribution, spotlights indigenous knowledge and Black population in a clay-floor space furnished with rammed-earth plinths. In the British Pavilion, a carefully curated exhibition showcases artifacts speaking to diasporic cultures and rituals, from an abstracted domino tile to a stunning sculpture made of sabão azul, an iconic blue laundry soap whose use makes reference to public laundry spaces in Luanda, Angola. A film is shown in the first room of the pavilion, made up of archival footage of people cooking, eating, dancing, playing dominoes, polishing their cars, all set against a mix of bass-heavy music coming from an impressive sound system.
Another group of contributors opted to stray from the very idea of an exhibition, presenting empty spaces or setting the stage for a program of events instead of displaying physical artifacts. The Estonian team tackled the topic of the housing crisis, locating their exhibition in a rental apartment just outside of Arsenale, one of the two main Biennale venues. The interior contains a series of subtle interventions alongside a fully functional living space, blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. On the day of my visit, the performer in residence was eating pasta from a takeout box at the table, and, judging by the flour on the kitchen countertop, someone else was making a cake. Ordinary-looking folders on the bookshelves were labeled “taxes” and also “hopes and dreams.” The German Pavilion, titled Open for Maintenance, became a repository of materials collected from last year’s Art Biennale, in the spirit of circular economy and waste management. The pavilion also includes a workshop, a tea and coffee station for Biennale staff, a functioning composting toilet and an all-gender urinal. If making a neat pouch out of scrap material is not your bag, you can instead shoot some hoops at the Mexican pavilion, where the curators re-created a campesino basketball court, “an infrastructure that has become repurposed as a privileged space for poly- and plurivalent processes of decolonization in Mexico’s indigenous communities.” Ukraine presented two spaces, both defined by emptiness. In the Giardini people caught sun while resting, their backs propped up against the grassy mounds delineating the outdoor space. In the Arsenale, an empty, dark room covered in draped fabric spoke poignantly to the pavilion’s title, Before the Future. Addressing the country’s first appearance after a nine-year absence, one of the curators, Borys Filonenko, said that “there is a paradox of thinking about the future while the country is still being destroyed. You lose something every day. We don’t know which people, humans, nonhumans, cities we will go through victory with.” The Ukrainian pavilion will be animated by interventions from new collectives of architects, artists, and historians from midsummer. The Uruguay pavilion contains a single film, with a sound system set to compete with the one at the British pavilion. Here, a clear curatorial strategy crystallized in an enchanting opera about architecture, infrastructure and forestry, featuring a rich ensemble of drone footage and digitally rendered forms dancing on the screen.
Finally, a number of contributors used archives to critically evaluate history, destabilize established forms of knowledge or address absences in collections. At the V&A Applied Arts pavilion a critical eye is set on “Tropical Modernism” and the way it was written into the Western architectural canon. Cocurator Nana Biamah-Ofosu told NYRA that “often, archives focus on European actors and what they did in Africa. We are interested in the resistance and power that this architecture represented in the postcolonial era.” The Slovenian space showcases a wide range of vernacular architecture case studies, demonstrating the depth and variety of passive measures with which thermal environment was managed and controlled in the pre–fossil fuel era. Finland, exhibiting laudable curatorial restraint, proposes the death of the flushing toilet in a pavilion that looks at the present from a point in the future, pointing out the wasteful, polluting logic of a sanitation system that uses clean water to dispose of human waste. The viewers are greeted with an archeological dig revealing the ruins of a ceramic toilet bowl. Inside, a life-size dry toilet, the type often found in Finnish countryside summer houses, is presented alongside a film in which two scientists from the future present the new infrastructural landscape.
In the supermarket of ideas that is the Biennale, the competition for viewers’ attention is fierce. Amid text-heavy, overloaded exhibitions, curatorial restraint pays off—and it can be a way of making complex topics accessible. As the Finnish pavilion curator Arja Renell said, “We’re dealing with a heavy subject: we’re facing political crisis and climate crisis, biodiversity loss. How do we bring this topic up in a positive way?” Well-stacked supermarket shelves and innovative toilets are certainly a start.