Shopping for Ideas

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, ‘Wh…