Unknown Unknowns: guide to the 23rd Triennale Milano

The main thematic exhibition curated by Ersilia Vaudo traces an orbit around an imaginary centre of gravity in which the anthropocentric vision has been abandoned and new degrees of visual openness open up on what translates more or less clearly as what “we do not know that we don’t know”. Only 100 years ago, when the Monza Biennial, the eldest child of the Milanese institution, was inaugurated, we thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy there was. To date, another 250 billion have been discovered. To quote the curator, when faced with the mystery that cannot be unveiled, that disregards and contains us, we must not be so eager to know and unveil it, but rather we must learn to live with it and work out a new way of coexisting with the unknown. Gravity and mathematics, neuroscience and astronomy, theoretical physics and the philosophy of biology thus become themes in which art, design and architecture, with even site-specific works, confront each other to try to find solutions in which the cultures of the project may become, perhaps one day, tools for implementation and not just speculation.

Following a well-established thesis in the history of Italian design that sees “research” design as a way of experimentation and thus of discovery poised between art and design, the exhibition curated by Marco Sammicheli, the director of the Italian Design Museum, which is usually located in the same spaces as this exhibition and which for this occasion was transformed into the Italian Pavilion, investigates the period between the 13th Triennale of 1964 (Tempo Libero) and the 19th of 1996 (Identità e differenze). The thematic itinerary, which interweaves various documents, works and objects, identifies common areas of projects and actions - Gravity, Human Containers, Environments, ‘80s Movements, ‘90s Playground, Synesthesia and Music - and monographic in-depth studies illustrating the research and results achieved by individual authors or groups and collectives that became established in the years that a “radical” vision of design was focusing on a new design culture.

The red corridor through which we walk while visiting the exhibition is a faithful reproduction (set up by set designer Margherita Palli) of the corridor in the home of Giovanni Agosti, curator together with Jacopo Stoppa, which is a place filled with works, books, and objects that represent the mysteries of his life and bear witness to the presence of the unknown in domestic and everyday spaces. In addition to the entrance and exit (through a bathroom installed in an imaginary and at the same time realistic Etruscan tomb), the corridor leads to four doors opening onto four abstract rooms in which different and very universal themes are explored and which refer to the four elements (air, fire, water and earth), and in which ancient and contemporary art dialogue with works from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo Galilei, from Lucio Fontana to Pino Pascali and Alberto Garutti.

Around the permanent exhibition of the living room of Casa Lana, the original interior designed by Sottsass in 1967 and brought to the Triennale in 2021, the second temporary exhibition is curated by Marco Sammicheli and features objects and drawings rearranged according to a specific theme, which for this occasion is “calculation”. This term was specifically used to bring together two projects that testify to Sottsass’s research in the attempt to measure the “great number” and organise the new technologies in which to start living. On display are some special drawings and rare objects of the ELEA 9003 calculator designed with engineer Mario Tchou for Olivetti in 1959 and some elements of the Microenvironment designed in 1972 for the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape held at the MoMA in New York.

There are four initiatives involving Francis Kéré. The first architectural installation is right at the entrance to the Triennale. The Future’s Present is a tall tower serving as a place of isolation and reflection, where visitors can enter before, during or after visiting the exhibition and sit looking up. It is a place of compression and understanding, and confrontation with oneself or with others, where one can find one’s own contact between the land of knowledge (trying to leave everyday problems behind) and the sky of mystery in which the imagination makes its way.

Just as the tower is typologically and metaphorically a large tree, a hollow trunk into which to enter to meditate and get to know the “other”, Under a Coffee Tree, Kèré’s second work, in axis with the previous one and inside the building at the entrance to the café, is a sculptural and decorative interpretation of a coffee tree, under and around which visitors can sit to enjoy the coffee ritual as if they were at a public square.

In the section of the Triennale dedicated to the International Pavilions, Kéré is the designer of the general layout and has places the African pavilions at the centre and the other participations at the perimeter, as if in an ideal communal embrace. The fulcrum of this space is Yesterday’s Tomorrow, a spatial installation with two walls decorated with patterns found in African vernacular architecture, which twists around a central area which the visitors can walk on and inhabi while listening to voices asking questions on the themes of the Exhibition. Finally, on the outer side of the international participations area is the pavilion of Burkina Faso, Kéré’s country of origin, where a long wall entitled Drawn Togheter was created with the collaboration of the visitors on the days of the opening and decorated with signs and symbols of the country’s tradition, attempting to give a new life to this tradition.

Curated by Juliette Gelli, Romain Guillet and Pablo Bras, and set up with a rare sensitivity, modulating surfaces and furnishings with handmade bricks, the French pavilion does not just showcase simple objects but prompts the visitor to consider the interactions between them, revealing an infinite and regenerating renewal of sometimes unexpected combinations. On the same interpretative, and therefore relational, level, there is a lemon tree, a self-built data centre and other objects, including jugs and glasses, lamps and sound surfaces, shelves and containers, cheeses and Kefir and an installation of reflected natural light. In this sparse and heterogeneous selection, an “ecology without nature” is revealed, that is, the discovery of a praxis of the relationships between what we produce and what already exists, with the realisation of how much, even in a compromised present, the future offers the need to interact in a different way with the environments in which we live, observing what already exists and admitting that we have not yet exhausted all its configurations, uses, and resources.

Curated by Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and Ellen Zoete and featuring an installation by the young and promising Studio Ossidiana, composed of two Italian designers based in the Netherlands, this project aims to foster new ways of understanding the earth as a shared space between plants, humans and other animals. In order to tackle climate and environmental crises, the earth can no longer solely exist for human exploitation, but it is necessary to rethink the relationship between all living beings on the planet in the same shared spaces. An urban block in Rotterdam, a regenerative farm in the country’s rural east and an abandoned North Sea oil rig are three ecologically diverse sites in the Netherlands that help explore the possibilities of interspecies relationships over time. The exhibition is based on the organisational model of the Zoöp project, developed by Het Nieuwe Instituut. This pavilion received the Bee Award for the best international pavilion.

The curators – Christiana Ioannou, Daphne Kokkini, Spyros Nasainas and Christos Papastergiou – have designed an architectural and audiovisual installation that reinterprets the idea of enclosures and the condition of a secret garden concealed behind a semi-permeable barrier. Starting from the ancient tradition of gardens in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus and emphasising the isolation of certain naturalistic environmental conditions, the installation, which replaces the traditional idea of the pavilion, triggers a physical and intellectual experience with the aim of redefining the garden as a place of contemplation and introspection, between the imaginary and the unknown.

Starting from the first anatomical research that was carried out in the past, at the dawn of modern science, and noting that it was done on inanimate bodies and remains of corpses, with a sculptural, performative and multimedia installation, Sonja Bäumel dedicates her work to the unknowns of biological, climatic and technological changes, investigating the boundaries of the human body and their vital relationship with the microbiotic universe. “The human being is a walking biotope. Hundreds of thousands of microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, yeasts, and parasites, live in, on, and around human bodies and keep them alive. Try as we might, we cannot escape the vital interconnections with the microbial world”.

Curated by Timea Junghaus, exhibited in an official pavilion of a state that does not exist on the maps but is representative of the nomadic Roma and Sinti peoples, and organised by the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin, Emília Rigová’s work includes a site-specific installation that is a bit like a cabinet of curiosities loaded with videos, photographs, found objects and a community art project. An altar honours the work, career, life and success of Bári Raklóri, the artist’s alter ego that allows her to circumvent the collective Roma identity as a minority artist and facilitates acts of self-definition and freedom. Her pseudonym serves as a catalyst to tell and embrace her Roma origins, linking her individual experience to the stories shared by members of the Roma community in Milan. Delving into the richness of their spiritual and material traditions, Rigová uses the stories evoked by the exchanges to develop narratives and cultivate a self-determined imaginary of Europe’s largest ethnic minority.

In a setting as immersive as a comfortable movie theatre, after more than 25 years, the latest film by renowned Armenian director Artavazd Pelechian, Nature (2020), hypnotises the visitors who are first drawn in by the sounds of classical music and then sucked into a sequence of enthralling images that, for about an hour, show the great complexity of the planet, with the magnificence of the landscapes and the moving vital energy and at the same time destructive power of nature.

After the entrance to the Palazzo dell’Arte, right before the central atrium, there is a portal, a kind of star gate, curated by the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and made of screens showing a video installation introducing the themes of the exhibition and talking about our planet as a great place of the ever-spreading unconscious. The philosopher asks us to think about these themes by reversing the point of view, so to think about the planet that lives in us. The sound design and the video installation was created by Dotdotdot, while the illustrations and the animation was made by propp.

Coccia is also the curator of the two catalogues of exhibition, which aim to be a further series of analogue and anthological rooms. One is a small handbook in which theoretical essays by young international experts in various disciplines, from politics to science, economics and statistics, investigating contemporary phenomena, are collected. The second illustrated volume is made up of imaginary tarot cards that guide us in discovering the mysteries of the exhibition.