There are many projects at the 17th International Architecture Biennale that, looking towards a post-Anthropocene future, seek to consider the reciprocal and fragile relationship between different species. They do it through various approaches: adaptation, coexistence, collaboration, mimesis. The message is fairly clear: if we want to get out of the age of man, the one in which human beings have dominated, conditioned and destroyed the Earth’s ecosystem, if we want to aim for a peaceful and synergistic coexistence between species, it is desirable to broaden our horizons. Looking at the projects on display within the thick walls of the Arsenale – in the exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis and especially in the Stations developed by researchers from universities all over the world – but also in some of the national pavilions in the Giardini, it is clear that the role of the designer in this process is anything but secondary.
Will architecture be multispecies in the future?
At this year’s Biennale, more than one project reconsiders the coexistence of different species on our planet. In doing so, a new way of approaching and narrating design emerges, under the banner of collaboration and disciplinary contamination.
Among Diverse Beings (Arsenale). Photo Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of Biennale di Venezia
Photo Riccardo de Vecchi
Among Diverse Beings (Arsenale). Photo Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Among Diverse Beings (Arsenale). Photo Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
As Emerging Communities (Arsenale). Photo Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
As Emerging Communities (Arsenale). Photo Andrea Avuzzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Across Borders Central Pavilion (Giardini). Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Across Borders Padiglione Centrale (Giardini). Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Central Pavilion (Giardini). Photo Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Giardini. Photo Giulia Di Lenarda
Giardini. Photo Francesco Galli. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
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- Elena Sommariva
- 09 June 2021
- Venice
- 17. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura
If multidisciplinary collaboration appears to be increasingly widespread, an almost essential element of the game, it is not surprising that the architect works alongside anthropologists, ethnologists, biologists, geographers and scientists. And while it is true that there are still those who continue, in a more classic way, to propose elegant models of buildings in refined pastel shades (see the Belgian pavilion), this Biennale consolidates a wider definition of the architect’s profession. He represents one of the many participants in a broader debate, in an experiment of increasingly global, continuous and open collaboration, maybe also accelerated by this year of pandemic. In short, we need the vision that has always been the hallmark of architects to pull the strings of this new approach, but also the contribution of many other experts in many different fields.
As anthropologist Anna Lowenthaup Tsing – author of the classic of ecology The Mushroom at the End of the World – writes: “Collaboration means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations”. In Venice, original forms of writing, design, analysis and research emerge from this contamination: Studio Ossidiana’s birdcages, the vegetable atlas of a barrio in Caracas (Enlace Arquitectura), the mushrooms collected on the Arsenale’s walls and examined in the lab in Athens (Thomas Doxiadis), the dragonflies-barometer of monsoon climate and climate change (Lindsay Bremner). As “the necessary multispecies dynamic diversity of the forest” (Tsing again), a choral narrative emerges, made up of different voices, but in dialogue with each other, united in addressing current issues: social, urban, spatial and political. Some of them try to answer the question How will we live together? launched by Hashim Sarkis: the American David Benjamin investigates bio-receptive materials, while Studio Libertiny designs structures inspired by bees. However, most of the times the research and projects raise further issues or open up a more complex debate, such as the Israeli pavilion, transformed into a cold morgue with extinct animals from what was once a land of plenty, or the border ecology along the Gaza Strip (Malkit Shoshan).
In doing so, and in the same vein of Alejandro Aravena’s Reporting from the front, the Biennale is fulfilling its task of catalysing stimuli from around the world, awakening the imagination and offering a platform for conversation that starts with architecture and embraces all the knowledge it needs to redesign the world.
Combining historical research and new typologies, Studio Ossidiana's investigation focuses on objects that facilitate the encounter with birds. The installation aims to rethink the archetype of the cage as a physical language and not as an enclosure, which from a form of isolation becomes an object of mediation.
External installation, Giardino delle Vergini, Arsenale
“Alive: A New Spatial Contract for Multispecies Architecture” investigates an architecture capable of fostering different microbial communities, essential for the maintenance of an ecosystem, and opens a new direction for probiotic buildings and multispecies architecture. A new porous, organic material provides different microclimates for different types of microbes.
Beehive Architecture consists of several 1:10 scale models of pavilions generated and produced by honeybees from natural beeswax, used as a structural material. The bees perform multiple and highly complex architectural calculations after assessing the constraints of the local climate, the size of the hive and the richness of the surrounding flora.
This research highlights the rich spatial and cultural dynamics of a barrio in Caracas, Venezuela: a network of green spaces covering 1.75 hectares - lichens, bushes and ivy growing wild in the cracks of pavements and on walls - but also vegetable gardens with plants grown for cooking, curing diseases and keeping insects away. A dictionary, a model and a book bring together stories and knowledge about the nature of the open spaces of the barrio. Recognition of life in the gardens is a fundamental prerequisite for integration with the rest of the city.
This project presents mushroom spores collected on the walls of the Arsenale which, after having been cultivated in the mycology department of the University of Athens, return to Venice as a "mushroom garden", inviting reflection on the complexity, beauty, invisibility and ubiquity of mushrooms, creators and facilitators of life, as resistant as rock.
This immersive installation redefines ideas of boundary, scale and action. The elaboration is based on the monsoon, a global weather system, and uses climate data, fieldwork and immersive media to show how climate change and human activity are increasing the unpredictability of the monsoon. The region studied is not defined by human boundaries, but by the flight of a species of dragonfly, Pantala flavescens, which follows the monsoon from East Africa to South-East Asia.
FAST's research traces the transformation of a small farm in Kutzazh, an agricultural village between Gaza and Israel. The installation tells 10 stories of daily life on the farm and links banal objects (such as watermelons, sardines, sand) to bureaucratic protocols and restrictions imposed by Israel and continuous violence, to which the inhabitants respond with collective actions of survival, resistance, mutual aid and solidarity.
The group exhibition curated by Caroline A. Jones, Hadeel Ibrahim, Kumi Naidoo, Mariana Mazzuccato, Mary Robinson, Olafur Eliasson, Paola Antonelli and Sebastian Behmann invites an inclusive future that extends to all the inhabitants of the planet: not only human beings, but also animals and plants, air, water, trees and soil. And it asks what the position of space professionals might be to these voices in a vision for a shared future.
The exhibition curated by Dan Hasson, Iddo Ginat, Rachel Gottesman, Yonatan Cohen and Tamar Novick examines the relationship between humans, animals and the environment in the Israeli context. The protagonists are animals and a land, Palestine, transformed by human intervention with irreparable damage to the local fauna and flora
The study of animal behaviour is the basis of Patrick Berger's project, a pavilion made of steel, wood and tree branches