The Laboratory of the Future, Review of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, titled The Laboratory of the Future, was open to the public from Saturday May 20 to Sunday November 26, 2023 at the Giardini and the Arsenale, and at Forte Marghera; it will be curated by Lesley Lokko and organised by La Biennale di Venezia. The pre-opening was take place on May 18 and 19, the awards ceremony and inauguration was held on Saturday 20 May 2023.

In current years, architecture has become set up as the field that more than another can and need to provide answers to the desires of humanity. Almost on a par with medical studies within the area of medication, structure is asked to provide immediately solutions to urgent imperatives for the survival of the earth and the genera that inhabit it. This turned into unequivocally showed via the years of Covid.

La Biennale di Venezia, dedicating over six months to the finest International Architecture Exhibition within the international (the 18th this 12 months), will become a centre for global statement managing the issues of the prevailing with a watch to the future. Not coincidentally, the curator Lesley Lokko has titled her edition The Laboratory of the Future.

Until recently the Exhibition become skilled as a representation of the brand new, of beauty and of technological improvement inside the technological know-how of creation. Today the expectancies and duties attributed to people who paintings in the subject of architecture are extremely excessive, making the architectural career increasingly more complex and targeting exceptionally concrete themes that subject the truth around us, despite the fact that that doesn’t suggest forswearing aesthetic research.

This can be why the curator likes to define the members as practitioners, due to the fact she unearths the term ‘architect’ to be reductive. This may well be why the curator likes to define the participants as practitioners, because she finds the term ‘architect’ to be reductive. And the word practitioners immediately suggests the idea of a necessary and tangible action, without preferring tried-and-true or aesthetic canons.

The most recent Architecture Biennales have made awareness of the world’s most urgent themes their centre of gravity: and so Lesley Lokko’s edition comes enriched with a new and original College programme (as all the other arts of La Biennale have done before). This is an important step: the Architecture College will not be a training ground in which young women and men, future graduates or professionals at the onset of their career exhibit projects or architectural works, it will be a veritable campus, which under the responsibility of the curator and the tutors she has chosen will help the participants and all of us to understand the duties of contemporary architecture and especially how to transmit them.

Exhibition

The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition in six parts. It includes 89 Participants, over half of whom was from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is 50/50, and the average age of all Participants is 43, dropping to 37 in the Curator’s Special Projects, where the youngest is 24. 46% of participants count education as a form of practice, and, for the first time ever, nearly half of Participants are from sole or individual practices of five people or less. Across all the parts of The Laboratory of the Future, over 70% of exhibits are by practices run by an individual or a very small team.

Central to all the projects is the primacy and potency of one tool: the imagination. It is impossible to build a better world if one cannot first imagine it. The Laboratory of the Future begins in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, where 16 practices who represent a distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered. It moves to the Arsenale complex, where participants in the Dangerous Liaisons section – also represented in Forte Marghera in Mestre – rub shoulders with the Curator’s Special Projects, for the first time a category that is as large as the others.

Threaded through and amongst the works in both venues are young African and Diasporan practitioners, our Guests from the Future, whose work engages directly with the twin themes of this exhibition, decolonisation and decarbonisation, providing a snapshot, a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world. The event had deliberately chosen to frame participants as ‘practitioners’ – the Curator stated – and not ‘architects’ and/or ‘urbanists’, ‘designers’, ‘landscape architects’, ‘engineers’ or ‘academics’ because it is our contention that the rich, complex conditions of both Africa and a rapidly hybridising world call for a different and broader understanding of the term ‘architect’.

A laboratory of the future must necessarily begin from a specific starting point, from one or more hypotheses seeking confirmation. The Biennale starts with the talk about Africa’s historical, economic, climate and political criticalities and to let us all know “that much of what is happening to the rest of the world has already happened to us. Let’s work together to understand where we have gone wrong so far and how we must face the future”. This is a starting point that seeks to heed those segments of humanity that have been left out of the debate, and opens to a multiplicity of voices that have been silenced for so long by the one that considered itself to be rightfully dominant in a vital and unavoidable contest.

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition was the first to experiment in the field a path towards achieving carbon neutrality, to the point that the Exhibition itself is structured along the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation. La Biennale di Venezia’s true task as an institution, and not only for Architecture. We must start here to seize the opportunity that will allow us to raise the bar in the way we approach all the other disciplines as well.

Since the International Film Festival in 2021, La Biennale di Venezia has been committed to this crucial objective, and last year already obtained the certification of carbon neutrality. We are perhaps the first major international Cultural Institution to achieve this result, thanks to a meticulous collection of data on the cause of the CO2 emissions generated by all our events and our adoption of subsequent measures.

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia closed with a total of 285,000 tickets sold, in addition to the 14,150 visitors who attended the preview. This makes it the second most highly attended Biennale Architettura in its history, conceived by the Curator Lesley Lokko to be the first Architecture Exhibition to focus the spotlight on Africa and its diaspora, on the culture that the Curator defined as the “fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe”, on the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation.

Young people and students accounted for 38% of total visitors. Visitors organized in groups who came to see the Exhibition represented 23% of the overall public and approximately 76% were groups from schools and/or universities. This figure denotes an Exhibition compellingly centred on the circulation of ideas and the transmission of knowledge, which amplified the phenomenon of collective visits by students from schools and universities, with a record attendance that tripled the number of visiting groups compared with the previous edition.

There were 2,500 accredited journalists in the days of the preview alone, representing the Italian and international press, from news agencies, televisions, radio, newspapers, periodicals, online news sites, plus other journalists who registered as press during the opening of the Exhibition.

Curators

“A laboratory of the future must necessarily begin from a specific starting point, from one or more hypotheses seeking confirmation – Roberto Cicutto, President of La Biennale di Venezia, stated. Lokko starts with her continent of origin, Africa, to talk about its historical, economic, climate and political criticalities and to let us all know «that much of what is happening to the rest of the world has already happened to us. Let’s work together to understand where we have gone wrong so far and how we must face the future».

This is a starting point that seeks to heed those segments of humanity that have been left out of the debate and opens to a multiplicity of voices that have been silenced for so long by the one that considered itself to be rightfully dominant in a vital and unavoidable contest.”

What does it mean to be ‘an agent of change’? The question has shadowed the gestation period of The Laboratory of the Future, acting as both counterfoil and lifeforce to the exhibition as it has unfolded in the mind’s eye, where it now hovers, almost at the moment of its birth. Over the past nine months, in hundreds of conversations, text messages, Zoom calls and meetings, the question of whether exhibitions of this scale — both in terms of carbon and cost — are justified, has surfaced time and again. In May last year, I referred to the exhibition several times as ‘a story’, a narrative unfolding in space.

An architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process. It borrows its structure and format from art exhibitions, but it differs from art in critical ways which often go unnoticed. Aside from the desire to tell a story, questions of production, resources and representation are central to the way an architecture exhibition comes into the world, yet are rarely acknowledged or discussed. From the outset, it was clear that the essential gesture of The Laboratory of the Future would be ‘change’. In those same discussions that sought to justify the exhibition’s existence were difficult and often emotional conversations to do with resources, rights, and risk.

For the first time ever, the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe. What do we wish to say? How will what we say change anything? And, perhaps most importantly of all, how will what we say interact with and infuse what ‘others’ say, so that the exhibition is not a single story, but multiple stories that reflect the vexing, gorgeous kaleidoscope of ideas, contexts, aspirations, and meanings that is every voice responding to the issues of its time?

It is often said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. Whilst it is true, what is missing in the statement is any acknowledgement of who the ‘we’ in question is. In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only. The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter. They are a unique moment in which to augment, change, or re-tell a story, whose audience and impact is felt far beyond the physical walls and spaces that hold it. What we say publicly matters because it is the ground on which change is built, in tiny increments as well as giant leaps.

“For the first time ever, the Biennale Architettura include the Biennale College Architettura, which run from 25 June to 22 July 2023. Fifteen renowned international tutors – Samia Henni, Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Thireshen Govender, Lorenzo Romito, Jacopo Galli, Philippa Tumubweinee, Ngillan Gbadebo Faal, Rahesh Ram, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Urtzi Grau, Samir Pandya, Alice Clancy, Sarah de Villiers and Manijeh Verghese – work with fifty students, early career practitioners and academics from around the world, selected by Lesley Lokko through an Open Call process over the four weeks of the teaching programme. At the conclusion of the Call on February 17th, 986 applications had been received.

Participations

At the heart of the Exhibition in the Central Pavilion are some of the most significant African and African Diaspora practitioners working today. Adjaye Associates, Cave_bureau, MASS Design Group, SOFTLAB@PSU, Kéré Architecture, Ibrahim Mahama, Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, atelier masōmī, Olalekan Jeyifous, Studio Sean Canty, Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi, Thandi Loewenson, Theaster Gates Studio, Urban American City (Toni Griffin), Hood Design Studio and Basis all represent a distilled snapshot of the myriad roles, models and fields in which they all work, teach and practice. Those gathered here represent a fraction of the exploding community of African and African Diaspora practitioners who are redefining the term ‘practice’ in ways that could not have been imagined a decade ago.

To explore the idea of an expanding definition of architecture further, in the next section, Dangerous Liaisons, which unfolds in the Arsenale complex, the 37 practitioners chosen all work in hybrid ways, across disciplinary boundaries, across geographies, and across new forms of partnership and collaboration. There are single practitioners (Gloria Cabral, Liam Young, Suzanne Dhaliwal, Huda Tayob, Killing Architects); medium-sized architectural firms (MMA Design Studio, Kate Otten Architects) as well as two- or three-person firms who combine teaching and practice equally (Office 24-7 Architecture and Lemon Pebble Architects, Wolff Architects).

There are larger practices that focus on decarbonisation in novel ways (White Arkitekter, BDR bureau & carton123 architecten, Flores & Prats Architects, and Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation), as well as experimental practices (Gbolade Design Studio, Studio Barnes, Le laboratoire d’architecture) whose work seeks to expand our understanding of what it means to decolonise knowledge and production.

Work from every continent is represented here (RMA Architects, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, ZAO/standardarchitecture, Grandeza Studio, Ursula Biemann, Gloria Cabral, Paulo Tavares, Studio Barnes, orizzontale, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Studio of Serge Attukwei Clottey, Twenty Nine Studio, Low Design Office, AMAA Collaborative Architecture, DAAR – Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, David Wengrow and Eyal Weizman with Forensic Architecture and Nebelivka project) and from disciplines such as film, investigative journalism, adaptive reuse, land reclamation, grass roots community-based practice.

For the first time ever in the Biennale Architettura, the Curator’s Special Projects and Special Participants are a large category, out of competition. They are designated ‘special’ because of the close relationship with the Curator and her Curator’s Assistants, working together to produce work in specific categories chosen by the Curator to complement the Exhibition. Three of these categories, Mnemonic; Food, Agriculture and Climate Change; and Geography and Gender look specifically at the complex relationship between memory and architecture (Adjaye Associates with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Craig McClenaghan Architecture, Looty, and Studio & and Höweler + Yoon); between climate change, land practices and food production (Margarida Waco, Gloria Pavita, BothAnd Group) and between gender, architecture and performance (Ines Weizman, J. Yolande Daniels, Gugulethu Sibonelelo Mthembu, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, Clare Loveday and Mareli Stolp).

An additional category, Guests from the Future, features 22 emerging practitioners of colour whose work is threaded throughout the Arsenale complex and the Central Pavilion, providing a glimpse into who the architect of the future is likely to be, and where their interests, concerns and ambitions may lie. Black Females in Architecture, Dele Adeyemo, Cartografia Negra, Ibiye Camp, Courage Dzidula Kpodo with Postbox Ghana, Elementerre with Nzinga Biegueng-Mboup and Chérif Tall, Folasade Okunribido, Lauren-Loïs, Miriam Hillawi Abraham, Arinjoy Sen, Faber Futures, Tanoa Sasraku, Riff Studio, Anusha Alamgir, Guada Labs, Banga Collective, New South, Aziza Chaouni Projects, Blac Spac, MOE+ Art Architecture, Juergen Strohmayer and Glenn DeRoché have been selected for their ground-breaking work at all scales, in multiple contexts, from the ‘real’ to the imaginary and in between. The Curator’s Special Projects are additionally supported by Ford Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Force Majeure
16 practices that represent a distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. An outdoor installation is also exhibited at the Arsenale.

Dangerous Liaisons
The Laboratory of the Future continues in the Arsenale complex featuring the participants in the Dangerous Liaisons section. Two outdoor installations are also exhibited at the Arsenale and at Forte Marghera – Mestre.

Food, Agriculture & Climate Change
The first section of the Special Projects, made in collaboration with the Curator, deepens the relationship between climate change, land practices and food production. It includes three projects exhibited in the Arsenale – Artiglierie.

Gender & Geography
The second section of the Special Projects is also providing a glimpse of future practices. This section is about the relationship between gender, architecture and performance. It includes four projects exhibited at the Arsenale – Artiglierie.

Mnemonic
The third section of the Special Projects, made in collaboration with the Curator, is focused on the relationship between memory and architecture. It includes four projects exhibited at the Arsenale – Artiglierie.

Guests From The Future
The fourth section of the Special Projects is the largest one and presents 14 projects exhibited at the Arsenale – Artiglierie alongside 8 projects at the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, made by emerging practitioners.

Special Participations

These three Special Participations are located at the Arsenale: filmmaker Amos Gitaï; architecture’s first poet laureate Rhael ‘LionHeart’ Cape, Hon FRIBA and photographer James Morris.

Amos Gitaï – Home, Ruins, Memory, Future
Amos Gitaï’s multimedia installation represents different ethnicities, languages, musical traditions, and generations, brought together to reveal complex memories of the past and the possibility of envisioning a peaceful future coexistence. The installations tell the story of a house in West Jerusalem, spanning a quarter of a century, sharing the stories of its successive occupants. The stories woven into this installation through projection come from a trilogy by Amos Gitaï that has been documented over twenty-five years. New research is premiered, including photographs of the house in 2023 showing how it has evolved. Through this installation, Amos Gitaï returns to the site of the house, allowing the exhibit to not just tell the history of House but also to become the site of an artistic dialogue between past and present experiences that imagine a new future for the region.

James Morris – Butabu
This series of photographs by James Morris, threaded through the Corderie, made during 1999 and 2000, explores the culture of adobe architecture from the Sahal region of West Africa, and specifically Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. The word ‘Sahel’ in Arabic means coast or shore. The sea lapping this shore is the Sahara Desert. The ‘port’ cities of Segou, Mopti, Djenne, Gao, Agadez, and Timbuktu were at times trading and political centres of great wealth and power; Ancient Ghana, the Mali and Bamana Empires, the Songhay, Fulani and Tukulor Dynasties. Though part of long traditions and ancient cultures, these are at the same time contemporary structures, serving a current purpose. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. The maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life; there is an ongoing, active participation in their continued existence.

Rhael ‘Lionheart’ Cape – Those With Walls for Windows
Carnival, as described by Michail Bachtin, is where “life is subject only to its own laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.” Those With Walls for Windows is a meditation and exploration into the “laws of freedom.” Through poetry, an art form with its own relationship to freedom and control, the work investigates the space of diaspora, a place where forgetting, remembering, and reimagining act as architectural devices in the urban planning of the diasporic psyche. For LionHeart, carnival is a space of recovery and emancipation; a place of cultural and psychological real estate; a space to dwell, rest, repair, grow, and evolve. Those With Walls for Windows is an aural–visual– textual–oral tapestry that uses performance, rhythm and erasure as structuring devices, a ‘call to arms’ for sonic way finders who seek Carnival’s joyous, redemptive liberation.

National Participations

64 National Participations organize their exhibitions in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini (27), at the Arsenale (22) and in the city centre of Venice (14). Niger participates for the first time at the Biennale Architettura; Panama participates for the first time with its own pavilion and has already participated in previous editions as part of the I.I.L.A. (Italo-Latin American International Organization).

The Holy See returns to the Biennale Architettura, participating with its own Pavilion on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore (it participated in the Biennale Architettura for the first time in 2018).

The Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale, sponsored and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, is curated by the Fosbury Architecture collective, consisting of Giacomo Ardesio, Alessandro Bonizzoni, Nicola Campri, Veronica Caprino, Claudia Mainardi. The title of the exhibition is SPAZIALE: Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else.

Albania – Untimely Meditations or: How We Learn to Live in Synthesized Realities
Untimely Meditations or: How We Learn to Live in Synthesized Realities uses architecture as a speculative tool to explore contingent situations. It materializes in the form of two narratives taking place in two civic spaces in Tirana and the Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2023. The Pavilion acts both as a container to display the possible narratives and as content itself. The exhibition displays the precarious distinction between fiction and reality, questions the role of the architect in post-contemporary society, amplifies the human experience via technology, and most importantly, allows the homo ludens in us to take over. The exhibited work serves as an investigative tool and can be interpreted in three different forms: — First, it proposes a new typology in the city. — Second, it accentuates the architectural virtual double. — And third, it manifests an anthropogenic landscape.

Argentina – El Futuro del Agua
Within The Laboratory of the Future in Venice, the Argentine Pavilion studies the Future of Water. The exhibition presents the many facets and scales of water across the country. The exhibition presents the multiple facets and scales of water across the country. Upon entering the Pavilion, we realise that a blue fluid has flooded the lower part of the pavilion, while the upper part remains intact. This ‘fluid’ is not a literal liquid, but a single colour that covers it all up to a perfectly horizontal level of 70 cm in height. Above this intangible liquid, a series of white planes of light are loosely arranged and contain the exhibition. The curatorial criteria are structured through a water glossary that includes all water scales. Images are arranged that resonate with each glossary term on the light planes. New relationships emerge between water, territory, cities, and a selection of recent Argentine architecture.

Australia – unsettling Queenstown
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.

Austria – Partecipazione / Beteiligung
‘Partecipazione’ was one of the core demands of the 1970s for an ‘open, democratic’ Biennale, as was working on site in the context of the city. Partecipazione / Beteiligung transfers these two approaches to the contemporary reality of Venice’s old city. Vienna-based architecture collective AKT and architect Hermann Czech are shifting the separation between the Biennale and the city into the Austrian pavilion. Part of the building was connected to the adjacent district and freely accessible to the people of Venice. Should the opening to the city fail due to the resistance of the Biennale and/or the involved institutions, this failure wascome the content of the exhibition.

Bahrain – Sweating Assets
The exhibition explore the unique climatic conditions of extreme heat and humidity, along with current comfort requirements. Imagined as an exhibition of micro-environments, the research examine the neglected offerings of infrastructure. The exhibition crosses scales – from domestic to industrial – identifying the weaknesses of cooling systems in relation to a broader ecology. The work investigates historical, present, and potentially future water practices in Bahrain.

Belgium – In Vivo
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. We are proposing an alliance with mushrooms, which can constitute a highly available, sustainable, renewable material. The In Vivo Pavilion offer a time and a place for critical thinking, particularly because questions of responsibility, of taking other beings into account, and of justice was discussed in relation to living and building. But its strength was defined above all by concrete and inventive proposals for an enviable future of living.

Brazil – Terra [Earth]
Terra is a founding motif in the narratives of the formation of Brazil. Representations of national identity were historically structured by idealised and racialised views of the frontier and tropical nature that subalternised Indigenous and Black peoples. Terra is also a founding motif in the philosophies and imaginaries of the Indigenous and African Brazilian populations that form the majority of the local cultural matrix. But here terra appears in a different form, drawing ancestral and diasporic territories that refer to artistic and architectural geographies more deeply and beyond Brazil. They point to another sense of the earth, and to other imaginaries of Brazil, and of the planet, both as past and future, as heritage and project, as reparation and design.

Bulgaria – Education is the movement from darkness to light
Bulgaria is experiencing the fastest population decline on a global scale. As the population dwindles there are fewer and fewer children to fill the schools. Every year dozens of schools close their doors. Some of the buildings have been renovated and are back in use as housing or as hotels. Most of them are abandoned. The exhibition focuses on the traces of existence, depopulation, and the abandoned schools of Bulgaria. It is an exploration of a different future, marked by urban decline and rural flight. Based on the work of photographer Alexander Dumarey, the pavilion becomes a platform for debate and speculation for the future. How do we cope with shrinking regions? How to address preservation? How to adapt to change?

Canada – Not for Sale!!
c\a\n\a\d\a is in the midst of a severe housing crisis. Its symptoms include widespread unaffordability, under-housing, precarious housing, and homelessness. Not for Sale!! is a campaign of ten demands, each with an associated activist architectural project, to end housing alienation. The Canada Pavilion is the campaign headquarters, connecting architects, advocates, and activists within the growing movement for housing accessibility and affordability. Architects Against Housing Alienation is mobilising Canadians to demand socially, ecologically, and creatively empowering housing for all.

Chile – Moving Ecologies
In the Quinta Normal Park in Santiago de Chile, architecture and science allowed us to imagine the future of a country that was entering modernity in the nineteenth century. Today, the challenges are not about progress and production, but rather about ecological reparation and restoration of cities and landscapes. A future that was both designed and planted, built and cultivated, made of architecture and seeds, cities and ecologies. From sciences and landscape architecture, from species that travel in moving ecologies, repairing the damage we have caused, working from the ruins of a capitalist lifestyle. The objective of this exhibition is to imagine this inventory: the collection and cabinet of species that prepare for those worlds to come.

China – Renewal: a symbiotic narrative
Over the past forty years, Chinese architects have undertaken a diverse range of experiments in urban and rural renewal, exploring a symbiotic world where different people can better communicate, share, and co-exist, where cities and people are interdependent, and where more space is provided for nature. The theme of the exhibition tells of Chinese experiments in shaping liveability in high-density environments. Through this unique Chinese narrative, we seek free discourses on the recent and emerging transformations in the built environment: where are we going and what is at stake? Do conclusions lie in the architectural enigma of density? the future city feature modernist towers, traditional courtyards, or a symbiosis of the two? Or other possibilities be brought about through VR technology, clean and renewable energy? Visitors are encouraged to come up with their own answers by ‘viewing,’ ‘unfolding,’ ‘contemplating,’ and ‘strolling’ in the China Pavilion.

Croatia – Same as it Ever Was
The Croatian Pavilion is an ode to ambiances of coexistence of the wild and the domesticated, natural and fabricated, inanimate and living. It originates from the Lonja wetlands, where dynamic environments have evolved through centuries of symbiosis between a constantly changing landscape and the communities that have adapted to it. The wetlands are taken as a laboratory sample, a lesson for the future, directing towards reciprocities between what comes from nature and culture. The Pavilion includes a spatial installation which is a part of the bestiarium of built and unbuilt observatories in the wetlands, while the pavilion’s network includes workshops and discussions that test themes and future action in the education of architects.

Cyprus – From Khirokitia to Mars
How can we take on the first community of the Cyprus Aceramic Neolithic Khirokitia and use it as a stepping stone to address issues of social sustainability within a humanistic and cultural context, set on a platform towards a newly built environment that was created on Mars? Operating under the premise that social sustainability can be attained through means of collaboration and common awareness, the exhibition aims to activate spaces in a three-dimensional and temporal manner in order to induce values of social and egalitarian participation. Khirokitians were curious and persistent, as we are today about exploring planet Mars. Our proposal is taking you through matter, time, and space.

Czech – The Office for a Non-Precarious Future
Architects are educated in the spirit of the profession’s calling, the impetus to transform the world through a single act of a creative genius. But how can we change the world if we can’t provide decent working conditions for ourselves? The Office for a Non-Precarious Future is an exhibition project that metaphorically takes on the form of a Factory and a Laboratory. The Factory, as a dystopian environment, reflects the negative status quo of the profession. The Laboratory provides critical analysis, tools, and bestpractice examples. As a work-in-progress space for exhibition visitors and ten residents, it offers cooperation, conversation, and speculation on the non-precarious future of the architecture profession.

Denmark – Coastal Imaginaries
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-thanhuman 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.

Egypt – NiLab – The Nile as Laboratory
NiLab is a laboratory for understanding and developing ideas and projects for the Nile River, a space for exploring the water theme. Ain-Shams University, Cairo, and Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, curators of the Pavilion, along with twenty-four other international universities, work for the construction of the laboratory, through projects that focus on six landscape sections – Nature, Agriculture, Urbe, Infrastructure, Industry, Archaeology – in an international confrontation between Egypt, Africa, and the world. The Pavilion is conceived as a space–time dimension in which the visitor experiences the landscape of the Nile as an inclusive part along with water, nature, and history.

Estonia – Home Stage
Home Stage, the Estonian exhibition at the Biennale Architettura 2023, explores the contradiction between the use and the exchange value of living space. A succession of Estonian performers spend a month, individually, in a Venetian rental apartment that wbecomes both a home and a stage. Everyday life, lived and performed in a duet with the apartment through a loop of scripted and nonscripted activities, rolls out in front of, and among, visitors to the Biennale Architettura. Come over!

Finland – Huussi – Imagining the Future History of Sanitation
The exhibition critically reassesses sanitation infrastructure in the context of global freshwater shortages which have become a reality in Europe. Sanitation infrastructure is also connected with the possibility of restoring the nutrient cycle in food production. As a low-density solution, the exhibition presents a contemporary dry toilet, the huussi, which is still a typical sanitation solution in remote locations and summer cottages in Finland. By questioning the so far indisputable position of the current water-based sanitation system, the exhibition aims to inspire architects to start looking for alternative solutions, also at the urban scale, to better serve the world we inhabit today.

France – Ball Theater
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.

Georgia – January, February, March
January, February, March symbolically focuses on water reservoirs, their creation, and their impact in the age of rapid political transformations and climate change. How temporary is our footprint on the environment? When we mention the flows of energy, migration, time, and the outflow of the landscape itself, what flows are we speaking of? Can we consider water as a determinant of order? To what extent can the spatial–political development of humans bring changes in nature and society and vice versa? What physical and conceptual forms fade or remain with such transformations? Are the natural creations – their memory, history, and artifacts – signifying their past life and, above all, considering both the global and local contexts, what is their future?

Germany – Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet
Our 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 wascome 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.

Grand Duchy Of Luxembourg – Down to Earth
Down to Earth critically unpacks the project of space mining through the perspective of resources. With the space of the pavilion itself turned into a lunar laboratory, a stage where the performance of extraction takes place, the exhibition focuses on the unveiling of the backstages of the space mining project, offering another way of seeing the Moon that goes beyond the current optics of the Anthropocene.

Great Britain – Dancing Before the Moon
Our 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 wascome 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.

Greece – Bodies of water
The Hellenic territory has been geophysically shaped, since the tenth century at least, to a large extent by a series of catastrophic or creative anthropogenic interventions, such as extensive overgrazing and desertification. After the establishment of the modern Greek state, and with great intensity after 1950, water reservoirs as well as drainage, irrigation, water supply, and hydroelectric projects constitute a support system for agricultural production and all kinds of human activity. It is a transformation of the land where a new hydro-geological map of the country is invented, constructed, and operationalised. Bodies of Water address this evolving geological construct, investigating and presenting the problematic presence of these bodies and their technical works as a laboratory of the future.

Grenada – Walking on Water
By the very history of this small Caribbean island, the activity of building boats has its roots in the confluence of knowledge and memories from different origins, from the indigenous people, the Kalinago, from Scotland, from Africa, from the creolisation of many, handed down and improved in collaborative work units such as workshops. Imagining, designing, building, and launching a boat is also ‘architectural’ work, understood as the ability to transform the visions, plans, and examples born from the knowledge and skills of previous generations into new objects, solid and real, capable of facing the depths and uncertainties of the sea. A ‘Crew’ present together this lively performance in installation and short videos.

Holy See – Social Friendship: meeting in the garden
“Taking care of the planet as we do of ourselves and to celebrate the culture of encounter.” Pope Francis’s encyclicals Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti are the inspirations for the exhibition, curated by Roberto Cremascoli, which guides visitors through the gallery and garden of the Benedictine Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore. Social Friendship: Meeting in the Garden is the result of a collaboration between the Dicastery for Culture and Education and Benedicti Claustra Onlus. It begins with O Encontro, an installation designed by Álvaro Siza. This area was transformed into a vegetable garden and gathering place by Studio Albori, who have also designed a lemon house, a chicken coop, a seed store, and the parasols.

Hungary – Reziduum – The Frequency of Architecture
The focal point of our project is the new Museum of Ethnography in Budapest designed by Marcel Ferencz (Napur Architect). It was completed in 2022 as a part of the Liget Budapest Project, one of Europe’s grandest urban development programmes abundant with cultural content. The architect embellished the façade with contemporary transcriptions of the ornamental patterns used by the various traditions and cultures displayed and preserved in the museum. The exhibition presents the new building, its ornamentation, and the museum’s collection and contemplates the culmination of these elements observing the overall artistic relationship that connects this piece of architecture with music and light.

Ireland – In Search of Hy-Brasil
The time of endless expansion, extraction, and exploitation has passed. In order to escape the gravity of the familiar, these now redundant modalities of living, we must decolonise our minds and configure new ways of conceptualising and inhabiting the world. Ireland’s national pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2023 puts our islands’ diverse communities, culture, and experiences right at the centre of the discourse surrounding our shared future. To the forefront of our imagination. The installation offers an immersive experience that shifts between the local and the territorial, the micro and the macro, to make explicit the implicit intelligence of these most remarkable of places.

Israel – Cloud-to-Ground
The exhibition explores the material nature of the technological cloud and modern communication networks via the unique case of Israel and its environs. By surveying the rapid changes endured by these information infrastructures, the exhibition highlights the economic and geopolitical processes currently underway in Israel and the region, and the role of architecture in these. Focusing on the shift from sound to light, it extends throughout the pavilion as an immersive installation, while examining the transition from analogue to digital communication and from accessible buildings in urban centres to sealed structures in peripheral locations: the hardware of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Italy – Spaziale: Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else
Like any ephemeral event of this magnitude, an exhibition is by its very nature a process that dissipates a great deal of energy, raw materials, and economic resources. While this is clearly necessary to celebrate moments of confrontation and contamination, it is also essential to drastically rethink its horizons. With the aim of transforming consumption into investment and the end into a beginning, SPAZIALE foresees a three-pronged approach: SPAZIALE presenta, an observatory on nine sitespecific actions staged throughout Italy and promoted thanks to the support of the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture; SPAZIALE. Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else, which as part of the Padiglione Italia, embodies the formal and theoretical synthesis of processes triggered elsewhere; and, finally, the SPAZIALE platform itself, to be launched after the inauguration as an incremental workshop over an expanded timespan.

Japan – Architecture, a place to be loved — when architecture is seen as a living creature
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.

Republic Of Korea – 2086: Together How?
2086: Together How? is an exhibition imagining a future ecocultural revolution through critical assessment of our anthropocentric legacy. Central to it is a game that invites audiences to make choices regarding environmental crises. Their choices are visualised on a scoreboard and measured to show the players’ control of our Faustian ideology of progress and materialism, which is leading us to extinction. It begins from research and design collaboration between architects and community leaders in three small communities in South Korea, a cross section of urbanisation, modernisation, and globalisation. The exhibition uses environmental crises to visualise a better ecoculture in our future.

Kosovo – rks² transcendent locality
Migration has played a significant role in Kosovo’s social development up to the present day. During the tense political situation from the late 1980s to the late 1990s hundreds of thousands of people sought refuge and protection abroad, where they often remained for decades. The perceived locality of this migration group is the starting point for a spatial–philosophical concept: transcendent locality, implying the process of crossing a boundary that separates two different spheres. Not being able to return to their homeland for an indefinite period represented a deep caesura in immigrants’ lives, leaving them in an intermediate state of suspension. Boundaries between the immanent being in the now and the transcendent being in the mind blur – the migrated individual is in a transcendent locality.

Kuwait – Rethinking Rethinking Kuwait
The walled city of Kuwait, once the home of numerous aspects of Kuwaiti civil life, was mostly eradicated to make way for modernisation. Large roads now cut through its history, subdividing the city fabric into fragmented parcels, with remnants of the past scattered in between. How can we rethink urban planning on the basic human need for transportation, walkability, and accessibility rather than capitalistoriented models of urban development? The interconnectivity of the city’s historic fabric is revisited through various scales of urban interventions, resulting in a new network of connectivity that forms multiple modes of transportation culminating on the human scale.

Latvia – T/C Latvija (TCL)
The connection between La Biennale (as a ‘supermarket’) and National Pavilions (as ‘products’) is an analogy which the Latvian Pavilion explores. Find everything for your desires, visions, and needs in TC Latvija’s idea shop, a space where all ideas meet and find place on the same shelf. Welcome to the infinite horizons of shopping shelves. It’s not the products that are important, it’s your decisions that matter. Overwhelming amounts of ideas may be draining, but what if decision making could be fun? The authors request that a part of this process be moved to the Arsenale, emphasising that La Biennale itself is the Laboratory of the Future.

Lithuania – Children’s Forest Pavilion
Forests are architectural and infrastructural spaces: environments of natural systems governed, exploited, and regulated by human interventions, technologies, industries, institutions, and agencies, but also places of depleting biodiversity. The installation is composed as a playscape and conceived to acknowledge the unique approaches of children to observe, draw conclusions, explain the forest, and demand agency in forming it. The Pavilion brings together works and findings developed in parallel to outdoor activities held with children. Environmental educators, activists, artists, architects, and foresters introduced forests as negotiated spaces where no single actor has a central stake.

Mexico – Infraestructura utópica: La cancha de básquetbol campesina / Utopian Infrastructure: The Campesino Basketball Court
The Mexican Pavilion is an immersive space based on a 1:1 scale fragment of the expanded model of the campesino basketball court, an infrastructure that has become repurposed as a space for poly- and pluri-valent processes of decolonisation in Mexico’s indigenous communities. Our case study on these basketball courts functions as a laboratory for investigation of the adaptations and transformations that have allowed these spaces to transcend their original purpose and to become instead focal points for the construction of political, social, and cultural processes. The campesino basketball court, repurposed, is much more than the deconstruction of a Western sporting facility: it is the foundational unit of construction upon which indigenous utopias build cultures of resistance.

Montenegro – Mirages of the Future (MNE)
The theme of the presentation of Montenegro at the Biennale Architettura 2023 is set on the wealth of natural resources, heritage, and people whose talent created artefacts of the past of permanent value. The intention is to create interactive atmosphere and experience that bring architecture and concepts back into the context of Heritage values and, as such, in the near future can open up the most valuable topics in the (re)shaping of the Landscape of the Future and, above all, open and establish a creative and free dialogue of the most gifted and the most responsible in the creation of New Harmonised Paradigms.

Netherlands – Plumbing the System
Architecture can be seen as an articulation of systems – economic, social, political – that shape the built environment and organise and regulate flows of people, activities, resources, and ecologies. Often based on extraction and exploitation, these systems seem so thoroughly entrenched as to appear immutable. But in order to move towards a more sustainable, regenerative, and just future, many of these systems need to be rethought. The Dutch Pavilion aims to show how alternatives might work on a macro scale while attempting to enact (and test) real changes on a micro level – offering a site where global thinking and local action can meet.

Niger – Archifusion
The project plan for the Nigerien pavilion is basically the mixing of different cultures: the African and the Western cultures which give rise to a cultural ‘laboratory’ where one serves the other by creating a different one, to which we have given the name of Archifusion (Fusion in Architecture). Archifusion develops the concept of collaboration in the broader sense of an extended ‘workshop/laboratory’, where the basic concept becomes collaboration based on an exchange of common experiences that generates knowledge for all parties involved in the project. This growth is central in an era such as ours in which knowledge, having become a ‘capital’ resource, is seen in the world as intellectual property and therefore exclusive rather than ‘inclusive’.

Nordic Countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland) – Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library
Girjegumpi is a spatialisation of conversations and research initiated by Joar Nango over two decades of practice at the intersection of architecture and art. As an itinerant, collective library, the project has evolved and expanded as it has travelled. Everywhere it stops, it involves numerous collaborations with architects, artists, and craftspeople. Central to the project is the archive that it contains and shares – from rare titles to contemporary books, the collection of more than five hundred editions embraces topics such as Sámi architecture and design, traditional and ancestral building knowledge, activism, and decoloniality.

North Macedonia – Stories of the Summer School of Architecture in the St. Joakim Osogovski Monastery 1992-2017
The Summer School of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, Saints Cyril and Methodius University, was open from 1992 to 2017 within the confines of the Saint Joakim Osogovski Monastery. The monastery is located at the foot of the Osogovo Mountains, divided in relation to the undulations of the terrain, forming a kind of node that is open to the flows of the surrounding area. The School has been operating during a time of significant geopolitical upheaval. Despite these disruptions, it has brought together individuals from various parts of the world, fostering collaboration, creation, and discussions on diverse concepts, methodologies, and approaches. This exhibition aims to provide a documentary basis to our memories and experiences, placed on a common table as objects, photographs, records, drawings – traces of the past for a potential future.

Panama – Panama: Stories from beneath the water
For over five hundred years, the isthmus of Panama, a narrow strip of land better known as ‘the land bridge between two oceans,’ proved itself as a region of geopolitical importance in global transportation. Often portrayed from a Western perspective as a faraway place of exotic beauty and luxuriant vegetation, this tropical nation became a landscape of experimentation to define modernity. Within these limits, an ‘othering’ narrative led to a demarcation of ‘zones of segregation’ alienating nature, Panamanians, and their cities. The pavilion challenges this ideology and analyses three different areas within the Panama Canal Zone, reflected in the three spaces of the exhibition venue.

Peru – Walkers in Amazonia
Walkers in Amazonia have been reconfiguring their territories by hand for at least ten thousand years. The maintenance of this networked knowledge and its care depended upon the collective cooperation between humans and non-humans. This has made it possible to regenerate the diversity and variations of tropical rainforests. Waman Wasi, through The Calendar Project, conserves and renews them. The installation allows the visitor to explore, through a dynamic audio-visual experience, the obverse and reverse of a reality at once near and far, articulated by the collective act of walking. Engaging with an Amazonia inhabited by people, with their own cultural history, enables us to shift our usual ways of seeing, understanding, communicating, and doing. It helps us to imagine an active future.

Philippines – Tripa de Gallina: Guts of Estuary
Estuaries, or the esteros, are the mouth of a river, where freshwater meets saltwater. However, the enormous sludge amassed by the people along Tripa de Gallina (Guts of the Rooster) impedes this conversation. The estuary remains silent. The people are stuck. The experience of the pandemic cries out that this persistent complication is reticular and necessitates a fleshing out. The exhibition offers a diagnosis of the water’s condition and a prognosis of the people’s future in a procedure of modular urban acupuncture. The pavilion inspects the estuary’s guts: a flawed ecology of humans, waters, and dregs. Consisting of bamboo structure, windows, and projections, it welcomes a future assemblage that is in good shape.

Poland – Datament
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.

Portugal – Fertile Futures
Fresh water scarcity and management is a global problem, evident in the Portuguese context. Focusing on seven distinct hydrogeographies, the project presents the outcomes of a commission made to young architects, in collaboration with specialists from other areas of knowledge, to develop models for a more sustainable, healthy, and equitable tomorrow, in non-hierarchical cooperation between disciplines, generations, and species. Based on the strategic complementarity between practice, theory, and pedagogy in architecture, Fertile Futures advocates the pertinence of architecture’s role in the design of a decarbonised, decolonised, and collaborative future, expanding its action through five Assemblies of Thought and an International Summer Seminar.

Romania – Now, Here, There
The Romanian Pavilion is a generator of ideas, bringing to the fore the creation journey of innovations or inventions made only as a result of interdisciplinary collaboration. Ideas and objects become the ingredients of a dialogue about the future in which the visitor is invited to take part. The visitor interactively explores four research areas: Lost Inventions, Lateral Pedagogies, Instant Garden e Co-Thinking Installation, as an activator of ideas, all representing a way of education through research, innovation, and social activation, seen as new solutions to respond to a people- and context-centred future.

San Marino – Ospite Ospitante
Time, political and historical circumstances, the thresholds of inclusion of different species, and the needs of the moment make the distinctive lines between host and guest porous. We are all guests on this earth and yet we are also all hosts. The San Marino Pavilion explores these dual roles in content and form; it is both a guest to the local community with which it coproduces, co-explores, and develops new relations, and a host to visitors wishing to experience the intimate and immersive sculptural works of Vittorio Corsini or co-create artefacts for local beings with students. The Pavilion questions the orientation, scope, practice, and materialisation of hospitality: past, present, and future.

Saudi Arabia – Irth ارث
For the Biennale Architettura 2023, the Saudi Pavilion examine the symbiotic relationship between material and immaterial. The cohesion of both informs perception and brings to the surface the narratives embedded within these architectural building blocks. Earth used in Saudi vernacular architecture is explored, alongside organic material experimentation upon which future-proofed legacies and practices can be built. The intent is to present the empirical as a window into the essentials. The archival attempt here aims to capture the anthropological and historic and provokes contemplation of how the past presents the answers to the conundrums of the future.

Serbia – In Reflections 6°27’48.81″N 3°14’49.20″E
The exhibition addresses reflections on the past and present of the architecture created through the politics of global non-alignment on the African continent. The trip to Lagos and the encounters with the architecture of the International Trade Fair in Lagos aim to re-evaluate and activate the processes associated with these spaces today. In a direct experience, the authors seek to establish spatial and temporal reflections and to create their own relationship, both personal and generational, with this architecture. The exhibition turns its attention to the architecture created through international cooperation, considering it as a potential and a resource for the future.

Singapore – When Is Enough, Enough? The Performance of Measurement
In building the city we love, how do we measure the unmeasurable? The Singapore pavilion foregrounds architects and researchers whose practices aim to elicit inclusion, connection, freedom, attachment, attraction, and agency in the city. In examining design processes that work for these six goals, we uncover challenges and contradictions, bring to light methods of addressing diverse preferences and the conundrums that arise, reveal tensions between extreme positions as well as envisage potential spectrums in between. What measures do we have to take to live by our values? How do we calibrate for different entities, environments, and dreams? When is enough enough?

Slovenia – +/- 1 °C: In Search of Well-Tempered Architecture
Ecology is addressed by architecture rather paradoxically. Architecture tends to address ecological issues exclusively through applied technology hidden inside walls. ‘Energy efficiency’ thus appears as an entirely separate component of a building. In the past, ecology generated and was inseparable from architecture itself, which means that buildings were ecological already in their conceptual design. We have sought out examples of vernacular buildings that address the issue of ecology as an intrinsic part of architectural design and divided them into categories according to their main energy principles. Vernacular architecture is thus understood as a living specimen of energy principles that can be used as the basis for a critical reinterpretation of contemporary architectural production.

South Africa – The Structure of a People
The South African Pavilion, titled The Structure of a People, revolves around the architectural representation of social structures – in historical and contemporary terms. The exhibition unfolds through three zones. The Past is the Laboratory of the Future traces links to the architectural representation of social structures as documented in pre-colonial southern African societies. The Council of Non- Human Beings contains contemporary drawings on the topic of animism in architectural practice. And Political Animals presents the organisational and curricular structures of South African architecture schools as architectural objects, as the result of an architecture competition.

Spain – Foodscapes
By eating, we digest territories. Foodscapes is a journey through the architectures that feed the world; from the domestic laboratories of our kitchens to the vast operational landscapes that nourish our cities. At a time when energy debates are more pertinent than ever, food remains in the background, yet the way we manufacture, distribute, and consume it shapes our world more radically than any other energy source. Through five films, an archive in the form of a recipe book, and an open research platform, the exhibition surveys the present landscape of our food systems and looks to the future to explore other possible models, capable of feeding the world without devouring the planet.

Switzerland – „Neighbours”
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.

Turkey – Ghost Stories: Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture
In order to reveal more hopeful proposals for the future, the exhibition aims to question the accepted perceptions of and approaches to buildings. Based on Ursula Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the exhibition draws strength from the radical changes the world of architecture has undergone in the last two decades and suggests listening to and understanding the stories of abandoned buildings, rather than focusing on more successful examples. The research included an open call, aimed at compiling recent documentation of unused buildings across Türkiye. Considering these buildings as “the laboratory of the future,” the exhibition introduces novel tools to transform existing structures based on collective dreams and discussions.

Ukraine – Before the Future
By telling stories, we get an opportunity to comprehend each other, and thus to share diverse visions of a changing future. Over four hundred days of living at war have shown us that stories cannot be told without defence. Wherever storytelling takes place, there is someone and something that allow the voice to be heard relatively safely. Under the roof or behind the rampart, we can gather and discuss the most urgent questions. Among these is the possibility of action for architects in a paradoxical situation before the future, in coexisting with the constant destruction of the past and present, with its spaces and interactions.

United Arab Emirates – Aridly Abundant
The exhibition works at the intersection between land-based knowledge and contemporary technology. It challenges perceptions of arid environments as spaces of scarcity and precariousness, focusing on the relationship between architecture and arid landscapes, and transforms the pavilion into an environment that exhibits the spatial, material, and tactical qualities of aridly abundant environments, creating a backdrop for architectural provocations suited for global contemporary and future arid contexts. The main question of Aridly Abundant is: What architectural possibilities can emerge when we reimagine arid landscapes as spaces of abundance?

United States of America – Everlasting Plastics
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.

Uruguay – En Ópera, Escenarios futuros de una joven Ley Forestal
Uruguay is going through an unprecedented change in its productive matrix. Since the approval of the Forest Law in 1987, the forested surface has grown more than thirty times and this expansion is expected to continue. The exhibition understands the Forest Law as an ecosystemic assembly under construction that dialogues with diverse spatialities and territorialities. It is an invitation to discuss and learn together about its implications in the decarbonisation and decolonisation processes and its ability to shape Uruguay as a laboratory for the future of wood. An avatar interpret the Law in a multi-author opera together with a series of visual pieces based on the spatialities of wood in Uruguay and musical irruptions by the new generation of Afro-Uruguayan artists.

Uzbekistan – Unbuild Together
Our response to the theme of the Biennale Architettura 2023, The Laboratory of the Future, can be read as an encounter of different horizons, allowing us to take a close look at the Uzbek architectural heritage, to delve into its past in order to find the necessary tools for the elaboration of tomorrow’s world, unbuilding modernity together by questioning the notion of archaism. Participation is above all collaborative, placing the human being at the centre of our approach. Through the exchanges between us and architectural students, craftspeople, and associated artists, a collective proposal emerge, creating a sensitive and poetic architecture, reflecting a truly contemporary and contextual practice.

Venezuela – Universidad Central de Venezuela, Patrimonio de la Humanidad en recuperación. Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas.
The Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000 and is considered by international critics as the masterpiece of the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. This architect applied the principles of modern architecture to the requirements of our country, adapting them to the richness of our climate and the social development needs of Venezuela at the time. We show, with comparative images, original plans, and current photos the values of its spaces and especially the modern utopia of the University City that resurfaces to serve as a guide to the future, in the hands of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, one of the masters of world architecture.

Venice Pavilion
The exhibition of the Venice Pavilion, located in the Giardini di Sant’Elena, is organized by the Municipality of Venice.

Carnival

The Laboratory of the Future programme is enriched by Carnival, a six-month-long cycle of events, lectures, panel discussions, films, and performances, that explore the themes of the Biennale Architettura 2023. “Conceived as a space of liberation rather than a spectacle or entertainment, Carnival offers a space for communication in which words, views, perspectives, and opinions are traded, heard, analysed, and remembered – Lokko said. Politicians, policymakers, poets, filmmakers, documentary makers, writers, activists, community organisers and public intellectuals share the stage with architects, academics, and students. This public event programme is increasingly a form of architectural practice that attempts to bridge the gulf between architects and the public.”

Carnival is supported by Rolex, Exclusive Partner and Official Timepiece of the Exhibition. The Exhibition programme is enriched by Carnival, a six-month-long cycle of events, lectures, panel discussions, films, and performances, that explore the themes of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, starting in May 2023 and culminating in November 2023, supported by Rolex: exclusive Partner and official timepiece of the Exhibition. Conceived as a space of liberation rather than a spectacle or entertainment, Carnival offers a space for communication in which words, views, perspectives, and opinions are traded, heard, analysed, and remembered. Politicians, policymakers, poets, filmmakers, documentary makers, writers, activists, community organisers and public intellectuals will share the stage with architects, academics, and students. Curating a public event programme is increasingly a form of architectural practice that attempts to bridge the gulf between architects and the public.

Building African Futures
Buildings shape politics, articulating power relations in the ways they are designed, constructed and used. Africa’s public buildings – parliaments, ministries, presidential palaces, courts, public records offices, police stations – reflect the complexity and ambiguity of the politics of various states. Researchers and scholars who worked on this multi-layered research project examine in a roundtable the interaction of citizens with state buildings, focusing in particular on Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. A documentary was screened during the meeting. Participants: Julia Gallagher (moderator), Kuukuwa Manful, Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong, Olufèmi Hinson Yovo, Fiona Nyadero

Governing, Designing, and Educating Urban Futures
Mayors, social scientists, planners and educators were at the Piccolo Arsenale Theater on Thursday 31 August to investigate how innovations in city government, planning and urban education can trigger transformative change. The Council on Urban Initiatives is a research and promotion platform born in 2021 from the collaboration between UN-Habitat, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and LSE Cities to promote just, green and healthy cities. It is co-chaired by Ricky Burdett and Mariana Mazzucato, who moderate the symposium together with Lesley Lokko. Claudia López, Ada Colau, Soledad Núñez, Laura Lieto, Dan Hill, Rahul Mehrotra, Alcinda Honwana, Richard Sennett participate in the round tables.

Carnival: African Space Magicians
African Space Magicians includes the screening of two short films: the first directed by Black Females in Architecture, the second directed by Nzinga Biegueng Mboup and Chérif Tall, Participants in the Guests From The Future section of the Exhibition. This was followed by a round table moderated by Curator Lesley Lokko on what it means to be an “African” architect, on what are the conditions, creative opportunities and challenges that give the term “African” a meaning beyond a geographical or racial definition. With: Aziza Chaouni, Black Females in Architecture, Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Chérif Tall, Papa Omotayo.

The Future of Reseach into African Architectural and Urban History
What are the most pressing issues in African architectural and urban history that require academic investigation? Who should take responsibility for writing African architectural and urban history and what kind of approach should it take? What contribution could African architectural and urban history make to become a challenge for architectural practice and education in other parts of the world? Carnival presents THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH INTO AFRICAN ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN HISTORY, a round table on the future of African architectural research on the continent and in the diaspora. With: Murray Fraser, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Ola Uduku, Warebi Gabriel Brisibe, Kuukuwa Manful, Victoria Okoye, Huda Tayob, Ramota Ruth Obagah-Stephen, Mark Olweny, Neal Shasore.

New Architecture Writers. Learning from Venice
On Monday 17 July, from 2pm to 6pm, the Sala delle Colonne of Ca’ Giustinian hosted nine emerging writers from the New Architecture Writers (N.A.W.), the study and training program dedicated to people of color who often represent a minority in the design and architecture journalism. Together with them, Thomas Aquilina and Tom Wilkinson (directors of the N.A.W.), Cindy Walters and Ellis Woodman (Architecture Foundation). Speakers: Nana Biamah Ofosu (#BiennaleCollegeArchitettura), Manon Mollard (Architectural Review), Alice Grandoit Šutka (Deem Journal), Emmanuel Olunkwa (Pin-Up Magazine). NEW ARCHITECTURE WRITERS: LEARNING FROM VENICE is the result of a five-day residency in #Venice, part of the activities of the #BiennaleCollegeArchitettura, and presents the work of the N.A.W., with a live demonstration of its pedagogical methods and a round table on the future of architectural writing.

Collateral Events

9 Collateral Events are scheduled for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition titled The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko and organized by La Biennale di Venezia.

The Collateral Events, which are admitted by the curator and promoted by non–profit national and international bodies and institutions, take place in several locations; they offer a wide range of contributions and participations that enrich the diversity of voices that characterizes the exhibition of Venice.

A Fragile Correspondence – Scotland + Venice
Organizing Institution: Scotland +
Language is powerful and shapes how we understand the world around us. How can a closer relationship between land and language help architecture be more attuned to the environment in which it operates? Highlighting cultures and languages that have a close affinity with the landscapes of Scotland, A Fragile Correspondence explores new perspectives and approaches to the worldwide climate emergency. The project takes us through three Scottish landscapes; the Highlands, Islands, and Lowlands. Writers, artists, and architects explore issues distinctly rooted in place, but with global relevance to the cultural, ecological, and climatic issues that we face.

Catalonia in Venice_ Following the Fish
Organizing Institution: Institut Ramon Llull
A street market and a reparations workshop that emerged from Leve alliance with Top Manta, a cooperative founded by African street vendors in Barcelona. This coming together has encouraged the creation of alternate architectures to the hegemonic ones. Despite Europe’s pillaging of their local fish supply, forcing their departure, in their manoeuvring of the traps set by Fortress Europe and through political and creative struggles, they have been capable of offering other ways of living, of repairing what has failed in the cities (that have failed to) receive them. Through the constructive perspective of migrant communities, we seek to redefine the places whence architecture is made.

Climate Wunderkammer
Organizing Institution: RWTH Aachen University
The Climate Wunderkammer aims to immerse ourselves in a multi-sensory experience of climate change impact while sharing practical solutions to address and adapt to it. It exhibits a collection of narratives from our planet through drawings, videos, and voice recordings, a Wunderkammer of messages in bottles to open and discover. In each story depicting the threat and impact of climate change, we present tentative answers to adapt or address the new condition to inspire places undergoing similar climate trends in the future. This project sets up a global platform for sharing knowledge and mutual learning, especially learning from the most fragile places undergoing the impact of climate change.

Diachronic Apparatuses of Chinese Taiwan – Architecture as on-going details within landscape
Organizing Institution: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
The project encourages a dialogue between synthetic and real ground. Humankind respected the land with due awe in pre-history time. Gaining confidence with the sophisticated tools, it began to ask for more than survival or comfort. The project presents an inventory of landscapes across different latitudes and altitudes in Taiwan. The varied topography and evolutionary processes have given birth to rich biodiversity and diverse floral and forestry forms. Therefore, sectional analyses of the island may bear clues to the search for new architecture. And this is also the result that this project attempts to present.

EUmies Awards. Young Talent 2023. The Laboratory of Education
Organizing Institution: Fundació Mies van der Rohe
Young Talent 2023 aims to support the talent of recently graduated architects, urban planners, and landscape architects who was responsible for transforming our environment in the future. Young Talent emerged from curiosity about and interest in the initial stages in these students’ development and a desire to support their talent as they enter the professional world. Four winners have been chosen in April 2023 by an international Jury from among twelve finalists, and a group of shortlisted works has also been selected. The results of the process are now shown by presenting models, drawings, and videos of the projects.

Radical yet possible future space solutions
Organizing Institution: New European Bauhaus, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
In the Petri-dish of this New European Bauhaus Biennale two-day conference, we want to reflect on radical human actions leading to a better use of spaces and resources. We explore non-existing but wishful human endeavours such as the decarbonisation of human desires or decolonisation of nature from human needs. The close collaboration between the speakers, students, and Biennale Architettura visitors in talks, discussions, and workshops makes this two-day event a radical laboratory of the future and creates opportunities to experiment, discover, and design the future with the power of our minds.

Students as Researchers: Creative Practice and University Education
Organizing Institution: New York Institute of Technology
University education represents an opportunity to develop radical visions that can challenge the conventionality of market-oriented societies. The talent and freshness of students can positively contribute to an inevitable environmental revolution that recognises the needs of transforming the obsolete metabolism of the city from energy eater to power generator without compromising the well-being of future generations. Implying the exchange of ideas with the students, teaching can also become a research instrument, as well, if fuelled by bi directional teaching models in which the role of teacher and learner can potentially switch.

Tracé Bleu – Que faire en ce lieu, à moins que l’on y songe?
Organizing Institution: CA’ASI
In the face of overwhelming environmental challenges, the Tracé Bleu is simultaneously an approach, a method, and an inquiry, a collective invitation to transform, stimulate, and extend these questions through the gesture. This project proposes a sensitive and active immersion through works by Krijn de Koning, Jonathas de Andrade, Joanie Lemercier, and ‘fragments’ put into images by the French illustrator Serge Bloch, a multitude of elements of urban and architectural projects, which present circular and regenerative uses of resources.

Transformative Chinese Hong Kong SAR
Organizing Institutions: Hong Kong Arts Development Council + Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation
After significant earlier urban metamorphoses, Hong Kong is on the brink of another transformative moment with large territorial scale projects and new policies driving the next phase of change. Faced with increasingly complex environmental and social issues, architectural practices embrace new multidisciplinary approaches. While the 4th Industrial Revolution is having a broad impact, institutions and the creative communities are also evolving, using the city as a ‘laboratory’. The installation is organised in three scales to capture the Territorial, Architectural, and Public Space Transformations, and presents twelve projects addressing the issues ensuing from this transformative moment.

Applied Arts Pavilion
La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London present for the seventh consecutive year the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project (Arsenale, Sale d’Armi A) titled Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa, curated by Christopher Turner (V&A) with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed (AA). The presentation is organised in collaboration with the Architectural Association (AA), London and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi.

Biennale Sessions

The Project for Universities
La Biennale dedicates the Biennale Sessions project to Universities, Academies of Fine Arts, and other Institutes of Higher Learning. The aim is to facilitate three-day self-organized visits by groups of at least 50 students and teachers, offering assistance in the organization of travel and accommodations and the possibility of organizing seminars in exhibition venues free of charge.

Educational
For the past decade, La Biennale di Venezia has been devoting increased attention to learning activities and has developed a growing commitment to educational initiatives addressed to the audience of its Exhibitions, to universities, young people, and children, from schools at all levels. In the past two years, Biennale Architettura 2021 and Biennale Arte 2022 counted 111,164 participants in Education activities, of which 52,392 were young people. A broad Educational programme was offered in 2023 as well, addressed to individuals and groups of students, children, adults, families, professionals, companies, and universities. All these initiatives aim to actively involve participants. They are conducted by professional operators, carefully trained by La Biennale, and they fall under the following categories: Guided Itineraries and Workshop Activities and Interactive Initiatives.

Editorial Project and Graphic Identity
The official catalogue, titled The Laboratory of the Future, consists of two volumes. Volume I is divided into different sections dedicated to the events of Carnival and to the Curator’s Special Projects. Two sections are dedicated to the International Exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko, respectively titled Force Majeure and Dangerous Liaisons. Each project on display in the Exhibition is accompanied by a critical text and a rich iconography that completes the Participants’ work. A further section is dedicated to the first edition of the Biennale College Architettura. Embedded throughout are a series of essays developing the themes of the Exhibition and a detailed record of the works on display. Volume II presents the National Participations and the Collateral Events. It includes a series of illustrated texts that delve deeper into the projects on exhibit in the Pavilions and the Collateral Events at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in various locations across Venice.

The graphic identity of the Biennale Architettura 2023 and the design of the publications are the work of Die Ateljee – Fred Swart. The volumes are published by Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia.

Conclusion – The Archive of the Future

The Laboratory of the Future closes with an open-ended question: what next? The Archive of the Future is a visual account of the processes, drawings, discussions, ideas, conversations, old arguments, propositions and new understandings that collectively brought this exhibition to life. The Laboratory of the Future is not didactic. It does not confirm directions, offer solutions, or deliver lessons. Instead, it is intended as a kind of rupture, an agent of change, where the exchange between participant, exhibit and visitor is not passive or predetermined. The exchange is intended as reciprocal, a form of glorious, unpredictable exchange, each transformed by the encounter, each emboldened to go forward into another future.