Giardini 2030

A new vision for the Biennale

This year’s Biennale di Venezia main exhibition is titled “Laboratory of the future “, underlined by two main drivers: decolonization and decarbonisation, in a seek to have the Biennale become an “agent of change”. The fruit of Lesley Lokko’s work, first African woman to be curator of the Architecture Exhibition and to highlight African practitioners, also succeeds to move the axis of the exhibition away from the “first world”.

The Biennale first opened its doors in 1895, strongly influenced by the Universal Exhibitions, it served as a mean of affirmation for the different countries taking part in it, especially for those that have their own pavilion. The counterpart to this individuality was competition and the perpetuation of power and domination relationships, as well as inequality.

Nowadays it seems natural to question the very essence of the Biennale, or at least some of its characteristics. The Swiss pavilion did it by opening one of its walls towards the neighbouring Venezuelan pavilion while stating: “…Competition between national pavilions is a relic from the past. The fixation on national representation has narrowed our horizons. We learn only through contact with others. Pavilions, like all of us should take more care of each other”. A conference about “The Uneasiness of National Pavilions” will follow…

The Austrian pavilion went a bit further by proposing an opening towards the city and to dedicate more than half a of its surface to participatory activities with the local inhabitants, which would have meant to transform part of the Biennale into a free access ground. That went too far for the Biennale authorities, who rejected the project.

In this context, at the BauKulturCamp (@Jan Weber Ebnet, @Stephanie Reiterer) we thought it might be interesting to consider the Giardini under a new light, as a microcosmos in the perspective of its worldwide influence and beyond its yearly function of an exhibition site, with a vision encompassing sustainability, care, and regeneration.

After a short assessment of the positive and negative aspects of the exhibition at its present form, the group of students established a shortlist of specifications that should be included in the design concept.

The outcome is to propose a new kind of exhibition, transformed into a “living laboratory”, a site where all the functions and aspects of life in a city like Venice could be tested on experimental projects in a permanent basis, serving as a showcase for visitors, citizens, scholars, enterprises, and politicians.

The Giardini would be the centre point for this laboratory, but several spots in the city could become antennas that would host replication projects echoing the experimentations in connection with local organizations and serving to build up the resilience of Venice as a whole.

The “living lab” could therefore host projects regarding energy production, circular economy including a material lab and material reuse, urban agriculture plus local food production and cooking, participatory projects including co-working and co-living, nature-based solutions, among others. And in order to assure the sharing of the produced know-how as well as its diffusion, new means and spaces should be deployed, like workshop rooms, materials library, documentation centre, “mooc” and conference cycles, within the Giardini’s compounds and beyond.

To be continued…

Daniel Kaufman, September 18th, 2023