Padiglione Venezia

In our contemporary existence, the ability to see is the ability to know. When something seems absent from vision, it is likely there is still an underlying invisible presence that sees, listens, and records. When temporalities are first confronted in a screen, how is it possible for art to overcome the assumption that we have seen everything? By incorporating the idea of the spectacle, the voyeuristic aspect of it, as well as the individualism that permeates them, the works can be observed by the individuals from the exterior of the pavilion. Nevertheless, the intention is to utilise Bodies in Alliance – the claim that equality among individuals is not only spoken or written but is performed precisely when bodies appear together in space. The interior of the pavilion constitutes the body that contains the city. This embodied experience is built up as a durational exchange – between the public, the building, the artwork, the artists, the materials, and the city – which commences upon entering the building and is communicated through the materiality of the work.

When an individual is experiencing the urban fabric of the city of Venice and the plethora of narratives that weave into it, they perceive it as a multitude of interconnected spaces and ecosystems that share a non-linear continuity. The process of wandering often evokes introspection and empowers the acceptance of your own histories as adaptive knowledge – which is essentially collected and shared through collaborative artistic and curatorial practices that emerge within the pavilion space. These collective practices do not entail addressing the public on a level of information, but instead, seek to nurture the experiential aspect of the city, the organic and inorganic notions that constitute it, as well as the intertwined exchanges among them. Eventually, the corporeal cannot be limited to linguistics, hence, the architectural design of the pavilion attempts to engage the visitors through the entanglement of the artists that are conversing towards the realisation of a single collective work, as a response to their individual experiences of the city of Venice.