During this year’s edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, ArchDaily had the chance to discuss with Giacomo Ardesio and Claudia Mainardi of Fosbury Architecture, the curators of the Italian Pavilion together with Alessandro Bonizzoni, Nicola Campri and Veronica Caprino. The curatorial project, titled “Spaziale: Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else,” aims to provide a distinctive and original portrait of Italian architecture within the international context. The curators discussed the origins of their office, their sources of inspiration and the thinking behind the design decisions that led to the creation of the curatorial project for the Italian Pavilion.
Delving into the culture of the office itself and its vision, the curators explain the origin of their chosen name, Fosbury Architecture. The name comes from athlete Dick Fosbury, who, in 1968, won the Olympic Gold Medal by revolutionizing the high jump event by jumping ‘back-first,’ a revolutionary technique now known as the Fosbury flop. The curators explain that their fascination with this figure derives from his willingness to challenge and invert the rules, in turn changing the discipline completely.
Aligned with this perspective, the project of the Italian Pavilion was envisioned as a laboratory, not of the future, as dictated by the overarching theme of the Biennale, but of the current times. Most of the funds allocated to the project were used to create new projects in nine specific locations across the Italian peninsula. These interventions were designed to activate relevant and meaningful aspects of the environment, “adding a new episode to something that was already existing.”
The pavilion is about looking into how the discipline is changing and how the discipline can react to the current urgencies, from the point of view of transitions, be they ecological or digital, but also from a scenario of crisis. - Giacomo Ardesio
The resulting exhibition on view in the Italian Pavilion is thus a synthesis of what has been happening throughout Italy in the previous months. The curators gathered 9 spatial practices and 9 advisors coming from different fields of creativity, who have been collaborating with local actors such as creative incubators, museums or local organizations. The resulting projects strive to go beyond the scope of the Biennale. This is also reflected in the title, “Everyone belongs to everyone else,” which refers to the interdependencies among all the actors, and also to the large group of people who have come together to make the various projects happen.
Inside the pavilion, a ‘void’ marks the center of the first room, symbolizing the fact that the exhibition expands well into the territory of the Italian peninsula. The second room features installations, some of which are abstract representations of local actions, others being actual pieces of what has been done in the territory. Two projects on the sides of the room also document the activities and initiatives. Here, an algorithm selects fragments of over a thousand short videos trying to find similarities among the different projects.
The main projects are happening outside, here it’s just a synthesis, sometimes even an allegory of something happening elsewhere. So, we hope that the visitor takes away this idea of renovated ways of practicing architecture, which nowadays needs to make a change towards empathy and awareness of the impact that our actions have on the territories. - Claudia Mainardi
Fosbury Architecture, an Italian architectural design and research collective based in Milan, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, works with a wide range of projects, from urban strategies to domestic environments and spatial experiments. In 2017, the office curated an exhibition titled “Re-Constructivist Architecture,” presented at the Ierimonti Gallery in New York featuring the works of thirteen architecture offices and exploring the various theoretical systems that influence architectural compositions.
