Out of 45 participating submissions for Chile's Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the winning proposal has been recently announced. 'Reflective Intelligences,' the curatorial project by Serena Dambrosio, architect, researcher, and lecturer at Universidad Diego Portales; Nicolás Díaz Bejarano, architect, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate in Architecture and Urban Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; and Linda Schilling Cuellar, architect, urban designer,educator and doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University.
The jury of the competition was composed of Gabriela García de Cortázar, Fabrizio Gallanti, María Berríos, Federico Martelli, Ruth Estévez, Gonzalo Carrasco, and Andrés Jaque. The commissioner of Chile's Pavilion, representing the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Heritage, is Cristóbal Molina Baeza. The 19th Venice Architecture Biennale will be directed by Italian architect Carlos Ratti, with the theme 'Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.' According to the jury, the winning proposal questions the impact of buildings that have only recently entered the architectural discourse (data centers) in urban, territorial, material, and political terms, through a multimedia exhibition centered around a large table as a curatorial device.
Chile's proposal, titled Reflective Intelligences, highlights the country's growing role as a key player in the development of artificial intelligence. With much of its wealth derived from minerals and renewable energy sources, and benefiting from a favorable economic and political climate, Chile is shaping a renewed vision of technological progress. The exhibition will center on the political significance of the roundtable—as a physical space and a forum for deliberation, commonly used in Chile to conduct environmental discussions between the state and civil society.
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"Architecture as a Cultural Artifact": Brazil Announces Participation in Venice Biennale 2025Between 2018 and 2024, the Chilean government established more than 80 roundtables to facilitate the development of policies and regulations in anticipation of the rapid deployment of AI infrastructure. These tables have brought together politicians, business leaders, and experts, fostering knowledge exchange, the expression of different visions, and collective agreements.
However, the bodies of AI—the land, water, and minerals that form its material foundation, along with the communities inhabiting the extracted territories—have not been given a seat at these tables. As a result, the table has become an unstable, incomplete, and abstract element, losing its ability to reflect this technology's material and terrestrial reality, while ignoring the injustices, tensions, and planetary limits that characterize our ecosystems amid the current climate crisis. — Abstract from the curators
In this exhibition, the table will serve as a curatorial device, linking architecture, space, and materiality with the collective intelligence of Chile's territories and the transformations taking place with the introduction of AI in the country's political and economic agenda.
The pavilion highlights and makes visible the spatiality and materiality of data infrastructure currently present in Chilean territory, shedding light on institutional negotiation processes and the socio-environmental frictions caused by its construction and operation. It serves as a space for reflection on the inclusion of intelligences and bodies typically excluded from public discussions about these infrastructures—such as social, mineral, and water bodies that sustain their deployment. The proposal gives voice to the absent intelligences in AI development, reconsidering the fundamental role that architecture can play in discussions around environmental controversies and proposing new ways of cohabiting with artificial intelligence in Chile and beyond. — Abstract from the curators
Besides curators Serena Dambrosio, Nicolás Díaz Bejarano, and Linda Schilling Cuellar, the team also includes a Scientific Advisory Committee composed of Marina Otero Verzier as an AI Infrastructures consultant, Susan Schuppli for Material Evidence, and Alejandra Celedón Foster focusing on Institutional Spaces. Additionally, a group of researchers includes Tomas Carbonell Vidal, Constanza Duran, Francisca Larraín, Francisca Luco, Javier Toledo Rodríguez, Miguel Uribe Rubilar, and Matías Valenzuela.
The exhibition design will be handled by Pedro Silva, Frank Hernandez, Diego Alday, and Sebastián Valois Hermosilla. The visual identity is by Constanza Gaggero, with art direction consulting by Daniel Aguayo Mozó of Specific Studio. Audiovisual consulting will be overseen by Jaime San Martín (Estudio San Martín), and the architectural exhibition production in Venice will be managed by Alessandra Dal Mos (We Exhibit).
Several other countries have also announced their participation in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Among them, the Belgian Pavilion will present a project curated by landscape architect Bas Smets focused on architecture through the lens of plant intelligence, while Argentina's proposal led by Juan Manuel Pachué and Marco Zampieron aims to reflect on the relationship between architecture and time.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the 2025 Venice Biennale.
