Titled "January, February, March", the Georgian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale is curated by the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. Exploring the relationship between the flow of time and energy, the Georgian intervention "will represent dead and living nature through the story of an artificially altered settlement in the Dusheti region of Georgia". Running from May 20th to November 26th, 2023 in the Giardini, at the Arsenale, and at various sites around Venice, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition tackles "the Laboratory of the Future".
Hosted by the art-space II Giardino Bianco, the Georgian Pavilion, as explained in its curatorial statement, "focuses on water reservoirs, their creation and their impacts in the age of rapid political transformations and climate change". The announcement also asks a series of questions, attempting to bring forward some answers through the presented installation.
Some of these interrogations include: 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 really speaking of? What are the costs of disrupting an order to create a new one? Can we take 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 – permanent? What will be the vestige of defining such places, and, above all – considering both global and local contexts – what is their future?
For its 2023 intervention in Venice, the Georgian Pavilion has selected the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, as its curator. Founded in 2017, as a platform unifying local and international professionals, the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial is in fact in charge of organizing exhibitions, installations, workshops, symposiums, and activities. In 2022 they held the third edition of the biennial, discussing the subject of temporality in urban and social contexts.
At a material level, our built environments accurately reflect the conundrum: we speak of democratic spaces, public spaces, green energy, and the human spirit as though the conditions that make this possible and attainable are universal, and do not come at an often terrible cost to our fellow humans and the non-human and natural worlds. -- Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Biennale.
Project Authors:
- Gigi Shukakidze
- Otar Nemsadze
- Tinatin Gurgenidze
Project Team:
- Giorgi Vardiashvili
- Alexi Soselia
- Stefano Tornieri-Pola
- Tamar Janashia
- Lado Kandashvili
- Giorgi Kartvelishvili
- Elene Pasuri
- Tato Kotetishvili
Commissioner:
- Magda Guruli
With the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Youth of Georgia
