The project for the Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia will be curated by Fosbury Architecture, a collective composed of Giacomo Ardesio, Alessandro Bonizzoni, Nicola Campri, Veronica Caprino, and Claudia Mainardi. Fosbury Architecture’s vision for the exhibition is based on a research practice that sees design as the result of collective and collaborative work. From January to April, leading up to the opening of the Biennale, nine site-specific interventions titled “Spaziale presenta” are set out to activate different locations across Italy.
The exhibition on display in the Italian Pavilion from May 20 to November 26, 2023, will be the formal and theoretical synthesis of the processes triggered in the nine regions during the previous months. Titled “Spaziale: Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else,” the curatorial project aims to provide a distinctive and original portrait of Italian architecture within the international context.
The collective has recently announced “Siren Land” as the title of the second of the nine interventions. Set against the backdrop of the Bay of Ieranto, an inlet at the tip of the Sorrento peninsula is known as the home of the Sirens. In the bay, stories of Greek mythology still echo: according to Pliny the Elder, this is the exact location where Ulysses is said to have encountered the Sirens, whose captivating song delayed his journey back to Ithaca, as recounted by Homer in The Odyssey.
Owned by the Fondo Ambienti Italiano, the site will act as the project’s incubator. BB design atelier (Alessandro Bava and Fabrizio Ballabio) collaborates with the team behind Terraforma, the international music festival, to create a project at the intersection of mythology and technology. The aim is to create a signifying device capable of both revealing the environmental state of the seabed and generating new forms of ritual aggregation.
In the face of the decline of anthropocentrism and in preparation for the challenge of the survival of the human species, there emerges the need to reaffirm the spatial contract between humans and nature, in light of future climate change. - Fosbury Architecture
By presenting the particularities of the Italian context, the curatorial project aims to align itself with the overarching theme of Laboratory of the Future set for the Biennale by curator Lesley Lokko. Other national pavilions have also selected their curators, many of whom have announced curatorial projects inspired by the particularities of their countries. Studio KO, the curator of the Uzbekistan National Pavilion, aims to bring into focus the country’s rich architectural heritage as a source of inspiration for developing more sustainable design solutions. The Nordic Countries Pavilion, curated by Joar Nango, brings a fragment of the indigenous Sámi culture to Venice. At the same time, the Georgian Pavilion interrogates the temporality of our environmental footprint by exploring an artificially altered settlement in the Dusheti region of Georgia.
