For the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Lithuanian Pavilion will present an exhibition titled “Children’s Forest Pavilion”, curated by Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule, and Jonas Žukauskas. The intervention aims to become a playscape, acknowledging the unique perspectives through which children observe and interact with their environment. The project strives to explain the ecosystem of the forest, bringing together works and findings developed in parallel to outdoor activities held with children in the woodlands of Lithuania and Finland. Environmental educators, activists, architects and foresters will discuss the idea of forests as negotiated spaces where all actors play an important role. The Pavilion will be open from May 20th until November 26th, 2023.
An interactive installation will activate the space of the pavilion, located opposite the entrance to the Arsenale. Conceived as an architectural object and a conceptual structure, the intervention aims to encourage different forms of discussion, communication, and play. The main building material will be the timber collected over several years in an archive at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts as part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture. The meandering structure will be enhanced with film installations, worktables, and play structures.
The architectural elements will relay the experience of the children who participated in the previous events where they learned about ancient forests, primordial swamp landscapes and the long process of geological formation. Through these activities, the children explored the forest at various scales, investigating chemical pollution through augmented reality, examining the growth patterns of lichens, and discovering the sound reverberations of timber. The exhibition’s aim is to expand on these teachings and investigate the ways in which human interventions, technologies, industries, and institutions influence natural environments and their biodiversity.
The exhibition is conceived as an educational tool with the potential to create connections to other spatial and thematic elements. After the closing of the Biennale, the installation will return to the woodlands of the Curonian Spit, the original source of the timber, where it will serve as a destination for forest walks and environmental education workshops. The pavilion is organized by the Neringa Forest Architecture project that was initiated in 2020 to reflect on the agency of cultural practices and institutions in framing environmental relationships.
The theme of education is a recurring one in many other national pavilion exhibitions proposed for this year’s edition of the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, as a natural continuation of curator Lesley Lokko’s chosen theme of The Laboratory of the Future. The Bulgarian Pavilion has chosen an exhibition titled “Education is the movement from darkness to light” to explore school abandonment and urban decline. On a similar note, the Australian Pavilion set out to explore themes of decolonization with an exhibition titled Unsettling Queenstown, while Nordic Countries Pavilion, representing Finland, Norway, and Sweden, brings to Venice an archive of books and materials exploring Indigenous Sámi architecture and design, traditional building knowledge, activism, and decoloniality.
