Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else

Abstract

The scarcity of resources in a context of permanent crisis is not only an opportunity but also the only direction in which it makes sense to practice. In our view, there is a generation that has already accepted the challenge and is trying every day to develop antibodies to disillusionment. The Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia invited these practitioners to recognize themselves as a “movement.” Titled Spaziale, it referred to an expanded notion of the discipline where the built artifact was not seen as an ultimate goal but as one of the possible tools for intervening in the fabric of relationships between people and places. Nine practices were invited to collaborate with nine advisors – from other fields of creativity – in nine Italian territories representative of conditions of fragility or transformation, with the support of as many local interlocutors. Each intervention represented a chapter in an incomplete agenda of urgent research themes for the national context and for architecture: open questions, traceable to the scenario of transition – not only ecological – that we are facing in these years.

We represent a generation that grew up in a state of permacrisis. The neologism, elected Word of the Year in 2022 by Collins Dictionary, expresses a recurring dimension of catastrophic occurrences that perfectly describes the unfolding of events of the last twenty years. After the near miss of the Y2K bug, the century began with the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers: the crisis of the West being screened on live television. We enrolled at university during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and, once we graduated, we started to look for work in the smoking ruins of the market. Today an energy and geopolitical crisis, tomorrow the environmental crisis; and this is only a partial representation of reality.

The global consequences have produced obvious repercussions on our profession and, while the age of architectural exuberance came to an end with the 2008 crisis, the pandemic has broadened that widespread awareness of the total depletion of resources [1]. As Rory Hyde suggests: “All crises have spatial consequences that architects are well prepared to deal with, yet instead of diving into them, we seem to be experiencing our own crisis: one of relevance” [2]. The clear risk is that the umpteenth internal discourse within the discipline makes us lose sight of how architecture, rather than providing solutions, is often part of the problem: on the one hand, the construction sector is one of the main causes of the environmental crisis; on the other hand (especially in Italy), the increase in land consumption does not correspond to the involvement of architects in transformation, neither their involvement in such process. An inversely proportional relationship between growth and development that lays the foundations for an unprecedented alliance between the environment and professionals in the sector. An opportunity for architecture to evolve, albeit only opportunistically, in order to survive (Figs. 1, 2, 3 and 4).

Fig. 1.

© Delfino Sisto Legnani.

Italian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2023. Photo

Fig. 2.

© Delfino Sisto Legnani.

Italian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2023. Photo

Fig. 3.

© Piercarlo Quecchia/DSL Studio.

Siren Land. Authors: BB (Fabrizio Ballabio + Alessandro Bava) + Terraforma. Location: Baia di Ieranto (Napoli), Campania. Photo

Fig. 4.

© HPO.

Uccellaccio. Authors: HPO + Claudia Durastanti. Location: Ripa Teatina, Abruzzo. Photo

There is a generation of sustainable natives who, in our view, have already accepted the challenge and seek to develop antibodies to disillusionment in their daily practice. In our opinion these critical spatial practices, term coined by Jane Randell in 2003 to indicate those practices “working across public and private, art and architecture” [3], are those who use the codified tools of design to question the social conditions of the places where they intervene. Accustomed by training to operating within a regime of scarcity, these practices foster transdisciplinarity as a means of pushing back the limits of architecture to hitherto little-explored fields.

We have intended our appointment as curators of the Italian Pavilion at the La Biennale 2023, titled ‘Spaziale. Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else’, as an unprecedented occasion to present to a broader public a series of Italian critical spatial practices and an invite to probe their diverse attitude confronting them with real design occasions, using curatorial practice as a powerful tool to shift from archiving to action. Necessarily recognising an ethical dimension to this role, we decided to use the Italian Pavilion as a pretext to activate pioneering projects, concrete actions that go beyond the six-month duration of the Biennale. Moreover, ethics also lies at the heart of the discourse when questioning the meaning and impact of temporary events of this scale: be they exhibitions, fashion shows, concerts, sporting events or fairs, they are all extractive processes that dissipate a great deal of energy and resources. In order to continue to celebrate moments of confrontation and contamination in a sustainable manner, it is now urgent to drastically rethink formats, flows and temporalities. To convert consumption into investment and the end into a beginning, Spaziale employed a substantial part of the public funds earmarked by the Italian Ministry of Culture to initiate and realize those pioneering projects in the months prior to the inauguration of the Venice Biennale 2023.

Each project tackled an agenda of urgent research topics for the national context and for the discipline as a whole: open questions that may be traced back to the transition scenario – and not only the ecological one – that we have been dealing with over recent years. An incomplete list of ‘impossible’ challenges that have been up for debate for decades, yet which – on the scale of the micro-histories of local contexts – are capable of producing tangible results. The definition of the themes guided the selection of designers under forty, who in their daily practice develop independent research in line with our curatorial proposals. Identified on the basis of the approach with which they operate, the territories in which they intervene, the means they use, the questions they raise and the answers they put forward, they were called upon to develop site-specific actions for the Italian Pavilion. Each practice was associated with an Advisor: nine professionals supporting the designers, from various fields across the creative industry, capable of informing and enhancing the ongoing projects, making them an undoubtedly transdisciplinary product. The installations were implemented in sites representative of conditions of fragility or transformation of our country: nine Stations narrating an unprecedented Italian landscape, a series of symbolic destinations on a renewed Italian Journey. Each collaboration was supported by one or more local interlocutors: public or private institutions which, as Incubators, helped to root the projects in the selected Stations.

What was shown in the Italian Pavilion has not to be intended as an exhibition but rather as a visual and formal synthesis of the multiple design processes and approaches embodied by the participants. The ultimate objective of the exhibition being the manifestation of a new disciplinary attitude that sees architectural interventions not as a goal, but rather as an one of the possible instruments to act in the space, or a network of relationships between communities and places; the basis of any architectural project.

Fig. 5.

© Melania Dalle Grave/DSL Studio

Concrete Jungle. Authors: Parasite 2.0 + Elia Fornari (Brain Dead). Location: Marghera, Veneto. Photo

Fig. 6.

© Piercarlo Quecchia/DSL Studio.

La Casa Tappeto. Authors: Studio Ossidiana + Adelita Husni Bey. Location: Librino (Catania), Sicily. Photo