Set to open to the public on 21 May is the Spanish Pavilion at the 17th Venice International Architecture Biennale, originally programmed for 2020 but postponed by the health crisis brought on by Covid-19. The biennial can be visited until 21 November. With Hashim Sarkis as this edition’s curator, its theme is How will we live together?, and Spain’s response is the exhibition Uncertainty. A curating team of four – Sofía Piñero, Domingo J. González, Andrzej Gwizdala, and Fernando Herrera – selected 34 projects from a pool of entries to an open competition, and are presenting them in the Spanish Pavilion, on the grounds of the Guardini della Biennale.
As they explain, “the exhibition of this Biennale’s Spanish Pavilion admits no concrete answer to the question formulated by Sarkis, but rather seeks to generate an infinite chain of further questions; questions of the kind, to be sure, that bear one certainty: our future is together, or nothing.” Uncertainty showcases heterogeneous architectures, appraised on the basis of their creative processes, that in cahoots with other disciplines offer new reflections and suggest new ways of practicing a profession that has managed to evolve and adapt to all the dimensions and needs of a society in constant change. Hence the objective of the works on display in the pavilion is to provide a catalog of flexible architectural strategies for our future coexistence and its social and environmental implications.
The exhibition is divided into three parts. A Cloud of portfolios, created out of thousands of sheets of paper, is a compilation of projects and actions that together constitute a repository of strategies for living together. In the ring around the Cloud, visitors enter the Draw through four side rooms and explore a non-hierarchical landscape of abstract and decontextualized pieces representing the selected projects. Finally, through an audiovisual projection in the Together hall, they will discover the sequence of interpretive operations used to select projects out of the Cloud.
Spanish Pavilion’s curators
