“How will we live together?” This is the title of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens with 61 participating countries. The motto reflects a turn toward social, even political concerns that has been taking place in the biennial since over two decades ago, when in 2000 Massimiliano Fuksas proposed the theme, ‘Less Aesthetics, More Ethics.’ In the currently ongoing edition – which kicked off with a posthumous tribute to Lina Bo Bardi and with Rafael Moneo deservedly receiving the Golden Lion – the curator Hashim Sarkis denounces the situation brought on by the climate crisis, political instability, and ever growing inequality on the conviction that “we can no longer wait for politicians to propose a path towards a better future. As politics continue to divide and isolate, we can offer alternative ways of living through architecture.” This makes the Biennale a laboratory of proposals for coexistence, such as the 34 from Spain, grouped in the exhibition Uncertainty, which in the words of its young curators —Sofía Piñero, Domingo J. González, Andrzej Gwizdala y Fernando Herrera— “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.” Venice in this way pronounces a well-meaning and necessary albeit perhaps naive manifesto.

Spanish Pavilion ‘Uncertainty’. Video: Imagen Subliminal

Spanish Pavilion’s curators