The first time I stepped out of the darkened chamber of the busy train terminal, I was suddenly, wonderfully blinded by the glitter of pink light bouncing off sparkling water. Venice has had my heart ever since. It is - and I have known this for some time - my favorite city in the world, and I try and make it back every chance I get, which is not often. Whenever I do force it onto the itinerary, my travel companions have often complained that I revere it too much and at the expense of other, less typical experiences. For those who have hearts of stone or simply haven’t been there, it is perhaps normal to disparage the city of canals. People complain about it endlessly: too many tourists, too hot, smells funny, not enough to do. Lies. The medieval marvel holds empires in a square mile and spans millennia across a small bridge.
I have my favourite haunts in the city, and nearly all of them are far from the tourist traps of the square of San Marco or the Rialto Bridge. Instead I try and find cheap hotels in the labyrinth of the inner old city, a place that tourists avoid because of how convoluted the canals and walkways can seem. But getting lost in Venice is how the city introduces itself to you. It’s kind, courteous, a little coquettish, and just when you think it can’t flirt any more it shows you a panorama so spectacular that you either have to paint it or hyperventilate out of pure joy.
Aravena is a bit of a socialist, and he chose as the main theme of the Biennale the response to global problems
My love for it was not the only reason I went this year. For one, I found really cheap flights. Secondly, I wanted to see the Venice Biennale, which alternates between Art and Architecture every year. This year was Architecture, and though I earnestly want to see the Art edition one year (#vacation2017), being able to see the architectural edition was lots of fun. The curator for this year’s show was a man called Alejandro Aravena, a Chilean architect who is having quite a career year. In 2016 he was not only given charge of Architecture’s biggest event, but also given its highest award, the Pritzker Prize.
The way the biennale works is that the curator picks a theme which every country responds to in their own pavilions and projects, and so the whole thing becomes a little like the Olympics/Eurovision of the architectural world. The last biennale’s theme was a return to the fundamentals of architecture, a title loose enough that everyone could tie into it without being overburdened. Aravena is a bit of an activist and socialist, and he chose as the main theme the response to global problems:migration, segregation, traffic, waste and pollution, and a host of other “urgent issues facing the whole of humanity”, as he puts it, “not just problems that only interest architects.”
Alejandro Aravena's work involves the use of several tonnes of recycled material and is located at the entrance to the Venice Biennale
The main pavilion houses his own curated show, and one of the first things I saw was a demonstration from London-based firm Forensic Architecture, which is an NGO led by Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman. The team has been compiling evidence for prosecutors in the International Criminal Court and the UN General Assembly pertaining to bombing campaigns in the Middle East. In the Venetian project they recreated the entirety of a US drone attack in a house in Waziristan by working backwards from the rubble. They included chilling details, like working out from the shadows of shrapnel-free areas of the wall how many people were in the room and where they were standing when the drone blew up. The centerpiece was a life-sized, abstracted room complete with an eerie light box for the actual drone.
It was by far the most moving piece in the show, and not only because of its personal national resonance. Other offerings varied from mud hut constructions to theories about how overpopulation can be mitigated by design elements.
The theme is a tricky one. On the one hand it aspires to provide real world answers to real world problems, and on the other it politicises an event that is much more comfortable being theoretical and often self-congratulatory. Generally it’s difficult to not come across as preachy. The Dutch pavilion, just outside the main hall, was frankly mildly racist, in that it was about all the wonderful interventions the Dutch have made in refugee camps in the world. This is what I mean: very difficult not to appear condescending when you have rich, mainly white countries telling the world how to solve their problems, and to do it by fetishising their own architecture can seem disingenuous.
Many of the national pavilions were so uncomfortable with the theme that they simply ignored it. The Germans were quite defensive and broke down the walls of their pavilion, which they said were accessible throughout the duration of the biennale, night and day, as a testament to the openness of the German borders. The British were reticent and relied on abstract projections of lines, and the Americans were so uncomfortable about talking about migration and the effects of their wars on the world that they decided to talk about Detroit instead. The Australians, probably also trying to avoid talking about sea-migrants, built a wading pool in their pavilion while recordings by famous Australians whispered sexily about how much pools mean to the Aussies.
The French were the only ones who flat-out said in their statement they didn’t like the curator or the theme, things in the world weren’t so bad and if the viewers had an issue with it they could evaporate for all they cared.
In all of this, the most joyous pavilion was Russia’s, which had dance party music, marble sculptures, Russian farmers and projections that looked like they belonged in a rave. You could actually feel how gleeful the Russians were at everyone else’s discomfort, and they really wanted to throw a party to show it.
This is by and large how most of the biennale went. I think it’s a wasted opportunity, because here were some of the brightest minds of our time ruminating on some of the decade’s most pressing issues, and there were hardly any actual, practical solutions to the very problems they had set out to address. There were no revolutionary designs for refugee camp tents, or safe boats for migrant crossing, or even theoretical ideas for how to make long-term refugee camps more effective.
My disappointment abated, though, because just by taking a water-bus back on the Grand Canal after a day at the biennale can restore your faith that architecture can be the most sublime of human endeavors. Or maybe that’s just Venice.
