Venice Architecture Biennale: Simple but effective

Anneta BouSaleh at the Venice Biennale. (Courtesy: Anneta BouSaleh)

The Art Blog continues its series of reports from the Venice Biennale of architecture with this piece by Anneta BouSaleh on Croatia’s national pavilion. BouSaleh is one of several interns who are in Venice to man the UAE’s National Pavilion during the course of the six month exhibition. The Art Blog teamed up with the UAE Pavilion and asked the interns to write about one of their favourite offerings from the many other nations there.

Here Anneta writes:

“As soon as I stepped into the Pavilion of Croatia, I was confronted by its stark aesthetic contrast to the sizeable installations housed by the neighbouring Pavilions of Thailand and Kingdom of Bahrain. The visible simplicity and straightforward presentation is to the exhibition’s conceptual advantage, however can be easily overlooked by visitors, who may not realise that the plain black four walled space is in fact hosting one of the most humble, important, and relevant projects on display at the this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

The curator of the overall biennale, Alejandro Aravena, challenged participating countries to present cases of architecture which work within the constraints caused by a scarcity of resources and propose solutions to improve the lives of the people using it.

Titled “we need it – we do it”, not only does this exhibition respond expertly to the brief, but it also delivers, in the form of a publication, a truly authentic and comprehensive examination of the complex and interwoven processes involved in revitalising abandoned or unfinished spaces organically, gradually, and tediously, through the collective social effort of the people using them.

“we need it – we do it” showcases a trinity of buildings in three different Croatian cities – the Youth Centre in Split, Pogon Jedinstvo in Zagreb, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the H-building in Rijeka – each in its own unique state of incompleteness or abandonment, tied together by a common thread of a community that did not wait for official support or even an acceptable environment to commence its activities, but rather “did what it needed to do, in spite of everything”. The buildings were and continue to be gradually transformed, piece by piece, room by room, into a viable, shareable and inviting space for cultural production and social interaction by artists, activists, thinkers, architects, and participants-users – in short, a collective of people who responded to a pressing need by visualising and creating the possibility of a new reality.

This fragmented transformation of the buildings is aptly communicated in the exhibition design. Each building is presented as an interactive section model, occupying an entire wall, with cut out spaces indicating the actual locations of the rooms that are either currently in use or still in transition. Each of these “rooms” houses a collection of physical objects, which symbolically represent its current or future projected function. Art pieces, sculptures, books, mounted tablets with performance videos, and abstract installations are just a few of the items that tell the individual story of each room, allowing the visitor to reflect on the contrast between the magnitude of the problem and the minuscule compartmentalised solutions proposed to alter and improve the spaces slowly.

Therefore, the exhibition perfectly mirrors Aravena’s call to present “cases and practices where creativity was used to take the risk to go even for a tiny victory.” In his own words, “when the problem is big, just a one-millimetre improvement is relevant.”

Some of my personal favourite compartment inhabitants include: a selection of the wonderfully vibrant leaflets of the infamous Klub Močvara, occupying one of the larger spaces in the Pogon Zagreb wall, the three symbolic installations of aptly placed oyster shells, dried corals, and snail shells made to represent the empty spaces awaiting their purpose in the topmost levels of Pogon Zagreb and the Split Youth Centre, and finally a little poster plate placed alongside a line of similar plates, proclaiming an idea of particular relevance to the overall theme - “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.”

Adding an extra layer of depth and playfulness to the exhibition, the take-away postcards are translucent mini-replicas of the three walls with removable laser-cut compartments representing the rooms. The interactive postcards remind visitors that the whole is made up of literal and metaphorical fragments, which - when physically picked off one by one - summarise the project concept with the age-old motto “if you want something done, do it yourself.”

The project is authored by Miranda Veljačić, Slaven Tolj, Emina Višnić, and Dinko Peračić, who is also the curator, and commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.

* Anneta BouSaleh is a Ukrainian Lebanese graphic designer, residing in the UAE since 2011 and working as a freelance art director across several advertising agencies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In her free time, she travels to as many countries as she can, documenting her travels through photography and writing. Follow the Venice interns on @veniceinterns and hashtags #uaeinvenice and #veniceinterns. Follow Anneta’s journeys and adventures on Snapchat @bravoyashatra

* To apply for next year's internship click here