Architecture Project has been invited to take part in the Venice Biennale, the world’s grandest celebration and showcase of the design of buildings.
This is the first time in many years that an architectural practice from Malta has been invited to take part in one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world.
Invited by the Dutch non-profit Global Arts Affair Foundation, AP will join a diverse group of 100 architects from more than 40 countries for the biennale’s collateral event – Time Space Existence.
Set up in 1895, the biennale has an attendance of more than 370,000 visitors at the art exhibition. For AP, this exposure takes it to a new level in the architectural world.
The Venice Biennale is the world’s grandest celebration of the design of buildings
Top architects from all over the world, with multitudes of varying ideas on how and what architecture should be, will converge on Venice in the coming days, trading ideas and networking.
Under the directorship of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, this year’s biennale, entitled Fundamentals, will consist of three interwoven exhibitions which collectively illuminate the past, present and future of architecture as a discipline.
After several architecture biennales dedicated to the celebration of the contemporary, Fundamentals will look at histories and is an attempt to reconstruct how architecture finds itself in its current situation, and to speculate on its future.
AP will be presenting its multidisciplinary piece, Year 2225 – a triptych at Palazzo Mora. By exploring other forms of expression, such as painting and film, AP encourages the investigation of space.
This piece revolves around the transitory moments of architecture: around the ephemeral moments between erecting and demolishing a building; when the structure is utilised not in its intended manner but rather in the most unorthodox of ways.
With this in mind, AP commissioned and curated a series of films and paintings to portray three realised projects: the Barrakka Lift in Valletta, the double-helix staircase of St Barbara Bastions and the Super-Furniture of Stanhope Gardens in London.
The projects’ protagonists of these films and paintings (a lift, a staircase and a cupboard) were selected for the intensity of experience and memory, which is derived from the spaces they create. These are physical and metaphorical, distant or hidden, inaccessible or overlooked, like the forgotten apartment that Tancredi and Angelica discover in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s book Il Gattopardo.
The films record the existence of lives that unfold in the shadow of these constructions which, invariably, hail from the past: chance encounters, missed opportunities, routine displacements.
The small oil paintings, on the other hand, are designed to become objects stemming from the life of the buildings they depict, extending it into domestic interiors, galleries, cabinets of curiosities and other depositories of memory.
To this end, the exhibits are placed at different heights on the wall, further participating in the exploration of spaces and accentuating the dichotomy between contemporary experience and the influence of its re-experience through the plurality of media.