APS 8 (1) pp. 29–37 Intellect Limited 2019
Art & the Public Sphere
Volume 8 Number 1
© 2019 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/aps_00004_1
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Paola Somma
Independent scholar
The 16th Venice Architecture
Biennale celebrates the
triumph of the ancient
régime, but la lutte continue
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Abstract
Keywords
In 1968 many intellectuals took to Piazza San Marco to express solidarity with the
students of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts who were demonstrating against the
Biennale and had been attacked for four hours by the police. In 2018 the same square
was patrolled by armed troops deployed to ’protect the tourists’ who occupied the city
and there was no sign of protests against the Biennale. On the day of inauguration,
the only voice of dissent was that of some citizens claiming their right ‘to live here’. No
trace of intellectuals. Many of the old protesters have made a comfortable career while
the invited artists to the international exhibition have uncritically responded to the call
of this year’s Architecture Biennale, whose title is ‘FREESPACE’, without questioning
the prevailing paradigm in which ‘free’ means ‘space cleared from citizens and offered
as a gift to financial investors’. Only a few national pavilions have adopted a more
articulate attitude that might recall some of the Mai ‘68 aspirations. Retracing the
events that transformed a public cultural institution into an enterprise at the service
of the art market and a powerful agent of the gentrification and Disneyfication of
Venice over the last 50 years, this article focuses on the role played by the Architecture
Biennale in the process. It also highlights the few contributions that in 2018 challenged
the dominant narrative by explicitly referring to the notion and practice of conflict.
’68 legacy
’68 slogans
Venice Biennale
rebel city
architectural activism
urban conflict
FREESPACE
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Paola Somma
Ce n’est qu’un debut
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In 1968 during the inaugural days of the Biennale groups of students marched
in the Venetian streets carrying posters proclaiming slogans such as ‘Biennale
of Capitalists: Well Burn Your Pavilions’ and ‘NO to the Biennale Servant to the
Bosses’. When they were assaulted by the police, a number of famous intellectuals, among them the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti and the painter Emilio
Vedova, took to Piazza San Marco to express their support. Also, some artists
withdrew their works from the exhibition while others wanted to make
known their dissent turning the paintings to face the walls and writing on
the retro ‘the Biennale is fascist’. Public disorders affected the official opening ceremony, and contributed to the entire edition resulting in an undertone
event (Di Stefano 2010). Commenting on the situation a well-known art critic
and curator wrote that the Biennale was like a ‘nineteenth century ferry that
sails indifferently on the waters of the May revolution’ (Celant 1968: n.pag.).
Almost immediately, however, the institution started to restructure itself
and adopted a more provocative curatorial agenda for subsequent editions.
One of the most significant initiatives was Freedom to Chile, a series of events
organized in October 1974 in solidarity with the people of Chile that included
movies, public meetings, conferences and exhibitions of posters. Ortensia
Allende, the widow of the president murdered by the dictatorship, gave the
inaugural speech and a number of exiled Chilean mural artists gathered to
form the Brigada S. Allende and toured the city painting murals in the public
squares.
The event was met with huge success, which gave the impression that the
Biennale had really started a new life. But in the following years the board, and
the cultural and political élites at large, showed a great ability to distort the
meaning of most of the slogans created by the youth who in 1968 protested
against the ‘corrupt capitalistic enterprise’, and managed to transform them
into promotional and self-celebrating messages.
Looking in retrospect, one could say that for the Venice Biennale, 1968
indeed ‘was only a beginning’. Since then it had constantly presented itself
as a serious-minded forum different from the art fairs that are the domain of
commerce and openly controlled by the art dealers. In fact such statements
are contradicted by the succession of decisions and acts that have been instrumental to the transformation of the Biennale in a market showcase and to
the increasing involvement of the private interests in the management of the
public institution.
L’urbanisme est un act politique, il doit être au service du
peuple
In the 1970s the Biennale expanded the range of the artistic disciplines on
stage, which now includes theatre, music, dance and architecture. After
some episodic events dedicated to specific architects and buildings, the first
Architecture Biennale was inaugurated in 1980.
Being dominated by the post modernist architects who with the rise of
neoliberalism were becoming increasingly more influential, the exhibition documented the transition to a commodity culture fully integrated into the hegemonic
economic and political system and the complete waning of ‘the democratizing
impetus that carried calls for reform in 1968’ (Szacka 2016: n.pag.).
But what is the function of an exhibition of architecture, by definition the
most inherently social discipline? In a very schematic way one could say that
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The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale celebrates the …
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while an art exhibition sells artworks, an architecture exhibition primarily
sells ideology. And indeed, since the 1980s edition, the Architecture Biennale
was at the forefront in promoting a radical change of the notion of architecture and urbanism, both as cultural disciplines and as professions. A key
element of the new theoretical framework is that architects are not to be
praised for their capacity to improve the living conditions in the places that
they contribute to transform, but for the ability to put on the scene spectacular images whose extravagance is touted as evidence of visionary genius. Also
the meaning of the city underwent a complete turn, becoming synonymous
of a resource to be exploited, valorized and put at the disposal of the financial investors. Each of the following editions has adopted and consolidated
this paradigm and the Architecture Biennale has been transformed into a
powerful machine at the service of the developers, even promoting specific
real estate operations that, due to the mere fact of being exhibited in Venice
and then ‘donated to the community’, acquire an aura of prestige and a label
of quality.
Evidences of the way in which the Biennale lends legitimacy to an architect’s project and provides the author a way to get rich assignments in town
are numerous. In 2010, to mention just one emblematic case, it exhibited
the project of the so-called restoration of the sixteenth-century Fontego dei
Tedeschi and its conversion into a luxury mall designed by Rem Koolhaas,
who then became director of the Biennale in 2014 (Somma 2014).
Moreover, in addition to being a site of convergence for multiple commercial interests, the institution itself keeps expanding its venues and occupying
an increasing number of valuable public spaces. This year they took over one
of the few surviving public gardens, and cut a number of old trees to provide
(free)space to a twelve-metre-tall tower designed by Daniel Libeskind for the
joy of tourists.
Overall, the Architecture Biennale’s behaviour is exactly the contrary of the
1968 approach that considered architectural interventions the vehicle for political activism in the public sphere and the term political was meant to denote
the theoretical and practical knowledge of the social life in the community.
Now the Biennale and its court of archistars have consciously taken the side
of the power.
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L’imagination au pouvoir
Year after year the submissive attitude of the Architecture Biennale to the
‘building compact’ – architectural offices, construction companies, real estate
developers, banks and investment groups – has made the true nature of the
institution a potent mix of state and corporate support designed to lure international ‘cultural’ tourism increasingly clear. The May ’68 cry ‘tout est politique’
that called for the politicization of the private sphere has eventually resulted in
the privatization of the political sphere.
In 1998 amendments were introduced to the Biennale’s statute to allow
private entities to be members of the board. Paolo Baratta, former minister of
the privatizations and former minister of foreign commerce, was appointed
president and is still in charge (having managed to obtain a change in the
national law that initially provided for a two-term limit).
Since then, the growing corporate sponsorship has translated into the
transfer of substantial power to the private sector (Madra 2006). In repayment for their generosity, the munificent donors are awarded real decisional
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power and they influence the selection of the celebrities whose participation
is essential to the return in image for the sponsors and even the choice of the
directors of the exhibition.
The case of Rolex, since 2014 the exclusive partner (not merely a sponsor)
of the Biennale, is the culmination of this process. Several archistars who work
frequently for Rolex appear constantly among the invited: from Kazuyo Sejima
who was the director of the 2010 edition and designed the Rolex Learning
Centre in Lausanne, to David Chipperfield, director in 2012, and then eight
members of the Rolex mentorship programme.
In the booklet prepared for this year’s edition, the company claims ‘its
commitment to world-class architecture’, and expresses enthusiasm about the
theme chosen by the curators, ‘which focuses on a deep sense of generosity of
spirit and sense of humanity of architecture’.
But this year the luxury brand went further and erected its own pavilion
in the precinct of the Biennale. The building ‘reminiscent of the elegant fluted
Bezel of the Oyster perpetual day-date is designed to resemble a watch bracelet’ and to confirm ‘the link between exceptional architecture and watchmaking
that is based on a shared culture of design excellence’.
The message conveyed by this gesture is more than symbolic.
Since 1907 the foreign pavilions have been built at various times by exhibiting nations on public land (owned by the municipality). The first pavilions,
Great Britain, France and Germany, were erected close to each other in a place
reserved for the great powers and whose arrangement expresses the relations
and political powers leading up to the First World War. In the same period also
the Russian pavilion was built below the German one.
Now the Rolex’s pavilion is the concrete evidence that the company, richer
and more powerful than many sovereign countries, behaves as a national state
and the Biennale agrees.
Their philosophy is summed up in the slogan standing in their advertising poster ‘a Rolex will never change the world, we leave that to the
people who wear them’, a perfect demonstration that while the attempts to
establish the primacy of the imagination and to use architecture to attack the
establishment have failed, the power had taken full control of the creative
process.
Non aux bidonvilles, non aux villes bidons
A redefinition of the physical and ethical character of cities was one of the
most compelling aspirations of the ’68 movements. Taking inspiration from
the seminal works on urban life by Guy Debord and Henry Lefebvre, artists
and activists claimed that changing the city was the precondition for any
successful change in the social, political and economic status quo. In other
words, changing the city was not a technical issue but a moral imperative.
In particular Lefebvre had pointed out that the right to the city is not the
right to the existing city, but the right to produce a different one that could be
defined only by imagining the reversal of the current situation. Also, he had
elaborated on the assumption that the production of space is the way in which
the capitalistic mode of production maintains itself and urbanization is crucial
to its expansion.
Adopting an opposite perspective, the Architecture Biennale uncritically
promotes urbanization as the only possible global scenario. That there is no
alternative to urbanization has become the predominant approach since the
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The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale celebrates the …
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2006 edition directed by Ricky Burdett, the founder of the research center
Cities and the Urban Age based at the London School of Economics. The
centre is financially supported by the Deutsche Bank, which is also one of the
most generous sponsors of the Venice Biennale. In 2016 the Biennale provided
a venue for the exhibition Conflict in an Urban Age curated by Ricky Burdett
and hosted Shaping the Cities in an Urban Age, a conference on the ‘role of
architecture in a urban world’. All these events were jointly organized with
and sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
In fact, the bank, which maintains the larger corporate art collection
in the world, is particularly active in supporting art events, but it does not
disdain architecture and infrastructure mega projects. They have also created
a Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award, whose mission is ‘to make the invisible
visible, to show what potential there is in the slums, townships, barrios gekekondus or favelas of this world, and to constitute a lobby for those who have
never had one’.
Increasingly, indeed, the Architecture Biennale seems satisfied to play an
ancillary role and lend cultural legitimacy to the rising power of the financial corporations that dictate the urban agenda and co-opt academics, scholars
and local authorities.
In addition to this, instead of promoting genuine cultural research and
innovation the institution is always ready to catch buzzwords and slogans and
turn them into spectacular events that capture masses of visitors.
The last editions’ titles, such as People Meet in Architecture (2010) or Common
Ground (2012), evoke noble intentions and principles. What is put on stage,
however, rarely corresponds to the statements of principle. Most often the
content of the exhibition represents a true détournement of the titles that are
interpreted in such a way that creates pro- corporate messages and promotes
a gradual dissipation of the theoretical embedding of architecture within an
agenda of societal reconstruction.
As a consequence, the right to the city no longer means the legitimate
aspiration of the inhabitants to build a different urban scenario, but the right
of the corporate financial interests to decide where people must congregate to
make the land more profitable.
This general trend is manifest in this year particularly conservative edition
whose curators do not even mention the 50th anniversary of the ’68. The title,
FreeSpace, might appear reminiscent of the reflections on urban geography
by Debord, who called for a ‘survey of the residual and interstitial spaces of
the city on a search for elements that might be salvaged from the dominant
culture and put to new use in a utopian reconstruction of social space’. In reality the exhibition is the true celebration of the role of architects as accomplices
of the power.
The choice of the invited artists in itself is significant to this respect.
Some parts of the world have almost completely disappeared from the
Biennale map. None from Russia or from the Middle East countries are
among the invited. The entire African continent is represented by just one
South African white male and there is a striking predominant presence of
powerful participants from a few countries: twelve from Switzerland, ten
from United Kingdom and six from the United States, which means that the
architects from three countries represent more than one third of the total
number of 71. The rest are the usual suspects, the archistars who use the
room as a corporate showcase to display their greatest hit and their flagship
constructions.
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Les murs ont la parole
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Despite the reactionary approach of the main section, the answers provided by
the national pavilions are very diverse and some of them offer more articulate
insights that challenge the seemingly invincible complicity of architects with
the global concentration of power.
Echoes of and allusions to the spirit of the ’68 are especially noticeable
in the South American countries’ pavilions that openly refer to the freedom
of imagination and explore new dialogues between geographies, places and
architecture.
‘The world is a set of possibilities and not just a set of realities […] other
worlds can be created from the same materials’, say the contributors to the
Brazilian pavilion, who explicitly recall the ‘idea of play as a subversive strategy to change the modern spectacle city and turn it into a city full of ludic
possibilities’ (Rosa 2018: n.pag.).
The exhibition, entitled Walls of Air, looks at Freespace from the point of
view of the ongoing urbanization in Brazil and aims at making visible ‘the
forms of spatial and conceptual separations that have resulted from the
urbanization process’.
One part focuses on projects that use architecture as a tool ‘to measure
conflict, transition between public and private domains and connection
between different urban fabrics’. The other consists of a series of cartographic
designs that display complex data on the spatial politics of contemporary Brazil, showing the different sorts of walls that construct a divided city.
Particularly intriguing is the section that deals with pixo, the black letter-like
sprayed graphics that ‘challenge the power dynamics in the city’. The map
not only shows the geographical distribution of the pixo in Sao Paulo; on top
of that appear the fines applied to the writers/offenders and the news with
their date, media vehicle and headlines that mention pixo. Finally, to show
the concentration of power in the repression of those marginalized activity
and to contribute to a reflection on ‘how much Brazilian architecture and its
urban development are, in fact, free’ the map cross references these data with
buildings’ square metre prices and with emblematic cultural institutions that
pixadores have sprayed at.
The exhibition is complemented by a rich catalogue that, in a format
unlike the traditional one, summarizes the exercise of exploration, discussion
and debate that have been developed in the process of constructing the exhibition. Ten broad themes – from ‘the map is not the territory’ to ‘the geography
of the real estate market’ – are investigated.
In the chapter on pixo, entitled ‘the encryption of power: disobedience
and exclusion in the city’, the authors highlight ‘how liberating can pixo be
in revealing the city’s power logic and the underlying dynamics that define
inclusion and exclusion’.
They discuss how pixadores use ‘the city as a notebook and each wall is
as a sheet’ to expose issues such as the privatization of public space and the
government’s negligence towards a class that has few outlets of expression. By
‘decrying rights to the city, which are denied to most people’ the pixadores put
into practice the ’68 slogans that proclaimed ‘la beauté est dans la rue’ (‘beauty
is in the streets’) and ‘la police s’affiche aux Beaux Arts les Beaux Arts affichent
dans la rue’ (‘the police are occupying the Beaux Arts, the Beaux Arts occupy
the street’).
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The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale celebrates the …
Non à l’état policier
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Prison to Prison, an intimate story between two architectures, is the title of the
exhibition organized by the curators of the pavilion of Uruguay.
Their project/research started from a reflection on the fact that the biggest
building constructed in Uruguay in 2017 is a prison, the first public–private
partnership experience as far as prisons are concerned, which ‘makes us think
of our collective fears and desires an also of the scopes and limitations of
architecture’.
The prison, built by a foreign company, is located in Punta de Rieles, a
district of Montevideo, and is a large-scale replica of an imported model.
Surrounded by a high concrete wall it is adjacent to an existing prison, known
as the village-like prison, where since 2014 a unique experience of collective
transformation with the participation of the inmates has been developed. A
‘vibrant neighborhood that imitates the outside inside’, resulting in an ‘unexpected Freespace’, has been built by the prisoners themselves without any
input from architects or academics, but with the support of the Director Luis
Parody, who was an exile in France during the dictatorship, and is convinced
that ‘prisoners can only learn dignity if they are treated with dignity’.
By telling the story of the two prisons the curators formulate questions
whose significance transcends the specific case. They make it clear how the
two colliding spaces establish dialectic relationships, how the two opposite architectures in terms of their understanding of punishment, surveillance, technique, space and power coexist and are inhabited. They extend
the confrontation of two specific buildings to ‘two visions of architecture of
which these two prisons are a contemporaneous living image, that is a police
architecture, consisting in repression and privatization of everything, in
juxtaposition to a political architecture’ (Aldama et al. 2018: n.pag.).
The catalogue not only reproduces the materials exhibited in the pavilion;
it includes critical texts that elaborate on the very question at stake, that is,
‘why and how architecture takes part in the destruction of human beings? and
at the same time, why and how architecture can make life possible, potentiate and celebrate life, even in the least expected place?’. Multiple answers are
possible, but all share the notion that space is a contested terrain and that
today architecture maintains its intrinsically political role as ‘a place of work,
conflict, and […] joy’.
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La lutte continue
The statement the city is us, a clear reminder of the ’68 cry ‘l’etat c’est moi’,
appears in the first lines of the introduction to the catalogue of the Venezuelan
pavilion, which the Los Angeles Times has defined ‘the most dissonant pavilion’
of this Biennale.
The entire exhibition entitled CCS Espacio Rebelde focuses on the idea of
‘rebel space’ that implies, according to the curator Nelson Rodriguez, ‘a process
of inclusive consensus, collective construction, and community agreements’.
Three urban axes of Caracas that are ‘the scene of the historical struggle between the capitalist model prevailing on the planet and the Bolivarian
socialism of the 21st century’ are taken into consideration. These spaces that
have been reoccupied, revalued and re-inhabited and are now open and free
for the enjoyment of the wider community are ‘a first step in the process of
democratizing the use of urban land’.
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Adopting a language that reminds many of the ’68 instances, the curators
show how, in response to the neoliberalism, social movements can reshape
the terrain of the politics and the city, and how ‘public social spaces can
emerge where popular leadership reconfigures the right to the city’ a right that
is violently contested by those who have historically already enjoyed it.
Conclusion
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As any other cultural institution, the Venice Biennale not only mirrors the
political and social attitudes of the times, but is an instrument potentially
available to either perpetuate or innovate the dominant cultural discourse.
In 1968 the Biennale was obliged to modify its format, but in the following years by stealing the power of the words that protesters used themselves,
corporate interests and their political affiliates have managed and taken
complete control of the agenda. Now public relations and marketing fuse
with high-profile cultural generosity, while aptly publicized slogans pushing
somewhat vague concepts are supposed to prove their social concerns.
The events of 1968 drove change in the attitudes of architects who were
forced to critically reflect on the role of their profession and adopt a selfreflexive thinking on their work. However, what emerges today is a diffuse
adaptation to the hegemonic political trends and a serious level of detachment
between statements of principle and actual behaviour.
In 1968 Whitney M. Young Jr, the activist and director of the National
Urban League, addressing the convention of the American Architects
Association, said: ‘you are not a profession that has distinguished itself by
your social and civic contributions to the cause of civil rights […]. you are
most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance’
(Cramer 2018: n.pag.).
This denouncement could have been a good starting point for a reflection
of the legacy of the ’68, but the Venice Architecture Biennale seems not even
have noticed the anniversary.
Despite the institution’s indifference, however, some countries from
the ‘periphery of the empire’ still struggle and are proud to exhibit their ’68
aspirations.
References
Aldama, S., Colom, F., Morera D., Rios, J. and Wood, M. (eds) (2018), Prison to
Prison: An Intimate Story between Two Architectures, Montevideo: Quiroga
& Rambla.
Celant, G. (1968), ‘Una Biennale in grigio verde’, Casabella, 32:8, pp. 52–56.
Cramer, N. (2018), ‘Architecture, equity and activism: 1968 to now’,
architectmagazine.com, 8 May, https://www.architectmagazine.com/
practice/architecture-equity-and-activism-1968-to-now_o. Accessed 20
August 2018.
Di Stefano, C. (2010), ‘The 1968 Biennale: Boycotting the exhibition: An
account of three extraordinary days’ in C. Ricci (ed.), Starting from Venice,
Milano: Etal, pp. 130–33.
Kozlowski, G., Fierro, L., Rosa, M. M. and Camacho, S. (eds) (2018), Walls of
Air, Sao Paulo: Bienal de Sao Paulo.
Madra, Y. M. (2006), ‘From imperialism to transnational capitalism: The
Venice Biennale as a transitional conjuncture’, Rethinking Marxism, 18:4,
pp. 525–37.
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36 Art & the Public Sphere
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The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale celebrates the …
Rodriguez, N. (ed.) (2018), Caracas Rebel Space, Venezuela pavilion, Caracas:
Instituto de las Artes de la Imagen en el Espacio.
Rosa, M. L. (2018), ‘Contesting urban borders: Cultural practices, design and
the construction of urban situations’ in G. Kozlowski, L. Fierro, M. Rosa
and S. Camacho (eds), Walls of Air, Sao Paulo: Bienal de Sao Paulo.
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Suggested citation
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Somma, P. (2019), ‘The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale celebrates the
triumph of the ancient régime, but la lutte continue’, Art & the Public Sphere,
8:1, pp. 29–37, doi: 10.1386/aps_00004_1
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Contributor details
Paola Somma taught urban planning and design at the IUAV University of
Venice, Italy (1980–2000). Since retiring, she operates as an independent
scholar. Her main focus of expertise lies on investigations between social and
economic structure and urban space.
Among her publications on Venice are Venezia: da città a marchio di successo
in Il diritto alla città storica (e.book, 2018); Mercanti in fiera: la Biennale di
Architettura di Venezia, progetti in vetrina o città in vendita? (2014); Imbonimenti:
la Laguna, terra di conquista (2012); Benettown: vent’anni di mecenatismo (2011).
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E-mail: paolamariasomma@gmail.com
Paola Somma has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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