Resilient Community, this is the name chosen for the Italian Pavilion at the next Architecture Exhibition 2021, places the issue of climate change and the demanding challenges facing architecture at the center of the exhibition, in all its vivid drama. In particular, it intends to underline how climate change is putting a strain on the sustainability of the urban, productive and agricultural system and what are the main problems and opportunities of our present.
The project, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, is based on the firm belief that architecture must make a concrete contribution to improving the quality of life by providing adequate responses to the epochal environmental and social changes taking place.
The main objective of the Italian Pavilion will be to make visitors reflect in an unprecedented way on the mechanisms of community resilience, a priority key for the recovery of a new form of interaction between urban space and productive territory, under the banner of interdisciplinary skills. and non-deterministic evolutionary logics, central elements in moments of transition.
“We are aware – declares the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini – of how much architecture is called to make an increasingly qualified and interconnected contribution to our common life, prompted by multiple social and environmental problems. The objective of the Italian Pavilion 2021 is to promote a reflection on the capacity for transformation and adaptation of the Italian communities, now necessary, to respond locally to global challenges. We cannot avoid this essential task, but rather share the progress made by Italian research in many fields on these vitally important issues. With it we hope to make a significant contribution that can bear fruit even beyond the time of the prestigious Venetian exhibition “.
The Italian Pavilion at the 2021 Architecture Biennale, an absolute novelty, will have an almost zero CO2 impact. To achieve this goal, a subtraction + integration of the materials of the Italian Pavilion 2019 for the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and a permanent relocation of everything that will be produced were arranged. It will be a unique opportunity not only to show works consistent with the objectives of the proposal, but also an opportunity to study the life cycle of a project in a context of resilience.
“Comunità Resilienti – underlines the Director General of Contemporary Creativity of the MiC and Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion Onofrio Cutaia – proposes concrete solutions for our country. Within twenty years our suburbs will be called to transform themselves into resilient communities, that is, capable of positively counteracting the social and environmental pressure currently underway. The Italian city represents a concentration of applied knowledge on which to draw to remodel the urban peripheries, the priority and complex areas of the country, to reflect on contemporaneity and the challenges it poses to the future of architecture “.
Enhancing this wealth of knowledge, starting from the model of the Italian city, compact and ecological, disseminating the results of applied research, especially outside the disciplinary and academic fields, are the challenges that the curator Melis launches to all of us.
The Italian Pavilion – comments the curator Alessandro Melis – will itself be a resilient community, made up of 14 “sub-communities”, intended as operational laboratories, research centers or case studies, according to two fundamental guidelines: a reflection on the state of the art in theme of urban resilience in Italy and in the world through the exhibition of the works of eminent Italian architects and a focus on methodologies, innovation, research with interdisciplinary experiments between architecture, botany, agronomy, biology, art and medicine “.
Like the human genome and brain, the pavilion will be a jungle inhabited by strange creatures where you can hear a background noise that is already deafening and that requires an adequate response, making use of new paradigms of knowledge. As proposed by the curator of the 2021 Architecture Biennale Hashim Sarkis, the Pavilion will emphasize the experiential and immersive aspect, favoring expressive forms linked to the graphic novel, gaming, in tones and methods of cyber punk inspiration, making use of the contribution of undisputed masters of the sector to approach and raise awareness, this is the wish, a large and young audience.
