Decided at Dinner (When Digestion Begins)

The theme of this year’s Nordic Countries’ Pavilion, “In Therapy: Nordic Countries Face to Face,” captures a quality underpinning this year’s Biennale positioning and consistent across its many contributions. Finland, Norway, and Sweden, by pulling back their facades of model nationhood and revealing their inner turmoil in an architectural play on psychoanalysis, have set-up an apt analogy for an impression that builds up throughout the Biennale experience. Their stepped pyramid installation, a metaphor for Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, aligns architectural projects with the hurdles to mental health and well-being – and establishes an association that puts the rest of the Biennale on the couch, as well.

Aravena invited the sharing and the world obliged – with all of its issues, in a prolific expression of words and multi-media translations.

A Little Bit of Context

One of the Biennale’s three Special Projects, “A World of Fragile Parts,” the first in an arrangement between La Biennale di Venezia and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, steps back from the churning and places all things in time. A researched exploration of artifact copying, it interrupts the noise of the pressing present otherwise circulating the halls of the Arsenale with the (re)collections and wisdoms held by the containers of cultural memory.

The exhibition conveys documentation of, challenges with, and fallout from the 19th century’s efforts to study, through copy, and ultimately preserve global heritage sites. A small sampling of the V&A’s cast collection—a personal obsession of and inspiration to the curator, Brendan Cormier—is on site. As well, the impetus to protect and salvage is carried forward with encouragements to apply contemporary replication advancements. A near dozen proposals introduce pioneering relic-securing examples of deployments of digital and virtual modeling, sound and visual recording technology, and rapid prototyping methodologies. Ordinary Architecture’s design of the assembly is a colorful riff on both the atmosphere of the V&A archive and the project title and narrative.

The presentation draws a couple of field leveling insights into the Biennale discourse: One, reproduction is a literal confrontation with the reality that it’s all been done before. Two, history’s leftovers, concrete reminders of past aspirations and conflicts, reinforce relativities of (im)permanence. The contrast against the surrounding promotion and urgency is quieting. And, the lines between the incorporeal forces behind and the physicalities of architecture blur notably.

Nod to Los Angeles

LACMA showed up at the 2016 Venice Biennale. It made an appearance in “The Work of Peter Zumthor from a Small Village in Switzerland.” Discretely sharing a space with “Dreaming of Earth,” a leafy fantasy for Korea’s DMZ by Jae eun-Choi and Shigeru Ban, it materialized in the form of a fragment from a future finished version of Zumthor’s sinuous black proposal for the museum campus. Its mysterious presence, given away by a side table depicting telescoping scale diagrams of the Wilshire site, was made more so by its inexplicable adornment with wardrobe racks of beautifully gradated color garments. Though its dark undulating lines were recognizable, it revealed an unfamiliar—and alluring—side of itself.