The Czech Republic’s annual cultural event, the Signal Festival, returns to Prague. Combining contemporary visual art, urban space and modern technology, it is the most visited cultural festival in the country. This year, for the first time, the Signal Festival will transform Prague Castle into a projection area and gallery zone, with two routes that will allow visitors to explore popular and lesser-known parts of Prague alike. The first route will lead through the Prague Castle District and bring the castle to life, allowing visitors to see select parts of the castle and Prague hotspots in a new light, while the second route will wind through digital and creative culture hotspots in the Old Town and central Prague, featuring works by renowned Czech and international artists. Titled Ecosystems II: Quest, this year’s festival will showcase 22 installations by prominent artists that will be displayed on both routes, including seven exclusive to the Gallery Zone.

Also for the first time, the Signal Festival will host the Signal Forum conference, a European creative forum organized in collaboration with the Slovak festival Sensorium, that will take place on October 11 and 12 at CAMP in Prague. With 15 internationally recognized speakers, allowing attendees interested in 21st-century trends to choose amongst a range of lectures, workshops, and other activities rooted in the festival’s main theme.

The post Signal Festival 2024 appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Pearson Lloyd’s “Well Made: What it means today” brings together a wide range of designers and thought leaders at Yorkton Workshops. Part of the 2024 London Design Festival, the show is on from September 14-22.

While the firm’s presence and outlook is global in scope, they retain a decidedly local presence. Case in point? As part of this year’s London Design Festival (LDF), Pearson and Lloyd are curating the landmark exhibition “Well Made: What it means today,” which brings together 30 design voices — including Jasper Morrison, Cat Drew, Erwan Bourollec and Anniinna Koivu — to examine the meaning of creativity, sustainability and quality across a variety of design disciplines. Ahead of the festival’s opening on September 14, the pair have also assembled a list of LDF highlights for Azure readers. Read on below for Tom and Luke’s top picks:

Creating a sense of place is a primary human condition and over the last hundred years or so, industrial production has removed us from the use of local and sustainable materials and solutions. The exhibition not only explores materials but methods of construction, moving away from a very linear industrial model of the factory and looking at nature as a source of constructional inspiration. The show investigates biodiversity and biomimicry in design, as well as bio-morphic design, bio-based materials and bio-regenerative design. — Luke Pearson

I have loved this work ever since it was first exhibited a few years ago. Rescaling the craft and aesthetics of pottery transforms it into a new sense of being. Quite mesmerizing. Clustering micro vase and pot forms together leans more towards sculpture than simply function. — Tom Lloyd

As a professional designer, we are often held back by what we know and our muscle memory. The generation that is emerging — naïve, curious, and (hopefully!) free from inhibition — is a barometer for changing views but also acting at the front end of “what if?” in terms of technology or material experimentation. This exhibition is looking at material developments, climate action and the integration of artificial intelligence with design to drive innovation and sustainability. Whilst we may have grounds to fear AI, it’s clear to me it is a tool we must harness to allow us to think collectively and optimize global efforts that otherwise get dispersed and lost in the ether. — Luke Pearson

Design should be political. This review of design as part of protest in this exhibition immediately drew me in. The Beacon structure is a beautiful, if not subversive, example of real world innovation. Creating a symbol of protest that cannot easily be dismantled by the police, it clearly did its work in irritating the powers that be. Design and innovation are needed in all walks of life. — Tom Lloyd

Kingston University, unlike so many design schools these days, celebrates and has a high focus on the act of making. This is evident in the teaching and the resultant creative output. I feel, as a designer, the physical process is vital to understand the nature of materials, their inherent qualities and ultimately how they can be manipulated to become useful, desirable objects. — Luke Pearson

I have known the team at Mitre and Mondays for some time and am always charmed by their thinking and ambition. Their theme this year of “Tolerance” is a lovely mixing of the physical and social sides of what we do as designers. I am intrigued to see their creative response. Look out for their mobile café installation as it moves around the city. — Tom Lloyd

This panel discussion at the V&A looks at the notion of play. I have always said that I am lucky in that as an adult, I have found a career that allows me to play. Play is vital to the act of discovery and insight, so for a designer, it’s a key component of our daily activity; As a human being, it is vital simply in order to maintain a healthy mind. It’s a pleasure activity. But as we grow up, the general perception is that play is something that children do, and that it isn’t functionally useful. It will be interesting to see the discussions of how play relates to the topics of wellbeing, creativity, society and the digital landscape in this V&A initiative. — Luke Pearson

We all know the massive impact of the fashion industry on our planetary health. Fast fashion and hyper fast trends create material obsolescence at an alarming rate. Exhibitions like this, which shine a light on the problem — but also look at ways to tackle it — should be front and centre of the design debate. — Tom Lloyd

As a lover of cultural divergence, I have witnessed the global economy erode the specificities of different peoples’ and locations’ meanings. As we travel the world, there is a global blandness to the high street. The joy of finding something unknown and unfamiliar — or a curious interpretation of something — is a continual need I have and still propels me. Sometimes these objects are ubiquitous everyday things that are simply typologically different and sometimes they are utterly unique. — Luke Pearson

Marina Willer’s beautiful show bringing to life the graphic language of man hole covers across London is going to be a hit. It reminds us to be curious, look around us and enjoy the richness of our built environment. In the show, Marina has created brass rubbings straight off the pavement and turned them into artworks through colour and composition. Stunning stuff. — Tom Lloyd

***

The 2024 edition of the London Design Festival runs from September 14-22. Pearson Lloyd’s “Well Made: What it means today” is on at Yorkton Workshops during the entire run of the festival.

The post Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd’s Guide to the 2024 London Design Festival appeared first on Azure Magazine.

London-based Turkish-born designer and artist Melek Zeynep Bulut unveils her latest work, Duo, at the 2024 edition of the London Design Festival. The installation, located in the Painted Hall at Greenwich’s historic Old Royal Naval College, marks another bold exploration by Melek into the realms of perception, space, and sensory experience. Known for her distinctive approach that melds art, design, and architecture, Melek’s creative process is informed by her synesthesia — a condition that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting colours or feeling sounds — allowing her to discern sensory fields that she translates into tangible works.

The impressive suspended structure takes the form of a rectangular prism, evocative of ancient architectural thresholds. Set within the cavernous and richly adorned Painted Hall, a space originally designed by Sir James Thornhill in the 18th century, Duo responds to its historical context with an avant-garde interpretation of duality and oppositional forces—such as centre and periphery, inside and outside, night and day, time and space, or simply, two people in conversation. The installation employs an interdependent system of magnets, sensors, perception-altering surfaces, and acoustic reflectors that respond dynamically to the presence of visitors.

The post Duo appeared first on Azure Magazine.

The WIP Collaborative team poses with the Soft Fits installation. PHOTO: WIP Collaborative

East of the underpass at The Bentway Studio, a lounge-scape design by WIP Collaborative defies the city’s conventions of hard structures. Soft Fits, according to WIP’s Elsa Ponce, comes from an urge to address the lack of urban environments that are supportive of both mental and physical health. “Both literally and metaphorically speaking, there’s no soft spaces to be found outside,“ says Ponce.

To combat this issue, the multidisciplinary practice (the project team included Abby Coover, Elsa Ponce, Lindsay Harkema, and Sera Ghadaki) turned to teenagers to answer a survey that realized their idea for a woven installation that brings softness to an urban environment.

WIP Collaborative’s community weaving workshop at The Bentway Studio. PHOTO: WIP Collaborative.

WIP Collaborative reused materials recycled from a previous installation. PHOTO: WIP Collaborative.

By weaving reclaimed cords — in a collaboration with local textile artist Colleen McCarten — the installation invited teenagers to shape their own space through co-design. Though the design was led by the ideas of teens, the space proved itself to be inclusive of all ages, as a curious group of elders finishing a Tai Chi class stopped to interact with the woven form, rustling with the fringes. 

WIP Collaborative member Sera Ghadaki notes Soft Fits is not prescriptive, allowing individuals to interpret the space however they like. “We want to create spaces that can be used in a myriad of ways, because it’s not a one size fits all approach,” says Ghadaki. “Different people of different ages, different abilities, different interests will use the space in different ways.”

Whether you’re engaging physically with the lounge-scape or simply observing, WIP Collaborative hopes that the installation will spark memories and create special moments for visitors, fostering a sense of ownership and agency.

Wind Ensemble by Heather Nicol.

At a sound and soft sculpture installation by Toronto’s own Heather Nicol, meanwhile, following the echoing sounds of voices and wind chimes will lead you to The Bentway’s heart under the expressway. Wind Ensemble evidently sparks the curiosity of many. Passersby are quick to fill the space with spontaneous joy, as they experiment with the brightly coloured microphone cones, laughing as their voices amplify and battle with the surrounding chorus of traffic, sirens and construction. 

Perspective Alignment by Chloë Bass.

Nearby, visitors can linger on rock benches with poetic inscriptions that are well worth the read. The words on Chloë Bass’ Perspective Alignment examine how historical and contemporary traumas, from colonization to pandemic isolation, can influence a person’s mental health. Reading Bass’ words spark a moment to ponder what it means to heal as a city, and evokes a sense of camaraderie within the community.

Holding Space by Nnenna Okore.

Tracings by Nico Williams.

Amidst the moments of reflection, the most action-packed part of The Bentway is still the iconic skate trail. While the rigid architecture of the underpass stands tall, two art installations weave around this busy space to create a contrasting sense of tranquility. Holding Space by Nnenna Okore serves as a centrepiece, with its bright Ankara fabric adding a vivid backdrop to the forceful movement of two rollerbladers whipping around the trail. Posted up above on the concrete columns, Tracings by Nico Williams extends the contrast through woven fabric and jingle cones that bring a literal softness to the hard urban infrastructure.

Walking:Holding by Rosana Cade.

After looping around the site, the last installation to see is Walking:Holding, an eight-portrait photography installation by Kirk Lisaj that captures Rosana Cade’s intimate performance series of strangers holding hands. Besides documenting the performance, which took place on The Bentway in May, the photos help us envision a new reality where, instead of simply passing by each other in daily life, we might pause to embrace one another.

Tracings by Nico Williams. PHOTO: Samuel Engelking.

In Toronto, where so much of the built fabric feels unyielding, spaces like these remind us that cities are not bound to their hard elements. Softness may not always be found in buildings and concrete, but it can emerge in human interaction, thoughtfully designed public spaces, and in the art that encourages us to pause and reflect. Softer City is not just a collection of installations, but a call to imagine — and create — a more compassionate urban environment. Even under all that concrete.

More information on the Softer City program is available at The Bentway website.

The post Softer City: The Bentway’s Gentle Transformation appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Pavilion 02: Surf la Kaz by ENSA La Réunion

Designed by French architect Bernard Tschumi (who sponsored the Archi-Folies initiative), Parc De La Villette has a long-standing reputation for experimental architecture, as one of the formative works of the deconstructivist movement. Tschumi won the competition for the park’s design in 1982, responding to a brief to transform the 50-hectare industrial area, then occupied by abattoirs, into a thriving cultural hub. His winning scheme leveraged points, lines and surfaces as organizing elements (the surfaces being programmed areas and the lines being the overlying grid that connects them), translating the “rhizome” theory developed by Deleuze and Guattari into a spatial plan that offers freedom of circulation, with multiple connections between any two points, while also referencing the work of constructivist artists like Wassily Kandinsky.

Pavilion 07: Coup de Poing by ENSA Paris-Val de Seine

As for the points, they took the form of 26 individually designed “folies”: bright red landmarks situated on the grid that help visitors orient themselves within the park. As a typology, follies typically exist only as objects, with their sole purpose being visual delight, though some of the structures now have prescribed uses, such as cafes or ticketing or lookout points. While their consistent design language fosters a sense of cohesion, the intentionally disjointed scheme was intended to create unexpected tensions that allowed users to define their own relationship to the urban space. In other words, it was an opportunity for Tschumi to rethink what a park could be.

Pavilion 11: 5 Sens du Penta by ENSA Bordeaux

The Archi-Folies’ similarity in size and scale puts them in natural dialogue with Tschumi’s structures. Unlike the original follies, however, the new pavilions have both an intended meaning and a clear use. Each team of 15 students, supervised by their professors, partnered with one of France’s athletic federations to create a functional space to celebrate medal-winning athletes and host sports demonstrations, whose design would also represent its respective sport. There were a few stipulations: Each school was allotted an 11.25 x 11.25-metre plot to design within (situated along one of two structuring axes of the park), and the pavilion had to be made of sustainable materials that could be recycled and repurposed at the end of the Games.

Pavilion 03: Les Ram’eaux by ENSA Nancy

Students oversaw each phase, from fundraising to design to construction. In July 2023, they presented their sketches and models at ENSA Paris-Malaquais for public consultation (and feedback from Tschumi himself). These models were used to determine the exact placement of the pavilions on the site. After a nearly two-year design process, the structures were prefabricated off-site and then assembled by the students in just 9 days.

Pavilion 12: Le Manège by ENSA Versailles

Some student groups took a more literal design approach: Pavilion 1, designed by ENSA Paris-Est for the mountain and climbing federation, features an 11-metre climbing wall, while Pavilion 5 by ENSA Marseille aptly draws from boat construction to honour the sailing federation. Made of stacked bales of straw, the circular equestrian pavilion (designed by ENSA Versailles) is equally on the nose.

Pavilion 08: Le Triangle by ENSA Strasbourg

Other projects translated their respective sports into geometric forms. Students at ENSA Strasbourg, for instance, conceived a triangulated wood and zinc roof for the triathlon pavilion to represent the three disciplines of the Olympic sport. The rowing pavilion by ENSA Nancy, meanwhile, boasts an angular solid wood structure designed using advanced digital modelling. Its posts are meant to resemble a skiff, while the overall form seeks to embody the gesture of rowers in motion. Its translucent roof lets the structure shine and also creates the illusion of an open-air space. Though the pavilion remains fully open, its design can accommodate exterior walls, allowing it to take on new uses throughout the year.

Pavilion 09: Vélodôme by ENSA Clermont-Ferrand

For Pavilion 9, dedicated to the cycling federation, students at ENSA Clermont-Ferrand were inspired by the geometry of a bicycle. Using local materials from their region (solid Douglas fir lattices and perforated canvases for sun protection), the students left the structure exposed, its trussed roof evoking spokes and the circular room at the centre (which hosts an exhibition) recalling the form of a wheel; the twelve support posts are weighted with massive volcanic stones.

Pavilion 04: Immersion Bleutée by ENSA Grenoble

Many of the Archi-Folies leaned heavily on symbolism. With its stark white structure and blue accents, the paddle sports pavilion by ENSA Grenoble stands out against the park’s greenery. Designed to evoke the movement of water, a perforated pre-lacquered aluminum screen around the perimeter recalls the trail of bubbles left in a boat’s wake, while the dappled light it filters in mirrors the magic of reflections on the water’s surface; a series of “portholes” curate views from outside in and vice versa. Inside, an exhibition explores the history of the sport as well as associated environmental issues.

Pavilion 20: Ty-Arc’h by ENSA Brittany

For the archery pavilion, ENSA Brittany looked back to the sport’s roots, modelling the space’s design after vernacular architecture, namely outdoor archery shelters. Comprised of three wooden volumes around a central covered space, all clad in cork, the pavilion has been designed to utilize minimal materials. The floor is made from recycled concrete slabs, while select walls made of woven rope nod to the materiality of bowstrings.

Pavilion 17: Step by Step by ENSA Lyon

Finally, the gymnastics and dance pavilions, designed by ENSA Saint-Étienne and ENSA Lyon respectively, seek to manifest a sense of movement. The latter takes the form of a cube, made of wood assembled using a tongue and groove system without screws or nails. The students then used a software to generate an algorithm that analyzed the precise movements of breakdancers in action and used it to carve out a curved pathway through the structure. The grey linoleum dance floor was reused from a former project.

Pavilion 14: La Routine by ENSA Saint-Étienne

As for the gymnastics pavilion, its circular form is hemmed in by trampoline mats, and its base is covered in floor mats of various sizes. An undulating ribbon of solid wood wraps around the space, not only serving as bench seating but also evoking the same dynamic quality of a tumbling pass. “Architecture and sports have one thing in common,” says Tschumi, “the celebration of the movement of bodies in space.”

Lead image by Aurélien Chen: Pavilion 01, Ascension by ENSA Paris-Est, sits adjacent Folie N4 which currently houses *DUUU, an artist radio station.

The post Sports and Architecture Converge at Paris’s Parc de La Villette appeared first on Azure Magazine.

In a way, the fused glass frames, fabricated in Europe’s largest kiln, were indeed a teaser of other, far-off attractions. Lasvit art director Maxim Velčovský designed the installation (dubbed Porta) to market the...

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The post Lasvit’s Porta Installation Led the Way to Magical Glasswork appeared first on Azure Magazine.

Divided into 100 links, Gunter’s chain was a surveying tool used by colonizers to lay out fields, farms and towns.

Gunter’s chain, as it was once called, was used by surveyors to measure and subdivide land during the colonization of North America. The stacks of books represented the corner mounds used to demarcate the boundaries of each plot. “Together, these tools enabled the conversion of earth into land and inextricably linked liberty to property,” the designers explained in their artists’ statement. When I toured the installation in November, AD–WO co-founder Emanuel Admassu elaborated, “We wanted to think about the horror of these tools, but also how they produce environments that are sublime.”

The first room of A Long Walk Home’s CAB 5 installation served as a shrine to missing and murdered Black girls and young women.

This tension between horror and beauty ran throughout CAB 5 as designers unpacked structures of oppression and erasure in the built environment. On the Cultural Center’s ground level, three galleries were taken over by A Long Walk Home, a local non-profit that works to combat gender violence and racism through a Black feminist lens. Its monument to missing and murdered Black girls and young women highlighted a sobering reality — all the while managing to capture the vibrancy of the lives it commemorated. In the second gallery of the sequence, poignant notes written on yellow paper hearts hung from a central tree, while the sound of birds chirping filled the space.

The second gallery of A Long Walk Home’s Black Girlhood Altar took the form of a verdant garden.

In the Chicago Rooms, meanwhile, Ruth De Jong’s CAB 5 contribution at first appeared to explore the theme of horror on a surface level. De Jong created the set design for the Haywood ranch in Jordan Peele’s film Nope, and her installation sought to demonstrate how buildings themselves become dominant characters in cinema. Rendered in monochromatic white, the house was fronted by six buckets of fake blood (nodding to the blood that rains down in the movie).

Ruth De Jong’s Haywood House installation at CAB 5.

But while De Jong’s iteration overtly referenced Peele’s film in many ways, it also spoke to the director’s philosophy on horror. “In Jordan Peele’s films, horror isn’t confined to a place beneath the stairs or the space between the walls. It’s not bound to a time of day. It’s pervasive; it’s structural,” explained Andrew Schachman, a member of Floating Museum, the local art collective that curated CAB 5. Indeed, the world’s most marginalized communities experience the horrors of inequality every day — in broad daylight.

The post Designers Unpack Structures of Oppression and Erasure at the Chicago Architecture Biennial appeared first on Azure Magazine.

First introduced during the spring installment, the new format for the show is centred around The Circles – content and event platforms that will serve as meeting points, showcases for products and concepts, and demonstrate the blurred boundaries between art and design. In total, four Circle themes have been devised to provide “connecting elements” for visitors, exhibitors, designers and field experts to congregate and share ideas, knowledge and inspiration: The Circle Club, Café, Bistro and Bar, gathering points with a relaxed atmosphere for meetings, snacks and drinks; Brand Circles for product highlights; Community Circles to exhibit a variety of collaborations, concepts and networking opportunities; and the Installation Circles, where three studios – Studio Dessí, Raw-Edges Design Studio and VANTOT – will each craft visionary displays that tread the line between art and design and challenge perceptions of light, material and hospitality in stunning sculptural installations. 

Vienna-based Studio Dessí, founded and led by Marco Dessí, explores the concept of hospitality with its “Welcome to Stay” Installation Circle. Situated under a giant doughnut-shaped inflatable “roof” – which Dessí considers “the purest form of welcoming” – the studio has used decontextualized materials and semi-finished products from the construction industry to form an intriguing backdrop for a selection of furnishings – including the studio’s own Texta D70 and Thonet 520 chairs – that encourage lingering, discussion and creative play.

Dessí’s stark black Cima lights for Lodes are suspended from cable ropes and keep the installation anchored, so to speak. Touching on cultural traditions and artistic impulses that often-times characterize hospitality, the circle evokes the ethereal beauty of James Turrell’s temple architecture and will feature compelling art objects by Vienna-based multidisciplinary talent Quirin Krumbholz. 

Situated behind a set of digitally printed curtains, the “Sense of Surface” installation by Raw-Edges Design Studio delves deep into the concept of multi-layered structures. Offering a moment of visual calm and contemplation, the secluded space transforms flat surfaces into three-dimensional lighting objects made from 3D-printed-mesh: Designed by Raw-Edges co-founders Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay, the individual objects were printed as flat structures at their London studio and then formed on-site (this economized printing material and transportation costs).

The organically shaped luminaries – inspired by nature, handicrafts and digitally generated patterns – toy with convention in that the structures “close up” (or become opaque) when illuminated and return to transparency when the light is turned off. 

Consisting of an open outdoor area and a darker indoor space, the “Impact of Light” installation by VANTOT (based in Breda, the Netherlands) experiments with the disembodiment of light. Suspended from a filigree grid system, numerous spotlights are positioned to carve out spaces and sculptures from light, exploring the potential to craft expansive light sculptures in public spaces as well as in smaller more intimate interiors.

Fashioned by VANTOT’s design duo Esther Jongsma and Sam van Gurp, the illuminated installation highlights the influence lighting can have on and in a space and how one system can achieve vastly different results. Powered by low-voltage technology, the light sculptures invite interaction and allow visitors to creatively play with light. 

While each of the three Installation Circles offers a unique and curious perspective, they do share one thing in common – an adherence to sustainability and responsibility: All materials (including the inflatable roof) from Studio Dessí’s installation will be returned to and reused by the construction industry; all elements in the Raw-Edges circle are fully recyclable or reusable; and VANTOT’s restrained use of physical materials means there will be no waste upon disassembly. 

The post imm Cologne 2024: The Installation Circles Connect Design and Sustainability appeared first on Azure Magazine.

St. Louis sits on unceded land historically inhabited by the Osage and Missouria nations. As the centre of the Indigenous Mississippian culture, the area played host to a number of earthworks associated, today, with the preserved Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in nearby southern Illinois. With the advent of settler expansion and subsequent river-borne and eventual rail-linked industrialization, these archaeologically rich land-formed forts and dwellings were periodically destroyed. Irish and German immigrants quickly established themselves on the frontier of what would become Southern and Northern states. St. Louis — once a Fur trading stronghold within the vast French-controlled Louisiana Territory — emerged as a major slave marketplace in the 19th century. The city played an important role in the lead up to the American Civil War as inhabitants with opposing views — including scores of recently freed people — engaged in early skirmishes that would ignite the larger conflict. Thanks to its long-standing ambitions as an important transportation hub, the city later played host to the 1904 World’s Fair. 

Sugarloaf Mound. From the Heckenberg Family Scrapbook. Courtesy of Joan Heckenberg.

Throughout the 19th and 20th-centuries, the city’s Black population grew significantly. The central Mill Creek Valley neighbourhood emerged as a hive of cultural activity — and in no small measure contributed to the rise of Jazz legends Jospehine Baker and Scott Joplin. Various urban renewal projects (undertaken under the scope of the 1954 Housing Act) saw the vibrant area demolished in the guise of so-called progress and in favour of new development, dispersing the community. Now seen as a symbol for the ineffective development of social housing “projects” throughout the country, Pruitt–Igoe was constructed with federal funds in the 1950s. Eventually demolished in 1972, the residential complex — designed by Minoru Yamasaki — had little to no recreational space, too few healthcare facilities or shopping centres, and limited employment opportunities. More acutely, mounting economic disparities and racialized disinvestment effectively destroyed the neighbourhood through poor maintenance and public neglect.

Installation view of Anita and Nokosee Fields’s WayBack (2023) (in progress), forty wooden platforms painted and embellished with ribbons and tile, sound; and Anna Tsouhlarakis’s The Native Guide Project: STL (2023), billboard. Photo credit: Chris Bauer. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023.

St. Louis was subject to segregation and Jim Crow laws well into the 20th century, and some explicitly discriminatory measures remained in place until the early 1980s. Outlying Black neighbourhoods, including those surrounding Pruitt–Igoe, received extremely little support, yet still fostered strong cultural engagement. Beginning in the 1980s, meanwhile, urban gentrification led to the partial redevelopment of the city’s downtown. Long-standing racial tensions came to a head in 2014 when Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in the suburb of Ferguson, sparking the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. In the near-decade since, numerous grassroots cultural and political organizations — such as gallery, community centre, and arts incubator The Luminary — have proven to be vital resources in the re-emboldenment of marginalized communities.  

Black Quantum Futurism, SLOWER-THAN-LIGHT SHRINE: IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, 2023. Plasma-cut steel with reclaimed gates from demolished homes, wood, gravel, cowry shells, Location: La Rose Room Cocktail Lounge. Curated by James McAnally. Commissioned by Counterpublic for Counterpublic 2023. Photo by Jon GItchoff.

First mounted in 2019, Counterpublic is a new type of civic exhibition aimed at harnessing the potential of different creative mediums in expanding political and cultural discourse across St. Louis. The curatorial initiative utilizes art and architectural invention as a form of social design, community engagement, and placemaking, negotiating between different historical narratives and a contemporary drive to forge better outcomes. The event seeks to elicit new site specific and responsive conversations unlike other urban art festivals, which primarily focus on outsider or global perspectives. 

Matthew Angelo Harrison, Detail view of Solemn Unrest (2023). Photo by Tim Johnson. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023.

Yet, as co-founder and art director James McAnally explains “The issues explored within the scope of Counterpublic, frames St. Louis as a crucible for how most U.S. cities — if not also, others around the world — in beginning to address their complex histories, reconsidering their prevailing narratives and histories.”

New Red Order, Give it Back: Stage Theory (2023). Billboard at Sugarloaf Mound. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023.

Programmed as a Triennial, the four month-event activated different parts of St. Louis with installations, performances, talks, and other activities that appealed as much to a local audience as it did to national and international visitors. This year’s program — the largest such public art initiative in the country — incorporated some 30 public psycho-geographic interventions commissioned to a carefully selected raft of contemporary talents operating in and outside of St. Louis. (Many of the works were developed in partnership with a group of independent curators.) 

Torkwase Dyson, Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), 2023. Photo credit: Chris Bauer. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023.

Strategically situated along a six-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue — a thoroughfare that traverses the city and its layered past — these various works implemented and riffed-on different components of the build environment to highlight distinct facets of public memory and to help begin to cultivate the sense of a reparative future. Beginning with an installation at Sugarloaf Mound, the last remaining yet severely obstructed Indigenous mound in St. Louis (erected by the Osage Nation) and ending with Torkwase Dyson’s architectural installation Bird and Lava — an abstract homage to the lasting legacy of Jazz forefather Scott Joplin. Some of the pieces are permanent — Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s changing of road names in the so-called “State Streets” to reflect Indigenous tribes or their leaders instead of the names of states that dispossessed them — while others remained on view for the duration of the festival. The installations presented a mix between conceptual works and those that were more intuitive and tactile in conveying their core messages. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s commission for Counterpublic 2023, including State Names Map: Cahokia, 2023, mixed media on canvas; and Trade Canoe: Osage Orange, 2023, wood from an Osage orange tree, cast resin, mirror. Installation view at Monaco. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023. Photo by Jon GItchoff.

A number of the pieces in this section of the program were mounted in partnership with New Red Order, an anonymous collective closely associated with the Land Back Movement, an organization advocating for a transfer of decision-making power over land to Indigenous communities. The movement does not ask current residents to vacate their homes but maintains that Indigenous governance is possible, sustainable, and preferred for public lands. 

Trade Canoe: Osage Orange, 2023, wood from an Osage orange tree, cast resin, mirror. Installation view at Monaco. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023. Photo by Jon GItchoff.

With most of the commissioned works constituting as outdoor installations and performances held at Greenfinch Theater and Dive on the final two nights of the event in mid July, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Lightening Bison work was presented at The Luminary as an augmented reality overlay. The app-enabled digital work depicted an individual in traditional dress as they might have appeared in this very location hundreds if not thousands of years ago but also in the present day and future. Counterpublic 2023 comprised projects derived from different layers and components of St. Louis life, such as the murals painted on the side of buildings — visual artist Simiya Sudduth‘s tarot card-esque Justice — or the interactive musical instruments mounted in a park — composer Raven Chacon’s call and response Drum Grid performance. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger, We Survive You-Midéegaadi, 2023, editorial photograph featuring mixed-media buffalo regalia made of repurposed materials. Photo by Brandon Soder, 2023. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York City. Commissioned by Counterpublic 2023

This approach was perhaps most evident at the historic St. Louis Union Station — a repurposed train terminus turned hotel and amusement park. Three site responsive installations by Steffani Jemison, produced by guest curator Diya Vij, played on the location’s current function to highlight elements of the sites’ history. Sky Is the Only called to mind different narratives from the past with spoken words and songs played within a specific gondola of a popular ferris wheel rising above the area in question. Untitled (Ripple) comprised retired stage drapes and a coin machine minting medallions commemorating Jospehine Baker. This project constituted a radically accessible form of art and played on the concept of crafting souvenirs. 

Damon Davis, Pillars of the Valley, 2023. Courtesy of St. Louis City SC.

Local post-disciplinary talent Damon Davis unveiled a striking permanent work dubbed Pillars of the Valley. These replicated monolithic sculptures were installed as multiples in a grid to reflect and abstract on the architecture of the gridded town homes that once stood as part Mill Creek Valley. Nine etched granite and limestone architectonic forms mounted near the recently completed St. Louis City SC soccer stadium. Many more of these works will be installed in nearby empty lots, ultimately forming a large-scale monument to an overlooked history. The practice of monument making — perhaps a challenge to the conventions established by the domineering Gateway Arch looming over the skyline — was a common motif throughout this year’s Counterpublic Triennale. The many ways in which this type of application was achieved, be it ephemeral or long-lasting, revealed the full potential for such tribute and creative expression.

Damon Davis, Pillars of the Valley, 2023. Courtesy of St. Louis City SC.

Located near the widely celebrated Griot Museum of Black History — at the northernmost point in the event’s trajectory — artist Jordan J. Weber’s regenerative sculpture Defensive Landscape introduces a new monument to Peace Park. When completed later this autumn, this earthwork’s rainwater garden, gathering space, and play area, will benefit the predominantly Black College Hill neighbourhood, which has experienced outsized effects from toxic flooding.

Jordan Weber, Defensive Landscape, 2023. Regenerative earthwork including obsidian boulders with bronze plaques. Location: Memorial Plaza and Peace Park. Curated by Diya Vij. Commissioned by Counterpublic for Counterpublic 2023. Photo by Jon GItchoff.

It all amounts to “A start — and a statement,” McAnally concludes. “We [were] interested not in a return to some imagined past, but rather in codetermining livable futures rooted in repair,” he says. “CounterPublic’s ultimate ambition was to inspire a new level of awareness but also keep the lines of communication open, ensuring the continuation of conversations started during this multi-pronged event.”

The post Counterpublic Mines the Depths of Civic Memory in St. Louis appeared first on Azure Magazine.

It was once a plantation; in the 1870s, those who were formerly enslaved there, now freedmen, purchased 10-acre parcels and founded the Phillips Community. And Hood marvelled at the beautiful logic by which the people — known as the Gullah Geechee — apportioned their land. They would gain recognition for the baskets they weaved from native sweetgrass: the stuff growing free and rampant along a rural edge of water, the “overgrown” that fades out into nothingness in the maps of 18th-century cartographer William de Brahm.

Yet more recent history would see the settlement boxed in by suburban development. “They wanted to ram a six-lane road through,” Hood explained, “so we came up with a plan to help them fight the road and that helped them also become a historic district.” Now that he has worked with the people to protect Phillips from further encroachment, Hood is proposing something called an Arts Lifeway — a network of pavilions along Route 1, the path where craftspeople have long made and sold their baskets. This is the installation’s focal point: a collection of wooden models that iterate what these structures, constructed from renewable wood harvested from the overgrown, could look like.

The Scarpa Garden (top of page) features an installation of the basket weave–inspired pavilions Walter Hood proposes for a South Carolina community. Here and below, the models are shown in the Central Pavilion exhibition. Photos by Matteo de Mayda

I want to begin with Hood’s project for two reasons: It carries you on a journey to a place where most of us have not been — in the tourist mecca of Venice, a slice of South Carolina’s Lowcountry — and second, it features architectural models. The first point speaks to the narratives that bring into view an often hidden subtext; the second shows off the very tangible fruits of architectural labour. For many critics of the Biennale (most voluble of them all is Patrik Schumacher, whose words, bouncing back to me via DM and LinkedIn, seem to constitute their own echo chamber), there was too much of the former, not enough of the latter. This hyperbolic reaction — that the Biennale is “an event that does not show any architecture” — rolled in faster than anyone could possibly process such a complex exhibition. But such is the velocity with which criticism is dispatched.

Bona fide architecture critics are routinely perplexed by the Biennale. Should it be an  architectural menagerie? Surely not. Of 2018’s “Freespace,” wherein the curators asked participants to recreate sections of projects at scalable dimensions, Tom Wilkinson wrote in the Architectural Review, “A curator has to curate, and fairly ruthlessly at that, otherwise objects might as well be chosen at random and visitors may ask themselves, ‘Why am I here?’ ” Should a biennale show works by the most prominent architects, elucidating the state of the art through a selection of the crème de la crème? That’s what David Chipperfield attempted in a 2012 show that included “an awful lot of stars” but was deemed by Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times “limited, exclusive, stiff, starched and a bit cloistered.”

Should it venture beyond architecture to explore how the practice collaborates with, is influenced by and can influence other disciplines, entirely other realms? Yes, of course. But Hashim Sarkis was lambasted by Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian for his 2021 biennale, “How Will We Live Together”: a “muddled pick ’n’ mix of arcane academic research” in a show that “jumps from moon rocks to migration, biotech to bird boxes, showcasing architects’ voracious appetite for tackling territories beyond buildings, with often dubious results.” In 2014, Rem Koolhaas prevailed, somewhat ironically, receiving both high praise and a grudging pass, although he displayed no contemporary architecture at all in his Central Pavilion, instead focusing on the building components that have reduced “architecture today” to “little more than cardboard.”

It makes one wonder why anyone would want to take on the curatorial mantle. If the popular desire is to see a proliferation of standout architecture projects around the world (an odd expectation of any professional discourse), there should be no curator at all. No theme. Just a world’s expo of architecture. In critiquing and even condemning Lesley Lokko’s “Laboratory of the Future” biennale, whose twin themes are decolonization and decarbonization with a special focus on practitioners from Africa and the African diaspora, the hot take that there is no architecture feels especially persuasive, even seductive. It’s a handy way to dismiss a show that requires a lot of brain work. And it would be relevant — architects have a right to be angry if they feel left out of the most important international platform for their profession, one meant to reflect their praxis and world-making back to them — were it true.

Francis Kéré’s installation features vernacular approaches to architecture, with curved clay walls and a timber ceiling that seem to envelop you. Photo by Matteo de Mayda

At the crux of Schumacher’s criticism, directed mostly at the national pavilions, is the valid argument that architecture should be the medium through which we examine the issues brought up in Lokko’s exhibition. The exception, he contends, is the national pavilion of China, a showcase of the many ambitious architectural projects that will continue to accommodate its unprecedented urbanization.

But if one were concerned about how human rights abuses (one of the Republic’s most concerning issues) intersect with architecture, they would want to spend time in the Arsenale installation Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps by Alison Killing of Killing Architects, dedicated to the alleged Uyghur “re-education” camps uncovered through her forensic architecture work alongside a robust journalistic investigation. That these two realities could coexist in one biennale is a credit to Lokko. (China responded to Killing’s work with a threat to shutter its pavilion; according to the Biennale’s press office, it remains open.)

British architect and urban designer Alison Killing’s installation at the Venice Biennale focuses on her work as part of an investigation into alleged Uyghur detention centres across China. Photo by Marco Zorzanello 

There is also the sentiment that the Biennale (which includes dozens of ancillary events) has long been fomenting in practitioners a bummer of a guilty conscience over the collateral damage caused by the major architectural developments they are involved in. Yet the profession itself — and its elites — have been hammering this message for years now: The practice of architecture is inextricably linked to everything from resource exploitation and human rights abuses to displacement caused by gentrification and the climate crisis. The Canadian pavilion refreshingly embraces the truth of this reality as a rallying call to rethink housing.

Rich in ideas, provocations and projects already underway, it shows how architects working with local activists, communities and organizations can create new models to address possibilities like “on the land housing” for Indigenous reservations, shelter for the unhoused on city land, new multi-generational typologies, a gentrification tax that would support the retrofitting of affordable rental units and more.

A retrofuturistic vision for a travel network based in post-liberation Africa, Olalekan Jeyifous’s contribution to the Biennale epitomizes its focus on African and African diaspora perspectives. Photo by Matteo de Mayda

Beautiful architecture from African and African diaspora practitioners — in the manner of projects that celebrate form, aesthetic and placemaking — abounds in the curated components as well, especially in the Central Pavilion, under the banner of “Force Majeure.” Lokko states that its 16 participants “individually and collectively” are “irresistible examples of the richly creative power of the Black Atlantic, a culture whose roots extend a thousand years into the past, equally stretching towards the future.” Concerning the latter, there is much pondering over a future that might have been, hope for a future that ought to be — one where local communities can thrive in a globalized world — and a foreboding for a future that likely will be, where there is more exploitation of people and resources.

My favourites here are Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi’s The African Post Office, or APO, which shows off a speculative future in which African nations have co-created a communication system of poles based on minarets and totems that bypass the power structures of Western colonialism; and Olalekan Jeyifous’s ACE/AAP (African Conservation Effort/All-Africa Protoport), a retrofuturistic vision of what might have been an international travel network across air, land and sea based in post-liberation Africa. Or perhaps both are nebulously situated in time, hinting as much at what could have been as at what still might be, seeding a fantastical future.

Atelier Masomi has wall-mounted models in ways that provide fascinating glimpses of building sections. Photo by Matteo de Mayda

There is also the tangible now: inspiring projects underway across Africa. Niger’s Atelier  Masōmī shows off architecture that “brings local narratives to the fore, translating dispossessed identities and history into architectural form” (including the HIKMA Community Complex in Niger, Bët-bi Art Museum in Senegal and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development in Liberia) in models that are wall-mounted to provide fascinating glimpses of building sections. Francis Kéré creates an installation that is fully experiential — with curved clay walls and a timber ceiling that seem to envelop you — while also presenting videos of the processes behind locally constructed works inside circular peepholes that you have to lean into.

A stunning menagerie of illuminated wooden models — of the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in Johannesburg; the Edo Museum of West African Art and MOWAA Creative District in Benin City, Nigeria; the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial and Museum project in Barbados; and the Africa Institute of Sharjah — is dedicated to the growing oeuvre of Adjaye Associates. The firm also erected a black pyramidal structure, called Kwaeε after a Ghanaian word for “forest,” that is skewed in form, perforated like a sponge and punctured by two oculi: “a space for listening to the past” programmed with music, poetry, debates and lectures.

Adjaye Associates’s Kwaeε pavilion was one of numerous projects the firm contributed to the Biennale. Photo by Andrea Avezzù

(As it came to be, in early July, three women who once worked for David Adjaye accused him of sexual misconduct. The Ghanaian British architect denied the charges but resigned as architectural advisor to the mayor of London; the Sharjah project was immediately cancelled, the first of many works either scrapped or put on hold. The now-apparent power imbalances at his international firm alone could bolster the thesis that architecture is about much more than buildings.)

Is the solar economy another sham? Grandeza Studio’s multimedia presentation interrogates the ongoing resource exploitation of Pilbara in Australia, one of ecocolonialism’s “sacrifice zones”. Photo by Andrea Avezzù

Mostly, the ideas presented in the Biennale are expressed in film, performance and other intangible (and not always compelling) arty stuff. It often gives the observer the impression of being at an art show. On the one hand, a variety of representations of architectural thought and discourse is necessary to convey a multitude of diverse stories about architecture’s influence on complex systems and vice versa. (Unlike physical models, however, they demand much more from the visitor: patience, imagination and, especially, time — which no one ever has enough of.) On the other, their overrepresentation made the scarcity of more typical architectural communication tools — especially advanced rendering and modelling systems — more pronounced.

Still, the contribution that has stuck with me the most is Grandeza Studio’s “Pilbara Interregnum: Seven Political Allegories.” The title alone might megaphone its intellectual pretensions and serve to prove the point of the naysayers, yet it is one of the most memorable pieces in the Arsenale. The rich mineral deposits of Pilbara, in Western Australia, have made the tiny territory the powerhouse of the nation — and, with the recent discovery of lithium, the site of a “21st-century green gold rush” — even though its local, mostly Aboriginal population lives with “infrastructural underdevelopment” and suffers high rates of “racialized social exclusion.” On a triptych of screens fronted by a table-long, gold-tinted model of a dystopian solar development, guerrilla-styled activists wearing balaclavas spit anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Is the solar economy another sham of resource-intensive exploitation? This combination of performance art and physical model posited what seems to be the Biennale’s central point and inexorable narrative: that so much of architectural production, especially in big developments, relies on exploitation; that colonialism continues, in the guise of hyper-globalized capitalism, with its complex modern supply chains obscuring rich nations’ subjugation of poorer places. And it might eventually put you in a nihilist funk. Or, in raising important questions that poke at the underwater mass beneath the tip of the architectural iceberg, which is what we typically have access to, it might leave you inspired to ask more of your own.

The structural columns of classic Western architecture are subverted in Studio Barnes’s Griot, which posits that their precedents are African. Photos, above and below, by Marco Zorzanello  

Grandeza’s eccentric installation is in the Arsenale, the domain of “Dangerous Liaisons,” where Lokko “focuses on practitioners working at the productive edge between architecture and its myriad ‘others’ — landscape, ecology, policy, finance, data, public health, AI, heritage, history, conflict and identity, to name a few…” Conflict (and conflicting narratives) come to the fore here, where you first encounter Griot, the work of Germane Barnes. The Chicago-born, Miami-based architect has been researching elements of classic European architecture — specifically the columnar orders in Rome — that have precedents in the wooden pillars of North African structures.

In his installation, Barnes subverts all the rules set out by the Greeks and the Romans, then superimposes his subversions onto blueprints of the historically Black institution of Howard University. “Why would those buildings be adorned with non-Black columns?” Barnes asks by way of explanation. In the centre of the Arsenale, he has installed a 2.75-tonne pillar of knobby Spanish Marquina Black Marble whose uneven surface is robotically sculpted but finished by hand to feel like bark and mimic Black hair. By redesigning the column, he is also recentring its precedent in architectural history and hauling it out of the anthropological shadows.

Correcting the historical document is also the subject of Ente di Decolonizzazione, Borgo Rizza, by DAAR — Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. Their Golden Lion–winning installation in the Arsenale shows that colonialism wasn’t just something that Italy practised outside its borders: In the Mussolini era, the city of Syracuse, Sicily, was deemed a backwards and “empty” place just as desperate for despotic oversight. The government established a rural settlement there, populated with “modernist-colonial-fascist architecture.” Flattened versions of the style’s prominent features are recreated in the installation as benches.

DAAR’s Golden Lion–winning installation includes benches that riff on the fascist architecture foisted on Syracuse, Sicily, during the Mussolini era. Photo by Marco Zorzanello  

The act of erasure by way of architectural development is best exemplified in Brazil’s exhibition, “Terra,” which reckons with Brasília’s legacy in a pavilion paved in fragrant earth. Even the most hallowed of modernist architecture emblems hides a local reality — in a place that was also deemed “void,” despite its being on Indigenous and Quilombola territory — that is too  problematic to contemplate. It too won a Golden Lion, not least for the Indigenous and African Brazilian forms of architecture it honours, which “present a decolonial view of heritage.”

In this way and many more, the Biennale makes space for a taking back by communities that have often been threatened with erasure. Most successful to my mind is the Nordic Countries’ pavilion. It is entirely dedicated to the work of Joar Nango, who has gathered written materials about Indigenous architecture for the past 15 years for his “Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library.” The hewn-log amphitheatre, hide-draped screening tents and multimedia micro-libraries throughout the natural light–filled pavilion are magnificent, every hyper-vernacular material seemingly carved, skinned, strung and otherwise assembled by many hands.

Joar Nango’s “Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library” filled the Nordic Countries Pavilion with marvellous spaces for gathering. Photo by Matteo de Mayda

Combining both the vital work of revising — and augmenting — the architectural canon and the tangible fruits of architectural labour, it is as visceral an architectural pavilion as any that can be imagined. While I was there — and I did not want to leave — kids scampered about, jumping from level to level on the gathering platform; people huddled together watching the Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV series; and official participants dressed in traditional Sámi clothing made themselves available to discuss aspects of the vibrant installation to anyone and everyone. It felt like being in a timeless place connected to the Earth and welcoming of all.

The post The Past Meets the Future at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture appeared first on Azure Magazine.