In the last few posts we have indirectly mentioned issues focusing on social and physical barriers when we talked about governments in the US and Europe dealing with migration issues.
But can you change frightening barriers into easily crossable boundaries? Yes, you can, at least according to the interdisciplinary team behind Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura.
The studio presented an installation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition entitled "Stand Ground" that hopes to open up new horizons.
Located in the Arsenale, the installation moves from the main theme of this year's Biennale – Freespace – and invites visitors to look at things from a different perspective.
One wall of the Arsenale is covered by a photograph of houses along a canal in Venice while on the ground there is an opening that calls to mind a window, as if the wall had lost its verticality to take up a horizontal configuration and had been transformed into the floor, turning into a connective infrastructure.
In a nutshell, you get the impression the wall in front of you has been destroyed and removed to open up a new perspective and a view on a quiet and peaceful Venetian canal. The wall of the Arsenale also assumes oneiric possibilities, becoming a screen on which anything may happen.
The installation is also surrounded by a series of preparatory studies about walls, passageways, windows and floors that chronicle ideas for a variety of projects: sketches are alternated with inspiring origami-like paper constructions and patterns, hinting at the possibilities of transforming static architectural elements into decorative motifs (or re-conceptualising them by changing their functions, turning a wall into a floor and viceversa), while bringing down barriers and eventually turning them into dissolvable boundaries.
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