As seen in a previous post the Nordic Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice attempted a dialogue between humankind and nature. Lithuania went for the same aim, albeit in a different format, through a series of projects reunited in its pavilion, installed at the Giardino Bianco Art Space (located between the Arsenale and the Giardini, in Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1814, Castello).
Curated by artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, the installation "The Swamp School" moves from two inspirations - the pioneering botanical study of the Aukštumala swamp in Lithuania (1902) by German botanist Carl Albert Weber and the bio-computing visions of British cybernetician Stafford Beer (1962).
The latter worked on complex models of self-balance within industrial production and conceptually designed the cybernetic factory as a system that was able to adapt to an unknowable and ever-changing environment and that had therefore to be equipped with an adaptive brain gifted with resilience and flexibility. In Beer's cybernetic dream, manmade systems merged with living biological matter, and the swamp represented the driving force in the overall scheme.
Swamps are made of water and land, they could therefore be conceived as the perfect metaphor for the city of Venice, but also for our times and society, in constant change and turmoil. The curators also employ the swamp in a radical way as a place that can prompt us to ponder a bit more about ecosystems reclaiming their spaces and fighting back human interventions. Last but not least, the swamp metaphor is an invitation from the curators to human cohabitation and interaction with other forms of life.
"Swamps seem to be the opposite of architecture, given that every construction starts from land reclamation," the curators state. "Today, made evident by global environmental disasters, wetlands are physically pushing back on our attempts to industrialize and control them. Instead of fighting our watery neighbors, we must embrace them as a place for future co-habitation. Indeed, swamp turns out to be a perfect milieu, the place, to learn, to understand, and to hear other species, forces and ecosystems that have been silenced and downgraded by us."
Until the end of the Biennale in November, the Giardino Bianco Art Space will be a laboratory where people can stop and ponder a bit more about the swamp as a liminal space inhabited by rare animals and greenery.
As the swamp is an ecosystem in constant transformation so the space in the gallery will focus on different aspects: the first aspect explored in May was Swamp Radio, with a series of acoustic space explorations, radio experiments, environmental sound recordings and eco-data sonification. At the end of June the pavilion will instead focus on the theme of Futurity Island and symbio-poetics, that is finding a new ethos of coexistence, a direction that stems from the act of recognising the poetical power of the ecologies surrounding us. The last series of events in September, will engage with Commonism and focus on the speculative forms of citizenship and cohabitation between people, and also between humans and non-human residents.
An interdisciplinary group of tutors with students from all over the world (the pavilion boasts the support of a series of partners, artists, architects, and institutions including MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology and MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology) will shape installations, lectures, field trips and workshops in both the pavilion and in Venice (you can find further information about the program here).
The entrance of the pavilion has got a connection with fashion since it features a row of raincoats created by fashion designer Sandra Straukaite that feature prints of the background research behind the pavilion and that could be interpreted as the uniform of the Swampians, that is explorers and experimenters in new ecosystems (hopefully they will produce some of the raincoats and sell them as well as they look rather intriguing).
The next sections of the pavilion take visitors on a multi-sensory journey with a visit to three olfactory chambers and to an outdoor space where a patch of Lithuanian swamp has been temporarily reinstalled.
One of the most interesting section remains the journey through the sounds of the wetlands: when the pavilion opened there were also other acoustic explorations going on with Jana Winderen creating live audible soundscapes.
Among the best installations in this section there is one created by artist duo Rasa and Raitis who have worked for several years to explore techno-ecological systems and interspecies communication. Their Biotricity experiments at the new media platform RIXC and Kemeri bog in Latvia sonify and visualise the bacteria electricity generation process, revealing relationships between biological and computing systems.
In Spring 2018, they expanded their research into water reservoirs and marshlands in the greater Boston area, experimenting with field recordings, radio transmission, and biodata sonification.
The duo transposed the Biotricity experiments from marshlands in the Boston area and the bogs of Latvia to the wetlands in Venice, installing in them bacteria batteries and micro radio transmitting devices and connecting them with real-time sonic environment in the exhibition space.
Their installation becomes therefore a space of free exchange between humans and the invisible and inaudible actors of the swamp, proving that, just like the DC Comics humanoid antihero in the comic book created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, the swamp breathes, dreams and thinks.
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