Architecture fans will definitely remember Philip Beesley's installation at 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2010, "Hylozoic Ground" at the Canada Pavilion.
The installation was a mesmerizing wood of lattice structures, mechanical fronds made of intricate networks of acrylic meshworks and matrices of digitally-fabricated components fitted with microprocessors that allowed them to move and breathe thanks to sensors and shape-memory actuators responding to the occupants moving within these environments.
Over a decade has gone since then and the Canadian artist, architect and designer architect has turned into a familiar name not just with architecture fans, but also with the fashion community, as he often collaborated with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen on her collections.
For the 17th International Architecture Biennale curated by Hashim Sarkis, Beesley continued this collaboration with van Herpen, even though the fashion references in his new installation are not so evident.
Entitled "Grove" the new installation responds to the theme of the Biennale, "How Will We Live Together?" that became even more poignant after the architecture event had to be postponed from 2020 to this year because of COVID-19.
Located in the Arsenale, "Grove", consists of a gathering space under a lace-like cloud illuminated by faint clusters of glowing lights. The canopy is made of interconnected, skeletal cells embedded with liquid-filled glass vessels, reminiscent of Beesley's previous installation at the Venice Biennale.
Meticulously crystalline crafted components and skeleton-like structures combine to create innovative forms and constructions hinting at natural forms, leaves and geometrical shapes.
The cloud, comprising all these elements made with thin sheets of polymer and metal materials, was inspired by the spiraling motion of the Sargasso Sea, strewn with free-floating seaweed of the genus Sargassum and with a high concentration of non-biodegradable plastic waste, located at the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. The interlinking, hovering materials in the installations are a reference to the minutely detailed fabrics developed by Beesley and Iris van Herpen for the Dutch designer's collections.
In the centre of the installation, a CGI-based film entitled "Grove Cradle" is projected into a concave, pool-like screen developed by Beesley in collaboration with London filmmakers Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. This projection pool acts as a kind of liquid window into a parallel world that is in a state of constant transformation and the film is a death-to-life-to-death cycle that invites visitors to descend into chaos and then rise to new life again.
In a dream-like vision in the film, mineral, liquid, and organic forms surround a child-like being that seems as if it were emerging from one of Beesley's complex installations like a symbol of new hope. This state of bliss is threatened by other forms, especially spiked structures bathed in a sinister blood-red light, reminiscent for their configuration of the crown-like shape of Coronavirus, moving and morphing, a shape that fills our minds with fear and anxiety.
COVID-19 actually had an impact on this installation: at first Beesley conceived it as a densely interactive environment and not as an immersive physical and virtual experience designed to accompany visitors with sound and film through a Dantesque journey suspended between life and death. But then he decided to add an audiovisual component, so that during the global pandemic, people could still experience his work even in virtual form if necessary.
The installation is indeed completed by a forest of totemic, basket-like columns with embedded custom speakers playing a 4DSOUND composition by Dutch artist and sound choreographer Salvador Breed.
This soundscape includes recordings of noises produced by stones, marbles, glass, metal, water and fire and extracts from Gustave Flaubert's "Temptations of St. Anthony", a text with passages where plants, animals, and mineral forms all interweave into a hopeful vision of constant exchange and renewal.
Beesley tried to find an answer to the curator's question - "How will we live together?" - suggesting in "Grove" a type of architecture in symbiosis with plants, animals, and inert matter alike, an architecture eager to see spaces reopening and celebrating these shared environments.
Beesley's answer to the curator's question was also based on his works about living architecture, a rapidly emerging discipline.
"Grove" was actually created in collaboration with The Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG), an international, interdisciplinary collective of artists, designers, academics, and industry partners researching and developing next-generation architectural environments that show qualities that come strikingly close to life.
Their studies are based on the concept that today's physical environment of buildings and surrounding spaces contain increasingly complex systems, similar to interdependent natural systems.
The physical components of today's environments can work as flexible, responsive scaffolds; the embedded intelligence and interactive behaviours of today's smart environments can create intelligent systems that can work with the responsive scaffolds to process materials and modify their surroundings, like a metabolism.
These components - scaffolds, information, and metabolism - are the basic elements for the emergence of life. If architecture developed further and integrated responsive scaffolds, information, and metabolisms, it could be considered literally alive.
Beesley's "Grove" is in many ways an extension of other projects, including the intricately and deeply layered "Meander" (located in Cambridge, Canada), a large-scale immersive testbed environment, also made in collaboration with Iris van Herpen.
In "Groves", though, the spectral component of the installation seems to be stronger and this work leaves a question open for the visitor: will it be possible one day to live again in a balanced environment in which bodies, minds and spirits can create renewed worlds grounded in mutual exchange and empathy with all sorts of mineral, animal and human forms? We will have to find the answer to this difficult question by living, but visitors at the Biennale can try and do so stopping to ponder for a while in Beesley's new and immersive public gathering space.
Image credits for this post
"Grove" installation, Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group, Arsenale, Venice, Italy, 2021. Courtesy of PBSI
Film stills from "Grove Cradle", directed by Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones in collaboration with Philip Beesley, music by Salvador Breed, 2021
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