For this year’s annual architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Pavilion of San Marino will present the Hosting Guest project. Curated by Michael Kaethler and Marco Pierini, this intervention is an authentic co-design workshop focused on hospitality-related issues, part of an international and multi-year research project based on real places and needs. Representing the oldest Republic in the world, Artist Vittorio Corsini will participate in the pavilion with the help of a research team of students, designers, and researchers from San Marino, Venetian, and international universities.
San Marino will showcase more than just an exhibition during the Biennale Architettura 2023, focusing more on a type of exploration and experience. The theoretical and practical framework develops within a multidisciplinary and worldwide research setting. Based on the connections that living things can forge with one another, four areas of study—community, food, interspecies, and religion—define the scope and direction of inquiry. Furthermore, some of these concepts will be implemented by producing artifacts, such as furniture for future use of the Fucina del Futuro, products for the elderly promoting relationships, children's toys, and ephemeral micro-architectures for the Campo and the surrounding open spaces.
Two distinct but linked rooms that are conceptualized as two organisms in conflict make up the Hosting Guest project. The first area, devoted to Vittorio Corsini's artwork, will be used to decompress and suspend from the craziness of the outside world, preferring a meditative aspect of regeneration of thinking on today's crucial subjects. In the second room, a genuine project laboratory dubbed Hospitality Lab will be set up based on a prior mapping of the needs of the local population. Activities for co-design will be planned over the course of the Biennale's seven months with the participation of students, professors from various San Marino, Italian, and foreign universities, members of the craft and business communities, seniors in the nearby nursing home, and young people from San Lorenzo. Based on the needs identified during the initial mapping phase, many one-week thematic project workshops will be arranged on particular projects. University students will set up a series of displays as the projects are finalized, enhancing the spaces with their ideas and ambitions.
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The Pavilion of Saudi Arabia Explores Legacy and Materiality at the Venice Biennale 2023Vittorio Corsini has produced three new works for the Pavilion of the Republic of San Marino that are not only motivated by the overarching topic of hospitality but also by the environment, culture, and morphology of the location they will be shown. One person at a time will be able to enter the first one (Esercizio 2, 2023), which is a 200x200x200 cm plexiglass cube that will be situated in the middle of the room. The work will respond to human presence with a kind of bright breath reminiscent of human breath during meditation, a pulse capable of generating a completely immersive and intimate situation, yet perceptible to those remaining outside, through the simultaneous light of about 2,000 white LEDs. Three young people who star in three videos (Here Everyday, 2023) dancing to music that the viewer cannot hear share a different dimension. Each of them will be videotaped in an all-white setting where only their body's rhythm and energy will be audible. The third piece (Welcome chairs, 2023), situated on the sidewalk near the entrance door, breaks the stillness that will fill the inside space. The piece is a pair of bronze chairs that invites anybody passing by, including Pavilion guests, locals, and chance onlookers, to stop and talk.
We are all guests on this Earth, and yet we are also all hosts, in the way we can, or cannot, protect, support and nurture other (human and non-human) beings, present in the spaces in which we live, through our actions and choices. The Pavilion of the Republic of San Marino aims at exploring the theme of hospitality, from immaterial to material, and from human to superhuman, shifting attention from the dimension of the individual to collectivity, to investigate the opportunities that architecture can offer in terms of synergic relations between organisms, places and the environment. Architecture made by nature or by man is capable of hosting and enhancing virtuous spatial forms of co-design, production and interaction, involving gestures, objects and actions. It is welcoming, inclusive, empathetic and expansive.
-- Curators Michael Kaethler and Marco Pierini
Under the overarching theme of this year’s biennale, The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko, many other countries have announced plans for their pavilions. The Turkish Pavilion, curated by Sevince Bayrak and Oral Göktaş, will present “Ghost Stories: Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture”. The display explores perceptions of unused buildings and attempts to discover creative proposals for them in the future. The Cyrpus Pavilion will present the first early settlements of the Cyprus Aceramic Neolitih Khirokitia, using these communities as a springboard to discuss social sustainability challenges in a humanistic and cultural framework. Finally, the Saudi Pavilion “IRTH إرث, “, investigates the qualities of materials available in the Saudi landscape, expanding on the tangible and intangible potentials through an interactive display.
