A delirious synthesis of the room, the building and the city, ambiguous objects and echoes of familiar places
The 2010 Venice Biennale, which runs from 29 August until 21 November, is curated by Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese practice SANAA. Forty-three architects, artists and engineers have been invited to exhibit, including Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Toyo Ito, Cecil Balmond, Olafur Eliasson, Wim Wenders and Atelier Bow-Wow. Exhibitors are asked to consider the theme People Meet in Architecture.
UK-based contributors are Caruso St John Architects, in collaboration with Thomas Demand; Florian Beigel and Philip Christou of ARU/Architecture Research Unit; Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist; the late Cedric Price; artist Cerith Wyn Evans; and architect Tony Fretton in collaboration with artist and designer Mark Pimlott, who have devised a joint exhibition entitled Piazzasalone.
Tony Fretton and Mark Pimlott write: Our work for the Biennale is derived from a central, shared aim: to make architecture and art that gives priority to experience of the present, understanding that it is affected by the past, by association and fantasy. We have assembled objects and spaces here that we have worked with for a long time, and re-presented them as figures of a place whose character is at once urban and interior, something between a piazza and a salone grande: a piazza-salone where people can meet, be conscious of themselves, their relations to others and to other realities.
Description of the work: In a great chamber crowded by classical columns, crowned with a dark void suggesting the nocturnal sky and enclosed by 6,5 metre high masonry walls, we have made a place whose character shifts from the urban to the domestic. The place and the objects within at once recalls a small, monumental piazza, and a salone grande, redolent of Venetian palazzi. Different interpretations of where one is or what things are––or how one might be (public, private)––depend on one’s point of arrival.
From the main entrance, one happens upon a street scene, festooned with lights. (1) A car, its interior an empty lounge waiting for guests, (2) is parked in front of a loggia or monumental staircase. (3) Caught in the car’s headlights, a great pile stands in an opposite corner, a ghost of a building as though viewed from a distance. (4) The place is at first very much like a piazza, though the presence of objects of inconsistent scale lends it an ambiguous character that is reinforced as one moves through it. The ghost reverts to being a rack of shelves, and the piazza briefly assumes the guise of a chapel, the loggia a baldacchino. A diminutive font (5) is caught in a beam of light, its tiny pool casting rippling light high onto the walls, reminiscent of the play of the lagoon. Tall, empty stretchers stacked on top of each other in another corner sketch a succession of illusory interiors, a trompe l’œil enfilade of unmade pictures. (6) A pale object, again, like a stack of shelves, stands next to them: an abandoned piece of furniture, an overgrown doll’s house that one can fill with one’s dreams. (7) An image of swaying branches of trees at dusk shimmers upon the wall like a window onto another place, a world beyond. The space is now a room, a private interior. A desk sitting in a pool of its own light is an intimate refuge turned to the wall. (8) A secretaire, or building, stands by. (9) Next to the desk, another opening, another place and the image of another in the sylvan glow: one’s reflection. (10) One sees an interior receding behind one’s own image.
Then, one turns, naturally, outward, past the furniture, to see the city, waiting. One looks back through the loggia to all the figures one has seen, and returns to the piazza, the city, its lights, its movement, its fantasy. The car’s doors are open.
1 Festoon, 2 Alfa Romeo GT1300 Junior 1970, 3 La scala, 4 Lisson Ghost, 5 Font, 6 Trompe l’œil, 7 Red House Ghost, 8 Architecture as a Performing Art desk, 9 Tietgens Ghost, 10 Mirror.
