AFTERMATH_CATALONIA IN VENICE. ARCHITECTURE BEYOND ARCHITECTS

A Collateral Event of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The Institut Ramon Llull presents the Collateral Event “Aftermath_Catalonia in Venice. Architecture beyond architects” within the framework of the15th International Architecture Exhibition that the director Alejandro Aravena has titled “Reporting from the Front”.The project is curated by the architects Jaume Prat and Jelena Prokopljević and film director Isaki Lacuesta. It uses audiovisual installations to spotlight seven cases of public architectural interventions, which were chosen as virtuous examples of architecture that improves the user’s relationship with the urban social and natural environment. The diverse installations – including a hospital, a car park, a theatre and a natural area – let visitors view how architectural space enables users to enjoy public places as conscious members of society while they go about their day-to-day routines.

The project suggests visitors assess the quality of the architectural intervention from a human and social standpoint. The video shooting – carried out over a period of several months – includes scenes and images from persons who interacted with the seven projects Its aim is to encourage an empathic experience that makes the viewer analyze and perceive architecture from the user’s perspective in order to define its innermost value. Prat, Prokopljević and Lacuesta state that “the purpose of Aftermath_Catalonia in Venice. Architecture beyond architects is to investigate the value of the architectural intervention from the perspective of its use, when the architects who created it are no longer present. All the cases chosen are public interventions that integrate the natural, urban and human environment, extending the architectural functionality into a common good. They reflect an architecture sensitive to the user’s requirements, which helps us reassess what we consider architecture today. They are spaces that oblige us to review certain outlooks, which envisage architecture as a univocal solution or an imposition on the user". The project’s purpose is to stimulate the public’s reaction, providing a cause for reflection.

Consistently, the exhibition aims at involving visitors with a sensory approach to the artistic installation where aspecific case is projected on diverse translucent vitreous surfaces that reflect the complexity of interactions between people, architecture and society. The public has the dual role of visitor and editor and as such it can browse through the exhibition and carry out the final “editing” on its own.