AKT & Hermann Czech: PARTECIPAZIONE / BETEILIGUNG

An appeal to the Architecture Biennale to engage with the reality of the city!

The Giardini were originally conceived as gardens for the people, but have become increasingly inaccessible for the residents of Venice due to their use by the Biennale since the late 19th century. Despite numerous attempts to open up one of the few green expanses of the city, the park is now either overrun by paying international visitors or lies deserted for several months. This and the general role of a cultural institution like the Biennale towards its host city have motivated the Austrian project “Partecipazione / Beteiligung.”

Shifting 
“Partecipazione” was one of the core demands of the 1970s for an “open, democratic” Biennale, as was working on site in the context of the city. Austria’s contribution to the 18th Architecture Biennale, entitled “Partecipazione / Beteiligung,” takes up these two approaches. The Austrian Pavilion lies at the northeastern border wall of the Giardini, neighbouring one of the few remaining districts of Venice predominantly inhabited by local people. Here the Biennale as an exclave of international art tourism and the city coexist spatially unrelated to each other.

AKT & Hermann Czech will therefore shift the separation between the Biennale and the city to the pavilion in order to make space for the public: half of the pavilion to the residents! An opening of the Biennale not by spreading out into the city as in the past decades, but by reversing this spatial practice. This requires a partition of the pavilion and a new entrance to the public part of the pavilion.

For the past one and a half years, local initiatives and residents have prepared a programme to use the space. In collaboration with AKT & Hermann Czech, this public programme seeks to intensify communication with the Biennale. It is an appeal to the institution itself to engage with the reality of the city on the very public ground that it lends every year. Not a one-sided polemic, but an exchange about the critical state of the inhabited city and the Biennale’s vital role in terms of the city’s future.

Participation
The term “participation” today usually implies “involvement.” “Participation,” however, means not only taking part or being involved, but also having a share in something. Interestingly enough, this meaning of the term, namely “to acquire a share,” that is, participation in ownership or property, is rarely used in urban planning and architecture – despite the fact that in the case of space it would be the only consistent one: one participates in space by occupying space, and thereby by owning it.

Participation is predominantly brought about by achieving a consensus, which is reached either by retreating to a very general or even the lowest common denominator or by excluding or covering up existing conflicts. This is why it is obvious that the concept of participation has to be interpreted spatially. But the handing over of existing space starts with its division. This becomes solely possible through architecture, through the creation of partitions and openings. The Austrian Pavilion will be divided. Although the other side cannot be reached directly, the residents of the city and the Biennale visitors can see and hear each other. The interests and demands of the ones receive a platform through the presence of the others, as well as visibility and political weight in the context of the Biennale. Exclusion and expansion give way to a spatial concept of participation in the literal sense of the word.

If today’s crises are directly linked to the production of space, architecture has a central role to play. In addition to the intense debate about its environmental sustainability, resource consumption, and climate neutrality, it must above all deal with the relationship between public and private, accessible or inaccessible, communal or individual. Because at the heart of architecture are human beings, who are directly influenced by architecture as concrete intervention in social relations.

Team: AKT & Hermann Czech

AKT is: Fabian Antosch, Gerhard Flora, Max Hebel, Adrian Judt, Julia Klaus, Lena Kohlmayr, Philipp Krummel, Gudrun Landl, Lukas Lederer, Susanne Mariacher, Christian Mörtl, Philipp Oberthaler, Charlie Rauchs, Helene Schauer, Kathrin Schelling, Philipp Stern, Harald Trapp

Information: info [​at​] labiennale2023.at

Newsletter: labiennale2023.at/en/newsletter/