Understanding the Earth: Interstitium

Understanding the Earth… What does it mean to be present within it? In exploring this question, soil reveals itself as mutable, layered, and riddled with fissures, reminding us that the ground beneath our feet is alive, unstable, and uncertain. Even when examined through scientific data, our perception of the earth is never entirely neutral, always shaped by how we interpret facts and the projections we overlay onto them. In this complex relationship, the earth emerges as both a support and a warning. While seeking security, we are reminded of its rules and limits, which cannot be fully constrained or completely understood.

Understanding the Earth: Interstitium, presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale and curated by Miljana Zeković, with authors Ivan Šuković, Dejan Todorović, and Emir Šehanović, builds on this premise. In the Montenegrin Pavilion, the earth manifests as an interstitial encounter between humans and microbial systems, between architecture and bacteria. It presents itself as a living presence, whose intelligence is attuned to observation, whose transformations are exhibited openly, without fear of failure or expectation of a final answer.

Interstitium invites us to listen to the materiality of the earth from the perspective of its microorganisms and the processes constantly unfolding within it. Research on Montenegrin soil illuminates these relationships, revealing pigments produced by microorganisms interacting with external conditions. Within the babbles, bacteria spontaneously generate pigment structures, materializing internal flows and transforming the invisible into the visible. These pigments serve as tangible traces of complex biological processes and as catalysts for new spatial imagination. Montenegro, recognized as the first ecological state, serves symbolically as a framework, a land whose soil becomes a laboratory for envisioning novel relations with nature.

The project also highlights destructive realities: the prolonged, systematic exploitation of nature, in which we all remain complicit. Yet, through micro-narratives transposed into color, material, and architectural form, it reminds us that nature, even under extreme conditions, relentlessly produces new life forms, colors, and structures. This subtle yet persistent admonition is a call for ecological transformation, where architecture ceases to dominate and instead becomes a space of reciprocity, attention, and attunement.

Within the fluid construction of babbles, inspired by the concept of međa (the traditional boundary in the landscape), each form functions as a thread in a complex network. Each bubble symbolically becomes a small, yet essential stone in that boundary, contributing to the shaping of the entire structure, preserving cohesion and harmony within the space. In this way, each individual element, though modest, becomes an indispensable guardian of the rhythm and integrity of the complete spatial installation. Thanks to the scientific contribution of the Institute for Molecular Genetics, microorganisms inside the babbles undergo a metabolic process, producing pigments that make their internal flows and interactions with the environment visible. In this way, microorganisms and pigments construct layers and boundaries, transforming the babbles into a living, fluid međa, simultaneously an architectural structure, an experimental space, and a visual record of invisible life processes.

This recognition of the Earth unfolds in a time of planetary upheaval, when environmental changes are dramatic and unpredictable, and the soil constantly negotiates with all who inhabit and transform it. Within this continuous flow, architecture rises above walls and rigid forms, becoming a living, layered network through which microorganisms, minerals, data, and technologies circulate, shaping and being shaped by one another. In Interstitium, the Montenegrin Pavilion demonstrates that architecture is no longer solely functional or aesthetic, but vulnerable, unfinished, and alive, a space in which meaning, security, and presence emerge through attentiveness, engagement, and reciprocity. Here, the built environment aligns with the rhythms of nature, opens itself to transformation, and becomes inseparable from the life it contains, bearing witness to the profound significance and enduring power of human presence on Earth.

Terram Intelligere: INTERSTITIUM
Commissioner: Mirjana Đurišić / Curator: Miljana Zeković / Exhibitors: Ivan Šuković, Dejan Todorović, Emir Šehanović / Members of the creative team: Tamara Marović, Maja Radonjić / Producer: Jelena Božović / Organised by: Directorate of the Chief State Architect at the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and State Property of Montenegro.

Press contact: mirjana.djurisic@mdup.gov.me. Text author: Ivan Šuković, exhibitor