Catalonia in Venice—Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures
Collateral Event of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale
May 9–November 23, 2025
Venice 30122
Italy
Curation, research and design: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño. Produced by Institut Ramon Llull.
Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures invites the visitor to explore new models of civic engagement and ecological responsibility with water through architecture.
Water Parliaments operates at once as an installation and as an epistemic device that questions how societies negotiate their entanglement with aquatic environments. Through the convergence of ecological inquiry, activist engagement, and architectural practice, it proposes water as a political subject and a medium for reconfiguring spatial, social, and environmental imaginaries.
The exhibition unfolds through cycles of fog, resonant soundscapes, and full-scale spatial prototypes that construct an environment for collective reflection and sensorial inquiry. At its center lie seven Projective Architectures, each emerging from interdisciplinary exchanges and situated collaborations across Mediterranean contexts.
Rather than static objects, these architectures operate as evolving propositions—spatial responses to specific water ecologies and as speculative instruments for imagining alternative hydropolitical futures.
Water Parliaments is not only an exhibition but also a broader research ecosystem.
The publication 100 Words for Water: A Vocabulary—edited by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño —collects more than one hundred terms and voices from scientists, artists, farmers, philosophers, and architects including participants from the Laboratories of Futures that took place over the last year across Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. Conceived as both a collective glossary and a manifesto, the book articulates linguistic and conceptual tools to explore new models of civic engagement and environmental stewardship with water through architecture. The book is an initiative of the Institut Ramon Lllull, with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia and published by Lars Müller Publishers.
The Atlas of Water Architectures, an open-access digital platform, complements this vocabulary by assembling a repository of projects, practices, and spatial experiments related to water from around the world. It functions as a shared archive—a growing cartography of situated knowledges and hydro-social practices—particularly relevant in times of climatic uncertainty. We invite everyone to submit their project to waterparliaments.org
Together, these components extend Water Parliaments beyond the exhibition space, proposing forms of shared reflection and collective imagination around one of the most pressing questions of our time: how we live with water, and how water lives through us.
Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures
Curation, research and design: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño. Collateral Event of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition—the Venice Biennial. Catalonia in Venice is commissioned and produced by Institut Ramon Llull.
Visiting hours until November 23, 2025 10am–6pm. Closed on Mondays (except November 17). Free entry
PR & press enquiries
Institut Ramon Llull: Cristina Estrada cestrada@llull.cat, Gavina Garcia ggarcia@llull.cat. Pati Nunez Agency (International PR): Ana Varea press@patinunezagency.com Photo: José Hevia.
