This dialogue across history was an elegiac paean to memory and place
Below_ Hungary’s whimsical pencil curtains Right_ Belgium’s laconic array of worn objects
Hungary delivered a cheerful homage to the art of hand drawing, adorned with rippling pencil curtains. In a riposte to the proscriptions of health and safety, Poland encouraged visitors (at their own risk) to leap off a gabion tower on to an inflatable landing shrouded in dry ice. Canada went all weirdly sci-fi with Hylozoic Ground, an interactive forest made of thousands of lightweight, digitally fabricated components fitted with microprocessors and sensors to mimic organic life. There were some misfires, notably the Scandinavians, who played it rather too Nordically straight (more Finnish schools?),
and the USA, whose pavilion inexplicably gave house room to architect John Portman. Spain was an inelegant articulation of some vaguely right-on, green credentials, with its section of the Biennale catalogue left enigmatically blank. For hardcore nihilism, however, one couldn’t touch the Venezuelans, who didn’t turn up at all. The virtues of austerity and authenticity were underlined by Bahrain’s award of Golden Lion for best pavilion. Making its debut in Venice, the tiny oil-rich kingdom confounded the stereotype of the Gulf as a latter day architectural Gomorrah, instead choosing to reflect
on the ecological and social decline of Bahrain’s historic sea culture. This was achieved with admirable simplicity through three traditional fishermen’s shacks plucked from their original context and reassembled in the Arsenale (itself a relic of a lost maritime civilisation). The poignant dignity of the rough hewn structures had nothing to do with architects and everything to do with an instinctive response to site, climate and materials. Several biennales ago in 1996, the British Pavilion was colonised by a huge scale model of Richard MacCormac’s Ruskin Library for the University of Lancaster. Ruskin and Venice are grimly locked together in art-historical perpetuity, but it’s well known that he came to deplore the consequences of his Venetian investigations and their careless rehashing in a tide of crass pseudo-Gothic imitations – ‘accursed Frankenstein monsters of,
indirectly, my own making’, as he put it. However, he was also deeply concerned with memory and especially the part buildings play as both text and repository of cumulative history. ‘We cannot remember without architecture,’ he admonished in The Seven Lamps of Architecture.
For this biennale, the shade of Ruskin rose again, with the British Pavilion ironically rechristened Villa Frankenstein by curator Liza Fior of Muf Architecture. Ruskin’s meticulous and obsessive recording is at the heart of what Fior describes as ‘close looking’, a strategy and spirit that underpinned the British contribution. On duck egg blue walls, Ruskin’s Venetian jottings and sketches were paired with images from a remarkable unseen archive by local photographers Alvio and Gabriella Gavagrin. The Gavagrins live in Castello, Venice’s easternmost sestiere.
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