The Dutch Pavilion presents SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness at La Biennale Architettura 2025
How can architecture challenge social norms to create spaces that support new forms of coexistence? Nieuwe Instituut, the national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture in the Netherlands, presents SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness at the Pavilion of the Netherlands at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
6 May 2025
Curated by Amanda Pinatih, Curator of Design & Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, SIDELINED transforms the Dutch Pavilion into an alternative sports bar — a playful yet critical space that questions the rules and rituals of social interaction.
Continuing the work of social designer Gabriel Fontana, the exhibition adopts sports as a lens for exploring how spatial design can reveal and disrupt the exclusionary dynamics embedded in everyday environments. Through changing jerseys, shape-shifting fields, or without defined teams, Fontana’s work reimagines how we play, gather, and compete, changing the rules of the game.
SIDELINED presents sports as an architectural system—in the ways it regulates spaces, bodies and behaviour. In doing so, the exhibition prompts visitors to ask: Who are we cheering for? Who is represented, who controls the game, and what are the rules?
The exhibition centres on sports as both a reflection and a producer of societal ideologies in order to examine how the games we play embed ideologies of power into their design, deconstructing spaces, uniforms, and tools to challenge conservative values and rethink the norms we want to promote.
Throught the course of the exhibition, Fontana presents three alternative sports: Multiform, Anonymous Allyship, and Fluid Field. Featuring transformable uniforms, changing playing fields and unknown teams, these reimagined sports give players the opportunity to experience new ways of connecting without predefined roles and structures. Through seemingly simple alteration of the rules, these games reinvent sports as a form of queer pedagogy by challenging the boundaries of competition, collaboration and orientation.
Within the pavilion, SIDELINED looks beyond the large-scale public arena of the stadium or the gymnasium to investigate the more localised and intimate context of the sports bar: a site of both social production and identity formation—and a metaphor for uniting diverse communities around shared experiences. Sports bars promote a sense of belonging and bridge social gaps by bringing together a wide variety of people, cutting across social, economic, and cultural divides. However, this can come at the expense of promoting a polarising dynamic through which group identities, rivalry, and opposition can lead to social division.
SIDELINED queers the sports bar as a sociopolitical field to explore themes of belonging, laying the ground for new modes of togetherness. By looking at how sports bars facilitate interactions among diverse groups while fostering divisions, the exhibition offers insights into creating inclusive public spaces.
The pavilion-turned-sports bar, designed by Koos Breen and Jeannette Slütter, is a space for fluidity, experimentation and empowerment where binary oppositions, social hierarchies, and cultural values can be contested and reshaped. In this space, there is no competition; sports are a bridge between communities.
Inspired by situationist artist Asger Jorn’s three-sided sports field, the space is configured as a hexagon. Screens show games being played of Multiform, Fluid Field and Anonymous Allyship, filmed at Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo in Venice. Informed by the memorabilia typically displayed in a sports bar, jerseys worn by players in Anonymous Allyship adorn the walls. A sports newspaper which gives voices to sports bar owners, queer gym founders and architects is up for grabs and football scarves and trophies are on display. In a reconfiguration of the beloved bar game, an unconventional foosball table allows visitors to reimagine play while breaking free from rigid binary structures and fixed teams, challenging the boundaries of competition, collaboration and orientation by removing the rules and encouraging originality.
Contributions to the exhibition by Luca Soudant—A Movement from Then to Here—and Alice Wong—Beyond the Game—offer further insight into how sports mirror our societies and how built spaces function as sites of community building and political negotiation.
Addressing the theme of Intelligens set by curator Carlo Ratti for the Biennale Architecttura 2025, SIDELINED suggests a future for architecture that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative.
said: “We invite visitors to embrace our unconventional sports bar where they can feel safe, seen and valued. Using sport as a universal language, Fontana’s work goes beyond the aesthetic or performative—it functions as a critical tool for social inquiry, encouraging dialogue around identity, inclusion, and collective belonging. In a time of great division, this exhibition demonstrates the potential of design to serve as both a method and medium for reshaping the social dynamics of everyday life, opening the playing field to inclusivity, empathy and solidarity.”
“Team sports have remained largely unchanged since the 19th century, often reflecting outdated values. Why are we still playing the same games? And how can sport practices evolve to better represent modern societal changes and challenges? The games that are shown in the pavilion are designed to queer the binary structure—one team versus another—to create a framework that stimulates unity by unlocking endless possibilities for new configurations, interactions and collaborations between players. In this way, we have created a new social infrastructure more fitting to contemporary society.”
“As commissioner, Nieuwe Instituut is excited to present SIDELINED; a project that offers new imaginaries for a more inclusive world through a medium everyone can relate to: sport. The talented team behind this installation shows us that nothing need be taken for granted; we can continue to confront our challenges with playfulness and optimism.”
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Press visits
Press is welcomed to visit SIDELINED and the Dutch pavilion. During the pre-opening week of La Biennale di Venezia on 7, 8 and 9 May, various press moments are planned:
- Wednesday 7 May 16:00 - 17:00 (walk-in 15:30): press opening
- Thursday 8 May 16:00 - 17:30: official opening of the Dutch Pavilion
- Friday 9 May 16:00-17:00 we will organize a Multiform event in collaboration with Associazione Sportiva Sant’Elena. Location: Viale IV Novembre, 101, 30132, Sant’Elena (near the Giardini).
Of course you are also welcome to visit the Dutch pavilion outside of these hours. Registration is appreciated. Especially in regard to interview requests with Amanda, Gabriel, Aric or other contributors. Please contact us to discuss the possibilities.
Media Contacts For further information and interviews about the Pavilion of the Netherlands at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, please contact:
Lauren Teague | lauren.teague@ing-media.com | + 44 (0) 789 446 2340 Francoise Campbell | francoise.campbell@ing-media.com | +44 (0) 783 4789 432
For more information about Nieuwe Instituut, please contact: Robin van Essel | r.vanessel@nieuweinstituut.nl | +31 (0) 6 3803 9218
Colophon
Commissioner: Aric Chen, Nieuwe Instituut
Curator: Amanda Pinatih
Exhibitors: Gabriel Fontana, Alice Wong, Luca Soudant
Scenography and Graphic Design: Koos Breen, Jeannette Slütter
The exhibition is financially supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.