Opening program Biennale di Venezia: Preview Day 1Opening program Biennale di Venezia: Preview Day 1

During the preview days on May 24-25, exhibitors and collaborators inhabit and activate the architecture of WORK, BODY, LEISURE through a series of bed-in style interviews, guided tours, discussions and performances. Although not envisioned as seated audience events, visitors may encounter and join these gatherings as they peek in different rooms inside the pavilion, or follow the live-stream and radio podcasts available on Het Nieuwe Instituut's website and social media channels.

With Mark Wigley, Liam Young, and respondent Amal Alhaag

#LOCKER ROOM, Dutch Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia In this conversation, Amal Alhaag, Liam Young and Mark Wigley will explore the role and agency of the architect as someone who can imagine and visualize the implications of technological developments before they are actually implemented. From the projection of desires, and their unintended consequences, to the bodies and labor involved in their materialization.

With Beatriz Colomina

#BED, Dutch Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia Beatriz Colomina welcomes you to Room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. Once the site of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed-In for Peace in 1969, the bed has now been reproduced inside the Dutch Pavilion. On top of this horizontal architecture for protest, work, production and reproduction, Colomina will conduct intimate, provocative conversations with renowned guests, dressed in white pajamas, and surrounded by a small audience.
The Bed-In Interviews will happen during a four-hour non-stop marathon leading up to the official opening of the Dutch Pavilion, as well as at spontaneous times announced shortly in advance. Stay tuned to Het Nieuwe Instituut's social media channels to find out who will be joining Colomina in bed.

Guests will include: Paola Antonelli, Thordis Arrhenius, Felix Burrichter, Odile Decq, Elizabeth Diller, Keller Easterling, James Taylor Foster, Eva Franch, Samia Henni, Nikolaus Hirsch, Francesca Hughes, Andres Jaque, Lesley Lokko, Niklas Maak, Winy Maas, Ivan Lopez Munuera, Alysa Nahmias, Pascal Schwaighofer, Felicity Scott, Madelon Vriesendorp, Mark Wasiuta.

Read the essay by Beatriz Colomina

Welcoming words Welcoming words from Barbera Wolfensberger (General Director of Culture and Media at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science), Guus Beumer (General and Artistic Director, Het Nieuwe Instituut), and Marina Otero Verzier (Curator, Dutch Pavilion, and Director of Research, Het Nieuwe Instituut).

Songs for Hard-Working People A project by Noam Toran, composed and performed by Remco de Jong and Florentijn Boddendijk. This afternoon concert launches the official soundtrack of the 2018 Dutch Pavilion. This new album covers labor and protest songs from pre- and early industrial times written by workers exposed to the effects of industrialization. The workers' music, lyrics and voices embody the troubling, enduring relationship between capitalism and the exploitative conditions of industrial labor, and demonstrate--despite the passage of time--how uncannily similar our responses to and concerns about automation are today.

Safety Measures: Anthropometric Database Performance by Simone C. Niquille Safety Measures is an environment situated between virtuality and reality, a simulation generated through meticulous measurements and scrutiny of the physical world. One such measurement is the translation of bodies into data to guide the design process. As digital avatars, these virtual human models stand in for entire populations, age groups, and ethnicities. The measurement data collected from real humans is sorted into neat computable categories, reducing complex life forms to spreadsheets.

One of the most comprehensive exercises in data collection was a survey conducted at the beginning of the 2000s, which resulted in a database of 3D-scanned bodies representing NATO countries. It includes data points that represent the average heights of different categories of the Dutch population, divided according to 'gender', 'age', and 'race'.

This opening event is a collective disruption of the averaged body. Visitors are invited to contribute to a wall of height measurements, creating a common portrait that blurs the standardized data points.