Opening program Biennale di Venezia: Preview Day 2Opening program Biennale di Venezia: Preview Day 2

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.

Curated by Aron Betsky

Paradiso Cafe, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia The Greenhouse Talks combine a breakfast session with a panel of international architects engaging with the overall subject of the Biennale, as well as the specific contribution of the Dutch Pavilion. Speakers will interpret the notion of 'Limbo Space' and offer perspectives on what such a space could tell us about the future of architecture.

Speakers include Iwan Baan, Maria Claudia Clemente, Nathalie de Vries, Elizabeth Diller, Andrés Jaque, and Marina Otero Verzier. Promoted by the Embassy and General Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and organized by Image, in collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut. | Partner Program. Registration via: rom-pcz@minbuza.nl.

With Barby Asante, Professor Mabel Wilson and Amal Alhaag

#LOCKER ROOM, Dutch Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia The Door(s) of No Return are a symbol of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For her contribution to the Dutch Pavilion, curator and researcher Amal Alhaag focuses on this particular architectural site for the brutal displacement, disposal, and transformation of bodies, languages, identities, belonging, and analyzes the historical significance and implications for Africa and the Black diaspora. The space between the Door(s) and the ocean signs the violence that precipitated the forced movements of the enslaved, and those still unfolding of the migrant and refugee. Yet the Door(s), or rather the threshold between being and no/being, between living and dying. The Door(s) are also a speculative sites for keeping the wake, a space for acts of refusal.

What are the historical and embodied meaning as well as the politics and poetics of the Door(s) of no Return as architectural sites of memory and violence? In what ways do these specific bodies redefine and resist the dominant hegemonic understandings of technology, space, memory, and the body itself?

Radio: In the Wake of Certain Bodies looks into the ways artistic, academic and activist work are complicating and tracing the cartography, technology and engineering of the black, ethnographic and cyborg body in the past and the present. This conversation is an opportunity to explore the complex geographic realities of certain bodies and what the set of conditions are that constituted the colonial architecture that are sites for agency and violence.

Read the essay by Amal Alhaag

#OFFICE, Dutch Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia Moderated by Arjen Oosterman, with Lilet Breddels, Dan Handel, Nina Rappaport, Marten Kuijpers, and Victor Muñoz Sanz. Under the premise that automation disrupts not only labor markets but the configuration of entire territories, the installation Automated Landscapes reflects upon the emerging architectures of automated labor. In this event, Arjen Oosterman (Archis / Volume) will engage in a conversation on the spatial implications of automation for the built environment with Lilet Breddels, Dan Handel, Nina Rappaport and and Dutch pavilion contributors Marten Kuijpers and Víctor Muñoz Sanz, and speculate on the role of architects in this transformation. Jointly organized by Archis / Volume.

#LOCKER ROOM, Dutch Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venezia With Nick Axel, Marina Otero Verzier, and book contributors including Amal Alhaag, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Nathalie de Vries and respondent Floris Alkemade. Join the editors and contributors for the launch of Work, Body, Leisure, a collection of texts reflecting upon urban developments where automated labor and leisure converge. Addressing the ways in which evolving notions of labor have categorized and defined bodies at particular moments in time, it discusses the legal, cultural, and technical infrastructures that enable their exploitation.

Details of the book