#Crystal looks to Edwin most often for answers.

[stark-lord]

DEAD BOY DETECTIVES (2024)

1.05 - The Case of the Two Dead Dragons

In which Edwin is less than impressed by locker rooms, and Charles continues to have catastrophic bi moments.

[greyskyflowers]

I like the idea that, I've seen mentioned a few times and love it, the boys turn into those little orb things when they're like completely, if they were human they would have passed out, exhausted.

I imagine a soft glow, warm to hold, about the size of an orange, a little weight to it and it doesn't float but drops to the floor and rolls like a ball ~

⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️⚪️

It really isn't surprising after everything with hell, Esther, and Niko, that Edwin shifts.

He looks exhausted, and Charles still sees him terrifed and bloody in Hell when he closes his eyes, swaying a little bit where he stands listening to Crystal, and Charles knows what's going to happen before it happens.

The softly glowing orb doesn't even have a chance to drop before Charles snatches it, carefully tucking it away in his coat. It's a warm, little weight against his side.

He loves Crystal, Edwin does too even though he huffs about it, but she doesn't need to see Edwin like this. No one needs to see Edwin like this. The thought of it feels like calling attention to an open wound, advertising a vulnerable spot for someone to exploit or further hurt.

Thankfully, they're all finally free to go home. He doesn't like the idea of leaving Crystal but there's a growing itch to get back home and she shoves him towards the mirror and tells him she's meet up with them later.

Neither Charles or Edwin like being out when one of them is like this.

The first few time it happened, Charles hadn't really thought about it too much. And it happened a lot those first years after his death. He often overdid it, everything going fuzzy before going dark, and then he'd wake up, usually pressed against Edwin's side on the little couch. He always woke up on or next to Edwin and it'd been startling the first few times but he always wakes up comfortable now, no rush to get up.

The first time Edwin shifted in front of Charles, he panicked. Refused to let go of him until, after what seemed like days, Edwin shifted back. Still relaxed enough that he hadn't immediately shoved himself off Charle's lap and he hadn't fought the hug too hard either.

He's only see Edwin like that a few times but to be on the other side of it, he understands why Edwin always relaxes when Charles shifts back. It's a powerful and terrifying feeling, to hold something so small and vulnerable and know it's the most important person in the world to you.

As he got to know Edwin more, Charles had the horrible realization that Edwin had been in Hell for over 70 years and surely he must have been exhausted plenty of times when down there. What happened to him when he shifted?

Charles didn't know what Hell looked like or what really happened down there but he pictured the little orb rolling around on the floor, being kicked, or someone finding other ways to hurt it. He had finally asked, so worked up he hadn't even thought about if Edwin would want to talk about, because he needed to know.

He'd gotten a gentle look from Edwin and an answer.

While he was absolutely exhausted in hell, he never shifted. Hell takes a lot of things away and the relief of sleep or unconsciousness is one of them.

So, honestly, Edwin had lasted longer than Charles thought he would. He half expected that he'd have to lunge for the orb as soon as they fell back through the door from Hell.

Thinking too much about Hell and Esther makes him a nasty mix of furious and terrified, so he forces himself to focus on the present.

He holds Edwin closer his chest as he sinks onto the couch. He's emotionally exhausted and in the silence of everything, finally has a moment to think about the love confession on the stairs of hell.

He doesn't know what to do with that liar but he was right when he told Edwin they had forever to figure it out.

He lays out on the couch, feet hanging off the far end and his head on the armrest, the orb on his chest and his hands almost petting at it. Holding it like this means that when Edwin shifts back he'll be sprawled over Charles, something that will probably have him flustered and immediately trying to get up and off.

Charles hopes he's sleepy and comfortable when he changes back though, that he just settles there without over thinking it.

Just the two of them existing together in the same space.

[anxious-witch]

I think the reason why there are so many amazing ships in Dead Boy Detectives is because the show manages to show different versions of love/lust/devotion through different relationships all characters have.

Like, love triangles have been doing the whole "a girl has to choose between two guys who each being out a different side of her" for over a decade in popular media, some more, some less successfully. But the pitfall they often fall into is that those differences seem very shallow and often ignore the other aspect of the main person who have to choose between the love interests.

Dead Boy Detectives makes sure to not do that.

When we look at how Charles is with Crystal vs how he is with Edwin, we can clearly see the difference. In the beginning of his and Crystal's dynamic, he is flirtier and puts more if a bravado, but he pretty quickly opens up to her. Because he sees that she very quickly sees past his facade he puts up with his constant happy-go-lucky persona. Only when he starts opening up to her and showing his emotions does their relationship progress. Because after David, Crystal needs someone who can be emotionally vulnerable with her and in turn, Charles offers her the same, and offers her a safe space.

In contrast, we see that Charles is more at ease around Edwin. They know each other deeply, and are also woven into each other at this point. It's easy, like breathing. One thing it doesn't do is challenge either of them from the status quo they have built over the years. But there is a sense of ease there, and such devotion. There is no question about what they would do for each other because the answer is everything.

That said, while they both bring out different sides of Charles, those sides of him feel intricately linked to one another! Which is why Crystal coming into the pictures begins changing Charles' relationship with Edwin as well! It brings to light things they have ignored. And in turn, Charles' clear and unwavering devotion and loyalty to Edwin prompts Crystal to learn it herself. To quote Jenny in ep 8, "you were about to leave and never see these boys again, but now you are going to save them"? And yes, she does exactly that.

This even has influence on Edwin and Crystal's rs directly, which I can't recall ever seeing in a love triangle before, at least not in a positive sense. But it's so clear that Charles loves both of them that the other learns to love them too, and they realize their own similarities through it, too!

As for Edwin and his many love interests, well. I know there has been a lot of debate, especially around Cat King vs Charles dyankics with Edwin, but the thing is-you are comparing apples ajd oranges here.

The Cat King is enamored, fascinated by Edwin, and yeah above all, attracted to him. This dynamic serves to challenge both of their characters' beliefs and shake up the power dynamics between them. Whenever you like the Cat King or not Edwin clearly reciprocates the attraction part, at the very least.

Charles loves Edwin and is devoted to him and Edwin to him turn, as discussed above. What is difficult about their relationship is that it became stagnant due to lack of communication, which is why they needed other relationships to shake up that dynamic.

But to address the most prominent comparison I saw, which is the Cat King saying he'll wait for Edwin vs Charles going to Hell to save him.

Both are types of devotion, is the thing. A profession of love, if you will. To this day, we consider Penelope a faithful, loving and devoted wife for waiting for Odyssey for 20 years. Cat King saying he'd wait for Edwin isn't any small confession, given he is aware it could take decades, if not more.

Don't get me wrong, Charles going to literal Hell to save Edwin and succeeding where Orpheus and Eurydice failed is an enormous success and a way to show you love someone. I am not minimalizing that at all.

I am just saying that, for who these characters are and given their rs with Edwin, they did exactly what they were supposed to. They expressed in which ways Edwin had influenced them and what they can offer him if that dynamic becomes romantic.

Cat King represents experience, patience. As an immortal he has all the time in the world to wait for Edwin to return from hell, because he believes Edwin is strong enough to return on his own.

Charles represents love that breaks all obstacles in their way. He goes to save Edwin because he believes Edwin deserves to be helped in the way he helps others. He deserves to be saved.

My point is, there is no better of worse way of loving someone. The character in the love triangle choose the person that better alignes with who they are and who they wish to be as a person. So yes, you are absolutely allowed to say "I think this character would choose person a because it alignes better with their character development" but comparing the two as one being superior is kinda pointless imo? Exploring different dynamic of a character is the goal here, right? Either through canon or fanon.

...I was gonna talk about Crystal/Niko and Edwin/Monty too but this post got away from me to uhh. Might do another one if anyone is interested but in their way! I adore the way DBDA explores different sides of characters while still making them feel like a fully rounded person and doesn't shy away from letting one rs influence other rs character has.

[thegrowngirlguide]

Dead Boys Detectives - A Review...Almost

May contain spoilers. If you haven't watched it, don't read it!

Or do. I am not your mother! :P

Out on the 25th of April, inspired in the creation of Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner for DC Comics, the "Dead Boy Detectives" were my company in the past 2 days. Made solely the now usual 8 episode, this Netflix show is oddly entertaining.

Surrounded with magic, love, friendships and cats, Edwin and his unalived friend, Charles, are the investigators one should look for if you have unfinished business while you're staying in the limbo.

Edwin "The Brain" Payne and Charles "The Brawn" Rowland are ghosts and to avoid their afterlives, they help others find their peace once and for all. Using some books and finding new truths, they go and save the day...with some help.

But we'll get back to that soon!

Let me go on and tell you what I thought about these two boys.

Starting with Edwin, I thought he was going to be a sad stereotype on a tormented gay man who lives an unrequited love and falls apart. However, this stereotype is almost broken with only his behavior towards other characters. Despite his love for Charles, he isn't encapsulated by it. He shows affection to Monty, who actually falls for the detective and the most satisfying moment of the show is how he bids farewell to Cat King. A kiss on the cheek, Edwin? How cheeky of you!

However, Edwin also behaves differently towards the girls. But the reasons are quite obvious. Crystal is a possible threat towards his relationship with Charles, Niko isn't. Then again, Crystal makes his constant search for knowledge almost irrelevant in some cases, while Niko questions him, looking for answers with him and comforts him. Possibly why Niko's death affected him so much, she was a big supporter of his methods and the one who would balance the ideas of everyone.

Not to mention, Niko is a delight!

Now, Charles probably a better character than what I expected, to be honest. I never expect much from the main characters, but sometimes I am surprised. This detective has another mission at his hands besides escaping Death's grip. He wants to fix his wrongs, prove himself and the world wrong.

Charles puts on the table some themes from the 80's that have been discussed before in Pop Culture, such as the conflict between Pakistan and India. Maybe it passed from our brains but in "Bohemian Rhapsody", we see a young Farrokh Bulsara - later known as the immortal Freddie Mercury - being called a "Paki", a slur often directed to Pakistan or South Asian descendants. Once again, we see it in the "Dead Boy Detectives", Charles being hated upon for being a South Asian descendant - probably from India, if memory does not fail me. Yet, if you look for the actual Charles Rowland from the DC Comics Universe, he isn't a South Asian boy, which surprised me a little, but in a positive way. It's not every day we get South Asian representations like these in our shows and they made it pretty amazingly. I am in no place to say anything on this matter, but from a white perspective, I thought it'd be worse.

On another note, something that pained me about Charles was how he passed and his life. I mean, obviously, it's death of a delight boy, how could it not hurt? But the cruelty and the solitude and suffering almost beats Edwin's death, in a way. Whatever Edwin suffered in Hell, Charles probably lived it. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but you get me, right? The detective passed peacefully in his sleep, accompanied by his best friend, who stuck around until his last breath. How heartbreaking.

It truly pulled a string of my heart, but I'm sure you'll know what I mean once you watch the show.

Moving on! Crystal Palace was known for it's changing structure, that could be carried from city to city in order to hold the great exhibitions in England in the early 1800's.

Don't worry, I am not insane, because it'll make sense. Even more if I tell you that this amazing Palace burned down in London, in 1936. Which is the same city where we meet our dear psychic medium, Crystal Palace. A quirky girl at her prime, initially possessed by her demonic ex boyfriend - Ugh, always these guys - who stole her memory and left her clueless with two ghosts to deal with.

Her help became almost crucial to speed up some cases, but even I had to team up with Edwin on being skeptical on her. I mean, out of nowhere she joins and gets to help? I know you're dead, but at least get to know the girl. However, these doubts start to disappear as time goes by and we actually get to know her.

Trusting both her gut and the boys, Crystal shows us that she is more than just a medium, she is almost a diplomat who communicates and unites both the living and the dead. She is also constantly ready to find solutions and trinkets for any problem that my be ahead, which funny enough is one of Charles talents, to use his trinkets to fix problems. What a cute couple!

Delightful couple in fact! Crystal's understanding spirit is probably something that makes Charles love her more than just her "mint" body. After all, they rely on each other for support and affection from the very beginning, always trying to figure out and communicating what they are feeling, be it good or bad.

On the other hand, we learn that Crystal is more than just a medium. Her powers didn't come from David, but herself. It was almost rewarding to learn that it wasn't just a demon, but Crystal that was powerful. Plus, it was passed to her by her ancestors. So could she actually be a witch? Would she be a divine creature? We should stick around and find out. Or maybe... investigate?

_____

Goodness, I wrote so much and I only spoke about 3 characters! I'm probably going to divide this and keep going in the next post. So, maybeee, you should stick around and see what I have to say about Niko. Or Jenny. Or Esther. Or Cat King! If you guys want, you can help me pick and everything! I promise to bring you much better thoughts on them!

Until then, stay safe, drink water, eat and rest! With all my love, Yours Truly

[juniaships]

Vanessa Marble-Whittaker Bio **redux**

I had to delete the old post due to spelling mistakes and to add more info, but here is the official character bio for my AIO OC....possibly the only one in existence 😅 Contains spoilers and subject matter of abuse & postpartum depression; if you're curious you might have to do look into the main story arcs of AIO for easier understanding.

Full Name: Vanessa Crystal Marble Whittaker (nee Marble;)

Age: Unspecified but around late 20s to mid 30s

Birthday: May 15th

Race: African American (with European ancestry on both sides)

Fandom: Adventures in Odyssey

Voice Claim: Cree Summer; Vivica A. Fox is also a good alternate

Character Role: Heroine & love interest/spouse of Jason Whittaker

Items: Cross necklace, Midnight Manor (formerly Blackgaard's Castle)

Relationships

Family: Robienne Marble (mother), Regis Blackgaard (father), Edwin Blackgaard (uncle), Jerry Jr. (son, infant), John Whittaker (father in law), Monty (nephew in law), Jana (sister in Law)

Friends at Whit's End: Whit, Eugene, Connie, Katrina, Angel (pet doberman)

Acquaintances: Nuns, denizens of Odyssey

Love Interest: Her primary love interest and eventual husband is Jason Whittaker. They began as tensse & awkward relationship during the Blackgaard Saga duento their contrasting personalities, before becoming close friends and allies. They do not become completely official until after Novacom. Their relationship is regarded as the bonafide example of "Opposites Attract" in Odyssey.

Enemies: While enemies are far and few, she considers her own father as the major obstacle between her and a peaceful life. She was a major player against Novacom. She had a brief yey tense rivalry with Monica Stone (partly for Jason's affections) but the two made peace at the end.

Appearance

- Average height (say, 5'7)

-Brown skin, light brown eyes, and wavy-curly black hair

-Has an average body type (pear shaped) and seemed to gain a few pounds since giving birth

-Typically were darker shades of purple, blue, with the occasional maroon

-Sense of fashion is put together, professional even if casual

- Still has her nun fatigues

Personality

Vanessa is a composed and reserved lady with a deep connection to God, while respecting other religions (and non religious). While seen as a cold person at first glance, she is actually very kind and open-minded, though she isn't immune to making sardonic comments once in a while. While not really great around kids, she has moments of being supportive. After becoming a mother she is rather clueless, though well-meaning and tries her hardest to be the parent her father wasn't.

One of her biggest obstacle is overcoming her aloof demeanor. She needed to learn to open up to others and to out faith in her new friends. Even now she still has her moments of keeping her true emotions, though she has a wide circle of friends and a spouse to talk to. Vanessa was also ashamed of her Blackgaard blood, though she learns to come to terms with her past in order to create a brighter future for herself and the rest of her family. Sometimes she is prone to feeling inadequate and jealous, especially during brief periods of romantic rivalry.

There is a fierce protective side that comes out when loved ones are threatened, as seen with the Blackgaard and Novacom Sagas. She dislikes staying on the sidelines and does whatever she can to help out. She even broke her vows to protect her mother Robienne when Regis came into town, and later inspired her uncle Edwin to stay and fight her father to help save Odyssey.

While studious snd intelligent, Vanessa is not very tech savvy, naturally preferring traditional mediums such as writing letters and books. While she learns how to use computers and cellphones, don't expect her to be a technophile anytime soon. She expresses curiosity and concerns over the next invention hubby makes.

Abilities

Vanessa can memorize a lot a bible verses which she uses as prayer, or as a quip. She also has taken self defense classes to hold her her own.

- Strengths: In her early years she proved to be surprisingly strong and fast when need be. She can adapt to certain situations and keep her cool. Clever and resourceful, Vanessa often thinks and plans her actions. She can speak three languages (Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese) and plans om studying more.

- Weaknesses: After pregnancy she isn't as physically strong and has to limit herself to recover, and can be overpowered by much stronger foes. Vanessa is not very good at advanced technology, and she is a bad cook (Jason keeps her away from the stove as much as possible).

Backstory Vanessa was the only child of Regis and Robienne Blackgaard. Their marriage had be a short and rocky one marred by neglect, emotional manipulation and mental abuse. Finally, on the guidance of Edwin (Regis's brother) Robienne decided she had enough and divorced Regis when Vanessa was two years old. Robienne moved her daughter to New England to be with family, and the two lived peacefully after that. After graduating high school, Vanessa went to the nunnery and stayed there for a few years, while Robienne moved to the Midwest to pursue a career in teaching.

However Vanessa soon grew discontent, feeling as though she was missing out on normal young adult life. Should she stay as a nun or forge her own path?

She would find clues to her answer in the form of receiving news about her father moving to Odyssey - the same town her mother lived. Fearing for her mother's life, Vanessa requested a temporary break in vows, family business, she had said. Settling in Odyssey (under the surname Newman) she got a job working at Whit's End and as a private tutor.

Following major and minor events including the Blackgaard, Novacom, and Green Ring Conspiracy drama, Jason proposed to Vanessa, and they had a summer wedding (but not before overcoming premarital jitters and a threat from Jason's past). Two years after their union (or as of current Odyssey storyline) they had a little boy named Jerry Jr. (named after Jason's deceased brother). Vanessa continues to work at Whit's End as a curator and artist.

Major Storylines: If she was canon she would've been a major player in some of Odyssey's biggest stories including:

- Blackgaard Saga: Her debut, she came to town to take care of her mother & to confront her father on troubled past. She was hired to work at Whit's End where she met then-owner Jack Allen & the previous owner's son Jason for the first time. The townsfolk were.mesmerized by the seemingly mysterious woman and rumors started to abound. Near the climax, Vanessa revealed to Connie and Eugene that came to Odyssey to protect her mother from Regis. Towards the end of the saga, she, her uncle Edwin, and a few townsfolk helped to set up a trap for her father to save Odyssey.

Novacom Saga: She was a big player in taking down Novacom, using her skills writing letters to raise awareness on Novacom's shady actions. This is where her rivalry with Monica Stone began as Vanessa feelings for Jason turn romantic. After Novacom, she would be involved in more stories.

Green Ring Conspiracy: Following Jason's supposed "death" she briefly left Odyssey in mourning. Her uncle and mother managed to convince her to come back to Odyssey. She was unaware of Jason's secret of being alive and working as the Stiletto, and had several encounters with the Stiletto where the mysterious man left her roses and notes of endearment. The two would later reunite after Jason retuned to town, but Vanessa was angry with him for keeping secrets from her. After a long time (and counsel from Whit) she forgave him, and the two reconciled with the promise of being more open with each other.

Courtship Of Jason & Vanessa: An original storyline where the romance between her and Jason comes full circle, leading to their engagement! If only they could overcome personal inhibitions, a hateful doberman, past rivals and a threat from Jason's spy work!

Junior's Birth & Beyond: A couple of years into their marriage Vanessa became pregnant. She was anxious over multiple scenarios, her growing appetite and mood swings. After her son was born she developed symptoms of postpartum depression and sought medications and therapy. Slowly but surely, her mental health improved, & her anxieties faded away. As of now she has gotten involved with the current Rydell Saga.

Trivia

Vanessa won several awards for her artwork and has them on display everywhere in Odyssey

She is one of my most complex characters, but also one starting to really grow on me mostly out of nostalgia for the series

- Characters that inspired Vanessa's creation are Megara (Disney Hercules), Rei/Sailor Mars (Sailor Moon), Esther (biblical stories), Tzipporah (biblical stories esp. Dreamworks The King of Egypt), Talia Al Ghul, and Elisa Maza (Gargoyles). Other inspos include Maria Von Trapp and Marian Ravenwood.

- Vanessa was made to have a unique female character to contrast Connie and Katrina. Also because I have a soft spot for the Forbidden Love trope (if done right).

- She is the only main character OC of mine that is explicitly religious. She was Catholic and while she converted to Protestant, she still holds on to Catholic values. She is also the only main OC to be a parent as of current.

- Vanessa still visits her old nunnery when she and Jason goes to New England.

- She has bouts of postpartum depression, and takes medication to regulate.

- Her favorite things are the color blue, making her own pigments, and coffee flavored ice cream

Quotes

"Blackgaard already made our lives miserable uncle Edwin! If you leave now you're only giving him more power! You helped mama and I so many times, so it's my turn to return the favor!"

"Connie I'm a nun not a miracle worker."

"If my mother superior saw what I'm doing right now I would've had an early meeting with the Lord!"

"No more secrets. From now on it's just truth and nothing but the truth. Except for my age, don't ask me how old I am."

"Sheesh with all these buttons I'm surprised we didn't destroy Odyssey yet!"

"Jason I know you're worried about the baby but did you have to baby proof the doghouse too?"

"My little Angel! Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl!"

"I can't believe I can still wear this after all these years!?"

"Jason Whittaker you have got to be the most stubborn, reckless, foolhardy man I have ever met, and I wouldn't have it any other way."

"You call it junk I call it avant garde."

"I'm not responsible for my father's sins but I am responsible for mine. But my mother and uncle are in trouble. If not for me then please, do it for them!"

"She doesn't hate you Jason, she hates everyone equally."

"I guess God had a plan in store for me after all. I would've never met such wonderful people."

"Are you going to keep talking or should I start the kissing?"

Pictures

I haven't drawn any references for her yet, so that's going to be on a separate post

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[networkingdefinition]

Pine Trees Quotes

Official Website: Pine Trees Quotes

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• A pine tree standeth lonely In the North on an upland bare; It standeth whitely shrouded With snow, and sleepeth there. It dreameth of a Palm tree Which far in the East alone, In the mournful silence standeth On its ridge of burning stone. – Heinrich Heine • Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. – Aldo Leopold • And the needles of the pine trees, freshly washed to a deep, rich green, shimmered with droplets that blinked like clear crystals. – Billie Letts • And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. – Toni Morrison • As I go musing through this mournful land Soothed by the pine-tree’s solemn harmony, Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me. I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand And talk of things I dimly understand, That thy dear spirit set to mine may be As to an intricate lock the simple key. – John Barlas • As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Pine', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_pine').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_pine img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. – John Muir • Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world. – John Muir • By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis, Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories? – Sherman Alexie • Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas. – Ronald Reagan • Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear. – Angela Carter • Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible. – Euell Gibbons • Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. – Henry David Thoreau • Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family’s cottage in Maine. It’s on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing. – Hope Davis • Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . . – John Muir • Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish. – John Muir • For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground–old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost. – Donald Hall • From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo – Matsuo Basho • Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend. – Henry David Thoreau • Gently I stir a white feather fan, With open shirt sitting in a green wood. I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone; A wind from the pine-tree trickles on my bare head. – Li Bai • God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble. – Zora Neale Hurston • High high in the hills , high in a pine tree bed. She’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant, Three geese in a flock one flew east one flew west one flew over the cuckoo’s nest – Ken Kesey • I don’t think anyone ‘finds’ joy. Rather, we cultivate it by searching for the preciousness of small things, the ordinary miracles, that strengthen our hearts so we can keep them open to what is difficult: delight in taking a shower or a slow walk that has no destination, in touching something soft, in noticing the one small, black bird who sings every morning from the top of the big old pine tree … I need to give my attention to the simple things that give me pleasure with the same fervor I have been giving it to the complex things with which I drive myself crazy. – Dawna Markova • I found everything so remote but, at the same time, familiar when I occasionally looked into the mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums depicted in old literati paintings. My innermost feeling which was awakened by the same mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums has been totally and utterly changed. Moreover, like an apparition, it hides deep down in my vessels. The very trees and rocks have become the storage of memories and emotions from various eras. Forced by the rapid change of time and perspective, I cannot help but feel urged to face up to these things once again. – Zhang Xiaogang • I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. – Henry David Thoreau • I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do – amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real. – Josh Turner • I love Tennessee, but they don’t have the pine trees and the sandy soil and the black water that I grew up around. – Josh Turner • I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. – Hamlin Garland • I should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army. – Henry David Thoreau • I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other’s destiny. – Mary Oliver • If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell–among all the delights of the open world–on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and–most spiritual and moving of sights–the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky. – Edwin Way Teale • If you could eat portions of pine trees, you could eliminate corn in many ways.- Homaro Cantu • If you look close … you can see that the wild critters have ‘No Trespassing’ signs tacked up on every pine tree. – Marguerite Henry • I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont’ just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight. – Philip Pullman • In a pine tree,/ A few yards from my window sill,/ A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and/ down./ On a branch./ I laugh, as I see him abandon himself/ To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do/ That the branch will not break. – James Wright • In snowbound, voiceless, mountain depths, to herald spring, pine trees sound in tune. – Princess Shikishi • It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness – breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him. – Henry David Thoreau • Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats. – Edward Abbey • Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant. – Matsuo Basho • Life has loveliness to sell, / Music like a curve of gold, / Scent of pine trees in the rain, / Eyes that love you, arms that hold, / And for your spirit’s still delight, / Holy thoughts that star the night. – Sara Teasdale • Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children’s faces looking up, Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit’s still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night. Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be. – Sara Teasdale • Many parts of a pine tree are edible. – Euell Gibbons • Momo listened to everyone and everything – even to the rain and the wind and the pine trees – and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion. – Michael Ende • No one can look at a pine tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time. – Frank Bolles • No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. – Thomas Merton • Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. – Thomas Merton • One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is. – Wallace Stevens • One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow – Wallace Stevens • Only yonder magnificent pine-tree… holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year’s ebb. – Thomas Wentworth Higginson • Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees. – E. F. Schumacher • Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener. – Sloane Crosley • Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could. – Daniel Woodrell • Santa Claus has nothing to do with it,” the latke said. “Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things.” “But different things can often blend together,” said the pine tree. “Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals. – Daniel Handler • so, when I spotted a cougar stretched out on a thick pine tree branch near the park gates, I wasn’t surprised. I can’t say the same for the women clinging to the branch above the cat. she was the one screaming. The cougar-a ragged-ear old top I clled Marv-just stared at her, like he couldn’t believe anyone would be dumb to climb a tree to escape a cat. – Kelley Armstrong • Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy. – John Frederick Boyes • Study the teachings of the pine tree, the bamboo, and the plum blossom. The pine is evergreen, firmly rooted, and venerable. The bamboo is strong, resilient, unbreakable. The plum blossom is hardy, fragrant, and elegant. – Morihei Ueshiba • Thalia had been turned into a pine tree when she was 12. Me… well, i was doing my best not to follow her example. I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if i were ever in the verge of death—plankton, maybe. Or a floating patch of kelp. – Rick Riordan • The forests are the flag’s of Nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten. It may be that sometime an immortal pine will be the flag of a united and peaceful world. – Enos Mills • The guy who owned that island was from Oregon and he decided that he wanted to have an Oregon feeling to it, so he planted pine trees all over the place! – Christopher Atkins • The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: – they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity. – Friedrich Nietzsche • The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. – Henry David Thoreau • Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. – J. R. R. Tolkien • There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. – Henry David Thoreau • There is scarce a cave, an isolated rock, a lone pine tree or a pile of stones without supporting folklore. – John Hillaby • There was once a bundle of matches, and they were frightfully proud because of their high origin. Their family tree, that is to say the great pine tree of which they were each a little splinter, had been the giant of the forest. – Hans Christian Andersen • To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. – Helen Keller • Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Wilderness is not only a haven for native plants and animals but it is also a refuge from society. Its a place to go to hear the wind and little else, see the stars and the galaxies, smell the pine trees, feel the cold water, touch the sky and the ground at the same time, listen to coyotes, eat the fresh snow, walk across the desert sands, and realize why its good to go outside of the city and the suburbs. Fortunately, there is wilderness just outside the limits of the cities and the suburbs in most of the United States, especially in the West. – John Muir • Worpswede, Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind… Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men–thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall–yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them. – Paula Modersohn-Becker • You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night. – Denise Levertov • You know the Zen question, ‘The Bodhisattva of Great Mercy’ has a thousand hands and a thousand eyes; ‘which is the true eye?’ I could not understand this for a long time. But the other day, when I looked at the pine trees bending before the cold blasts from the mountain, I suddenly realized the meaning. You see, all the boughs, branches, twigs, and leaves simultaneously bend to the wind with tremendous vigor. – Katsuki Sekida • You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the LORD’s renown, for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed. – Isaiah

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'a', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_a').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_a img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

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[equitiesstocks]

Pine Trees Quotes

Official Website: Pine Trees Quotes

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• A pine tree standeth lonely In the North on an upland bare; It standeth whitely shrouded With snow, and sleepeth there. It dreameth of a Palm tree Which far in the East alone, In the mournful silence standeth On its ridge of burning stone. – Heinrich Heine • Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. – Aldo Leopold • And the needles of the pine trees, freshly washed to a deep, rich green, shimmered with droplets that blinked like clear crystals. – Billie Letts • And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. – Toni Morrison • As I go musing through this mournful land Soothed by the pine-tree’s solemn harmony, Thy well-loved image comes and walks by me. I seem to hold thee by the gentle hand And talk of things I dimly understand, That thy dear spirit set to mine may be As to an intricate lock the simple key. – John Barlas • As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Pine', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_pine').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_pine img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. – John Muir • Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world. – John Muir • By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis, Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories? – Sherman Alexie • Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas. – Ronald Reagan • Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you must have gathered, is the smile I wear. – Angela Carter • Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible. – Euell Gibbons • Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. – Henry David Thoreau • Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family’s cottage in Maine. It’s on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing. – Hope Davis • Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts . . . – John Muir • Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish. – John Muir • For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground–old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost. – Donald Hall • From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo – Matsuo Basho • Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficientaccuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend. – Henry David Thoreau • Gently I stir a white feather fan, With open shirt sitting in a green wood. I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone; A wind from the pine-tree trickles on my bare head. – Li Bai • God took pattern after a pine tree and built you noble. – Zora Neale Hurston • High high in the hills , high in a pine tree bed. She’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant, Three geese in a flock one flew east one flew west one flew over the cuckoo’s nest – Ken Kesey • I don’t think anyone ‘finds’ joy. Rather, we cultivate it by searching for the preciousness of small things, the ordinary miracles, that strengthen our hearts so we can keep them open to what is difficult: delight in taking a shower or a slow walk that has no destination, in touching something soft, in noticing the one small, black bird who sings every morning from the top of the big old pine tree … I need to give my attention to the simple things that give me pleasure with the same fervor I have been giving it to the complex things with which I drive myself crazy. – Dawna Markova • I found everything so remote but, at the same time, familiar when I occasionally looked into the mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums depicted in old literati paintings. My innermost feeling which was awakened by the same mountains, rocks, pine trees and plums has been totally and utterly changed. Moreover, like an apparition, it hides deep down in my vessels. The very trees and rocks have become the storage of memories and emotions from various eras. Forced by the rapid change of time and perspective, I cannot help but feel urged to face up to these things once again. – Zhang Xiaogang • I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. – Henry David Thoreau • I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do – amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real. – Josh Turner • I love Tennessee, but they don’t have the pine trees and the sandy soil and the black water that I grew up around. – Josh Turner • I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. – Hamlin Garland • I should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army. – Henry David Thoreau • I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other’s destiny. – Mary Oliver • If I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell–among all the delights of the open world–on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and–most spiritual and moving of sights–the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky. – Edwin Way Teale • If you could eat portions of pine trees, you could eliminate corn in many ways.- Homaro Cantu • If you look close … you can see that the wild critters have ‘No Trespassing’ signs tacked up on every pine tree. – Marguerite Henry • I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont’ just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight. – Philip Pullman • In a pine tree,/ A few yards from my window sill,/ A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and/ down./ On a branch./ I laugh, as I see him abandon himself/ To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do/ That the branch will not break. – James Wright • In snowbound, voiceless, mountain depths, to herald spring, pine trees sound in tune. – Princess Shikishi • It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness – breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him. – Henry David Thoreau • Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats. – Edward Abbey • Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant. – Matsuo Basho • Life has loveliness to sell, / Music like a curve of gold, / Scent of pine trees in the rain, / Eyes that love you, arms that hold, / And for your spirit’s still delight, / Holy thoughts that star the night. – Sara Teasdale • Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children’s faces looking up, Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit’s still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night. Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be. – Sara Teasdale • Many parts of a pine tree are edible. – Euell Gibbons • Momo listened to everyone and everything – even to the rain and the wind and the pine trees – and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion. – Michael Ende • No one can look at a pine tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time. – Frank Bolles • No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. – Thomas Merton • Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn’t already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. – Thomas Merton • One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is. – Wallace Stevens • One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow – Wallace Stevens • Only yonder magnificent pine-tree… holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year’s ebb. – Thomas Wentworth Higginson • Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees. – E. F. Schumacher • Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener. – Sloane Crosley • Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could. – Daniel Woodrell • Santa Claus has nothing to do with it,” the latke said. “Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things.” “But different things can often blend together,” said the pine tree. “Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals. – Daniel Handler • so, when I spotted a cougar stretched out on a thick pine tree branch near the park gates, I wasn’t surprised. I can’t say the same for the women clinging to the branch above the cat. she was the one screaming. The cougar-a ragged-ear old top I clled Marv-just stared at her, like he couldn’t believe anyone would be dumb to climb a tree to escape a cat. – Kelley Armstrong • Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy. – John Frederick Boyes • Study the teachings of the pine tree, the bamboo, and the plum blossom. The pine is evergreen, firmly rooted, and venerable. The bamboo is strong, resilient, unbreakable. The plum blossom is hardy, fragrant, and elegant. – Morihei Ueshiba • Thalia had been turned into a pine tree when she was 12. Me… well, i was doing my best not to follow her example. I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if i were ever in the verge of death—plankton, maybe. Or a floating patch of kelp. – Rick Riordan • The forests are the flag’s of Nature. They appeal to all and awaken inspiring universal feelings. Enter the forest and the boundaries of nations are forgotten. It may be that sometime an immortal pine will be the flag of a united and peaceful world. – Enos Mills • The guy who owned that island was from Oregon and he decided that he wanted to have an Oregon feeling to it, so he planted pine trees all over the place! – Christopher Atkins • The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: – they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity. – Friedrich Nietzsche • The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. – Henry David Thoreau • Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. – J. R. R. Tolkien • There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. – Henry David Thoreau • There is scarce a cave, an isolated rock, a lone pine tree or a pile of stones without supporting folklore. – John Hillaby • There was once a bundle of matches, and they were frightfully proud because of their high origin. Their family tree, that is to say the great pine tree of which they were each a little splinter, had been the giant of the forest. – Hans Christian Andersen • To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. – Helen Keller • Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend, Unnerves his strength, invites his end. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Wilderness is not only a haven for native plants and animals but it is also a refuge from society. Its a place to go to hear the wind and little else, see the stars and the galaxies, smell the pine trees, feel the cold water, touch the sky and the ground at the same time, listen to coyotes, eat the fresh snow, walk across the desert sands, and realize why its good to go outside of the city and the suburbs. Fortunately, there is wilderness just outside the limits of the cities and the suburbs in most of the United States, especially in the West. – John Muir • Worpswede, Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind… Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men–thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall–yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them. – Paula Modersohn-Becker • You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night. – Denise Levertov • You know the Zen question, ‘The Bodhisattva of Great Mercy’ has a thousand hands and a thousand eyes; ‘which is the true eye?’ I could not understand this for a long time. But the other day, when I looked at the pine trees bending before the cold blasts from the mountain, I suddenly realized the meaning. You see, all the boughs, branches, twigs, and leaves simultaneously bend to the wind with tremendous vigor. – Katsuki Sekida • You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the LORD’s renown, for an everlasting sign, which will not be destroyed. – Isaiah

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[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.