Renewed Spatial Contracts

Conversations on Venice brings together architects, educators, curators and community organisers who are involved in the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. Originally scheduled to open in May 2020, the Biennale was postponed by a year to 2021 as a result of Covid-19. The theme chosen by Hashim Sarkis, the curator of this edition of the Biennale, How Will We Live Together? was more prophetic than anyone originally realised, with all participants having an additional year to reflect on not just their contributions but the role of architecture in a time of crisis. This series of conversations invites a selection of national pavilions and Biennale contributors, most of whom have connections to the AA, to discuss common themes that span across their installations in Venice and beyond to address issues of care, mutuality, context, collaboration and above all togetherness.

What are the spaces across scales that enable us to come together differently, to have new forms of conversation or to change our behaviours, habits and rituals? Especially after the months spent online as we remained physically and geographically separate, what are the spaces and devices that can now bring us back together? In this conversation between curators of the Cyprus Pavilion alongside designers and educators Lemonot and Francesca Dell’Aglio and Rory Sherlock who all taught units in this year’s AA Summer School, they will discuss the new spatial contracts that were formed in and around this year’s biennale and how this became a platform to develop conversations around teaching agendas, architectural practice and what it means to be an agent of change.

Urban Radicals started out in 2019 as a collaboration between Nasios Varnavas and Era Savvides. Dedicated to the idea of collaboration with other practices, disciplines, and individuals, the studio functions as a collective, looking to examine the notion of community from a variety of perspectives including culture, politics, economy, geography, ecology, social aspects and architecture. Era and Nasios are actively involved in academia as visiting tutors at the Bartlett, Architectural Association, University of Greenwich and De Montfort University. More recently, they have been selected as emerging architectural talent to design and curate the national participation of Cyprus in the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia 2021.

Lemonot is a duo based in London - co-founded by Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri - educators and spatial practitioners, they operate between architecture and performative arts, used as devices to detect, celebrate and trigger the spontaneous theatre of everyday life. They have been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto since 2017 and in the past few years they have taught in Cambridge, at the AA Summer School and at INDA in Bangkok. They currently teach on the AA Foundation course and at dieAngewandte (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna.

Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio is an architect, writer and educator. She currently teaches History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association and runs design studios at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art, where she is concluding her PhD on rituals, habits and collective space in London.

Rory James Sherlock is an architectural designer, editor and teacher. He graduated with Honours from the Architectural Association and was the Assistant Editor of AA Publications before joining OMMX, where he currently works. Rory is a Visiting Lecturer at the Architectural Association, a Design Fellow at Cambridge University and has previously taught at the Royal College of Art.

Images:
Cyprus Pavilion: All images courtesy of the Cyprus National Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2021.
Table of Contents: All images courtesy of the Table of Contents Summer School Unit at the Architectural Association 2021.
Reporting from Venice: All images courtesy of the Reporting from Venice Summer School Unit at the Architectural Association 2021. Work by Aimee Zhou, Erin Lau and Ritchie Tang.