EXHIBITION
Biennale di Venezia 2016: “Reporting from the Front” by Alejandro Aravena
Do you know why “Biennale di Venezia” is called “Biennale”? I don’t. What I know is that once every two years it organizes the world’s most important architectural event. This is the year when you can discover the latest design visions, building concepts and the most inspiring hints brought in from all over of our planet into a single place: the Venice Biennale.
From May 27 until November 28, Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale will host the 15th International Architecture Exhibition entitled “Reporting from the Front”, and curated by Alejandro Aravena from Chile. Aravena, besides being nominated the director of the forthcoming Biennale, has also won the 2016 Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious annual award in the field of architecture. So the Architect of the year will curate the architectural show of the year. Sounds promising, doesn’t it?
So what shall we expect from “Reporting from the Front”? We don’t know. What we do know is that Aravena promised to “offer a new point of view” on architecture, to extend this vision “adding explicitly to the cultural and artistic dimensions that already belong to our scope, those that are on the social, political, economical and environmental end of the spectrum”, and to introduce to a broader audience “the work of people that are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action”.
P.S. Originally the name “Biennale” has been clarifying that the exhibitions of this cultural hub are held every two years. The only exception is the Biennale’s Venice Film Festival founded in 1932 that takes place every year. Thanks to the Venice Biennale, however, the term “Biennale” is used nowadays all over the world and stands for a great (and recurrent) cultural event. The term however does not imply anymore the 2-years frequency.
Maria Novozhilova
e-mail: novozhilovam.blog@gmail.com
twitter: @NovozhilovaM