Forensic Oceanography at 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by Forensic Oceanography, Aesthetic Borders: Of Violence and (in)Visibility at Sea presents two investigations, “The Crime of Rescue” and “Mare Clausum,” that engage with the momentous shift that occurred in the Mediterranean in 2015, when nongovernmental organizations started to conduct search and rescue operations in reaction to the persisting death of migrants and state authorities’ inaction. While the critical presence of NGOs has invaluably enhanced the ability to monitor border violence at sea, it has also brought new dilemmas to the fore. As the investigations reveal, the sudden flooding of images they have generated has been used not only to demand accountability for that violence, but also to criminalize and discredit their own work. Moreover, revealing border violence can have ambivalent effects, such as reproducing racialized imaginaries of black and brown bodies upon which the very closure of EU borders is predicated. By critically analyzing the shifting aesthetic regime operating at the Mediterranean frontier, the installation seeks to confront and unravel some of these ethical and political dilemmas, dwelling upon the challenges of representing violence.

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In the context of widening political divides and growing economic inequalities, curator Hashim Sarkis calls on architects to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together. The architects invited to participate in the Biennale Architettura 2021 are encouraged to include other professions and constituencies—artists, builders, and craftspeople, but also politicians, journalists, social scientists, and everyday citizens. In effect, the Biennale 2021 asserts the vital role of the architect as both cordial convener and custodian of the spatial contract. In parallel, the 17th Exhibition also maintains that it is in its material, spatial, and cultural specificity that architecture inspires the ways we live together. The Biennale Architettura 2021 is motivated by new kinds of problems that the world is putting in front of architecture, but it is also inspired by the emerging activism of young architects and the radical revisions being proposed by the profession of architecture to take on these challenges. But more than ever, architects are called upon to propose alternatives.