Venice Biennale Pavilions

Part 5

Canada. France. Britain

Well this is a pretty interesting trifecta of nations to examine historically and politically and whilst I could draw some tenuous links around colonialism really this was only a investigated by the British Pavilion

Partnered with Architect investigate the ecological and carbon impacts of colonial settlements and Through a series of installations discussed the ways in which that can be recognised and mitigated. The image below is one of the exhibitions which does a 3-D model of some of the cave systems which were used by indigenous populations prior to colonisation for storage and habitation but have since been destroyed there was also a quite powerful exhibition in the entry hall which showcase the carbon footprint of colonial settlements. Not sure where the dust came from but it was quite staggering to see the impacts there wrapping all this together was an external installation which shrouded the neoclassical pavilion in a Kenyon veil of handmade objects and natural elements- including coal. Again, this is worth doing more reading as it has graceful presence in the Giadarni

The Canadian pavilion Is a lovely Building from the 1950s with a much more modernist and understated appeal. Inside was a really interesting display of a growing architecture using plankton I believe as a base for the structure. It seemed like it wasn’t necessarily the finished product but was quite an interesting idea and I can see that there might be a future here for temporary pavilions and shade structures It seems a long way of being ready for habitation

And lastly the French pavilion - this was under renovation but they’d use the scaffold to display some exhibition boards of projects which I didn’t really get time to investigate too much but one of the more interesting ones was a housing relocation project between An area that no longer required his houses to somewhere that did I thought that was a pretty interesting approach to a housing crisis