Mexico at the Venice Biennale 2018

The proposal of the Mexican pavilion at the 16th International Exhibition of Architecture of the Venice Biennale is a tribute to our architecture as a cultural heritage.

 

With 37 years and 16 editions, the Venice Biennale is the most long-lived and relevant to the world's architecture. Located in the former Naval and military complex known as the Arsenal in the city of Venice, Italy, more than a sample of works, is a window to the world.

Hence the importance of Mexican participation, as it is to disseminate internationally, through architecture, that our country has much more to say and offer, than you see daily in the news.

In this edition, the Mexican Pavilion responds to the free space, or Freespace, curatorial concept that governs the biennial – aimed at by the artistic direction of the Biennale by the Irish architects Ivonne Farrell and Shelly McNamara – which seeks to emphasize the quality of The architectural spaces, and how these «manage to connect with history, time, place and people». In other words, how architecture influences and manipulates the everyday experience of public and private spaces.

Based on this, the curatorial proposal for the Pavilion titled Echoes of a Land, proposes an approximation to the territory, the formal abstraction of architecture and its human experience by emphasizing the imaginary, cultural and geographical load of architecture. Present in 21 projects of various studies. These were chosen from 213 proposals from 15 States of the Mexican Republic, as a result of an open call.

The answer to the subject is appreciated in the selected works, which are a reflection of the links between the freedom of imagination, the interaction with the intangible and the incorporation of the cultural inheritance. In addition, they are the evidence of a topography that overlaps symbolic, historical, cultural and natural high-density strata in our country.

The palimpsest of the collective Mexican imaginary is distributed in several layers that persist on geographies and parallelisms of a common territory.

"The exhibition represents the search for a joint perspective that allows us to confront the constant imbalances that the country is obliged to respond to. The catastrophes experienced in recent years emphasize a broader ethical role in architecture and, in a forced way, evoke the construction of the territory in attention to the physical and cultural variables that determine the design processes. The formulation of desires and fantasies is limited by the echoes of his land to show that architecture should not be a reality in itself, but a discourse from reality, "said Gabriela Etchegaray, curator of the pavilion.

In addition to the national pavilions, this edition of the Venice Biennale includes the participation of 71 guests in charge of the biennial's artistic directors, in which the Mexican company Rozaa Montiel is integrated. The Mexican pavilion was inaugurated on May 24th and will be on display until the 25th of November of the current year.