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What if the best pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 is in the toilet?

2021-05-27T09:22:21.896Z


'The Restroom Pavillion' unfolds inside the Giardini public bathroom and its aim is to promote reflection on how toilets constitute architectures that highlight many of our current conflicts and concerns


They say that what happens in the bathroom gives us the exact measure of the spirit of a party.

Of its success, and of how much and how the guests have fun.

The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, which just opened a year late, is a strange party to be held at a pandemic moment.

And also because of all the pavilions there is one that we did not expect, but that concentrates all the spirit of the event in a very small space: that of its public bathrooms.

Those who access them will first discover that the old distinction between men and women has been removed from their doors. But this is only a small part of what happens there.

All part of a joint project of three architects and researchers, the Italian Matilde Cassani and the Spanish Ignacio G. Galán and Iván López Munuera.

The Restroom Pavillion

(literally, the bathroom pavilion), framed in the official section of the Biennale, has the peculiarity of being deployed inside the

Giardini

public toilet

, located between the Belgian and Dutch pavilions. Its objective is to promote reflection on how toilets constitute architectures that highlight many of our current conflicts and concerns. For example, the way we handle the complex issue of gender. Or the need for a more balanced relationship with the environment.

This pavilion is in charge of the Italian Matilde Cassani and the Spanish Ignacio G. Galán and Iván López Munuera Subliminal Image: Miguel de Guzman and Rocio Romero

"We tend to believe that bathrooms are neutral facilities but, without our realizing it, many debates and confrontations of ideas take place in them", advances Iván López Munuera, who also participates this year with a text for the Russian pavilion.

As a researcher, he is about to obtain his second Ph.D. in Architecture at Princeton University, and his academic work has focused especially on the architectures of AIDS and HIV.

He has not been able to travel to Venice to set up the project, but in a videoconference from his home in New York he details its origins and development for ICON Design: "The three curators had previously incorporated the bathrooms in our respective investigations," he explains. “In my case, I appreciated that in the eighties, at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, nightclub toilets brought together people from very different places and who belonged to the LGBT community, which helped bring them together. In some of them the idea of ​​gender fluidity already appeared ”. The trio presented their ideas to Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and curator of this edition of the Biennale, who gave them the green light.

The motto chosen by Sarkis, “How will we live together?”, Asks a question that is giving rise to endless responses in the city of canals, from the polyphonic approach of the cabinet of curiosities that the curated Spanish pavilion becomes by the young Domingo González, Andrzej Gwizdala, Fernando Herrera and Sofía Piñero to the videos accessible via QR code that make up an otherwise completely empty German pavilion.

The

Catalonia in Venice

collateral event

, entitled

air / aria / aire

and focused on air quality problems, even turns the question around to turn it into another: “How will we survive together?”.

Portrait of the Spanish architect Iván López Munuera, who also participates this year with a text for the Russian pavilion.Miguel de Guzman

Environmental issues and our coexistence with other human and non-human beings figure at the center of many of these proposals, but factors such as gender, religion, race, abilities, hygiene and health, and of course the strictly economic ones also appear with recurrence. All of them meet in the bathroom pavilion, starting with the declaration of intent that supposes the erasure of the binary division in signage.

"But it is not simply a matter of changing the bathroom sign so that they stop being for men or women," says López Munuera. “We are not interested in limiting ourselves to providing a solution, but we want to convey that architecture can be an agent that generates change, and that society itself and government frameworks have to embrace these changes, either by leaving behind that idea of ​​binaryism. or contemplating other geographies, other subjects ”.

The “soft architecture” operation, as defined by its authors, continues with an installation of flags outside: “It is an ironic nod to the national pavilions, that concept on which the Biennial is based and which we also discuss”.

Likewise, it superimposes on the interior tiling some adhesive vinyl with curved shapes that function as windows to different realities of the city that are developed, in a more or less veiled way, in the setting of its bathrooms.

Set of dioramas from the exhibition 'Your Restroom is a Battleground' that illustrate how toilets have become places of protest or political activism Subliminal Image: Miguel de Guzman and Rocio Romero

They speak, for example, of the

gatoli

, the Venetian sewage system, which since the 16th century has made it possible to exclude waste from the space of human coexistence at the cost of polluting the waters of the canals and altering their habitat. Or the disruption that for decades

the gigantic cruise ships full of tourists

have

caused

the

Serenissima

: not only millions of human tourists have come to the city, but also a passenger as silent as it is active, the seaweed

Undaria pinnatifidia

, native to Japan, which arrived attached to the hulls of cruise ships to reproduce en masse at their destination and collapse the pipes, endangering their proper functioning (a problem similar to the one that threatens the fishing of trap tuna in Cádiz.

Reference is also made to the case of Alex Hai, a transgender aspiring

gondoliere

who challenged the norms of professional associations, operating since the Middle Ages, which only allow the concurrence of male candidates.

After pointing out the discriminatory treatment he suffered due to his condition when he was excluded from the selection, he currently works as a private gondolier for a hotel.

Shown here is the 'Occupy Men's Room' movement, by Chinese activist Li Maizi, calling for the design criteria of public toilets to be modified in order to avoid the long lines that occur in women's. Miguel de Guzman and Rocio Romero

But the project is still continuing with an intervention in the other great space of the Biennial, the Arsenale. Entitled

Your Restroom is a Battleground

(Your bathroom is a battlefield), the three commissioners have conceived there a set of dioramas ("a kind of giant dollhouse", in their words) that illustrate different real case studies on how toilets have been turned into places of protest or political activism. This was the case at a Philadelphia Starbucks when, in 2018, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, two black clients who were holding a professional meeting there, were arrested for attempting to use their bathrooms, which had been denied access under the pretext that they had not consumed anything served by the establishment. And with the United Nations intervention after the 2010 Haiti earthquake that, due to ineffective wastewater management,it generated an epidemic of cholera that put on the table the strong imbalances of the global geopolitical map. As also with the case of the Chinese activist Li Maizi, who started the movement

Occupy Men's Room

to request that the design criteria for public restrooms be modified in order to avoid the long lines that occur in women's restrooms.

These are just some of the debates that the intervention of Cassani, Galán and López Munuera opens using public services as a physical and conceptual setting.

"The bathrooms define who is the privileged subject of a certain architecture, because in them everyone has contact", they conclude.

So they are also an environment in which we are destined to live together, and for that reason we have to think about how to do it in the fairest way possible ”.

'Your Restroom is a Battleground' is a project by Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, and Joel Sanders.natalia Guardia

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-05-27

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