Taking the Country’s Side now in Belgium
The Triennale 2019 exhibition Agriculture and Architecture: Taking the Country’s side continues its tour of international presentations. After travelling to the EPFL (Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne) in February 2020 and to Archipel: Urban Cultural Centre of Lyon in June 2022, it now arrives in Brussels at the invitation of its City Council. The full exhibition is displayed at the Halles Saint-Géry space between 12 September and 23 November 2022.
This third iteration also finally brings together in a conversation curator Sébastien Marot and Rem Koolhaas, co-founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and 2020 Pritzker Prize winner. This event takes place in the Victor Bourgeois auditorium of the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta on 22 November and is available online.
This occasion is an opportunity to focus the rural environment in the current critical thinking. The motto is given by the confrontation of two different perspectives: Sébastien Marot’s, self-evident in the very title of his exhibition, and Rem Koolhaas’ reflection proposed in Countryside: The Future, presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2020. For Sébastien Marot, no coherent thought about agriculture or architecture can be developed without reconnecting these two human activities, born at the same time in the Neolithic period. On the other hand, Rem Koolhaas considers that future strategies lie in the unprecedented automation and organisation that contemporary urban life requires of rural territories.
Agriculture and Architecture: Taking the Country’s Side was co-produced with CCB and integrated the fifth edition of the Triennale, The Poetics of Reason. Between 2020 and 2022 it travelled through three territories of central Europe, in a circuit between Switzerland, France and Belgium, disseminating the knowledge that results from several years of research and reaping the fruits of two courses taught at EPFL: Introduction to Environmental History in the third year (syntethised in a timeline that is part of the exhibition) and a Master seminar on Agriculture, Architecture and Urbanism. In February 2023 it heads to Marseille, the next destination of a fertile research that still remains relevant three years after the opening.
The presentation of this exhibition in Brussels was produced by Urban.brussels in a co-production with Halles Saint-Géry and Archipel-maison de l'architecture Rhône-Alpes. Hubert Lionnez (Karbon') + Luna Van Aubel were in charge of the project coordination and exhibition design, and the identity was designed by Tony Simoes Relvas.
Image © Joel Sternfeld, McLean, Virginia, December 1978