Handle with Care: Tales of the Invisible

This architecture exhibition is inspired by the collections of different European museums that are members of the Future Architecture Platform:  Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana (Slovenia), MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (Italy), and the Estonian Museum of Architecture based in Tallinn. Commissioned by the Triennale, this exhibition proposes, for the first time, a connection between emerging authors selected from the applications for the Future Architecture Platform call of 2020 and the members of this extensive network that brings together 22 countries. 

Architect and researcher Sonja Lakić, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, is responsible for the curatorship and Spanish architect Diego Sologuren is in charge of the exhibition scenography. Presented on the noble floor of the Sinel de Cordes Palace, this original exhibition content opens its doors on 15 October and extends to 12 December, 2020. A look at architectural exercises from the past that constitute helps us understand the current context that requires a humanist reflection on different forms of care.

Developed in three chapters, the exhibition brings together a diversity of content ranging from studies, axonometrics, photographs, illustrations and sketches. A set of interviews and personal testimonials of some of the represented authors, their family members, researchers, and representatives of institutions, also allows us to contextualize these approaches and practices carried out across different European territories. This exhibition is co-financed by the European Union's Creative Europe programme and is part of an extensive cultural programme for 2020 that brings together events and meetings attended by the emerging members of Future Architecture in different European cities. 

Curatorial approach 

This is not just another exhibition about architecture. This is a journey deep within whatever architecture may (not) be and whatever form it may (not) take; a conversation on those that care and are taken care of; a portrayal of the non-evident; homage to the quirks of the human mind.

This is the tribute to human clay: the one that connects and, yet, separates. Here, we celebrate imagination and passion, individual effort(s) and collective endeavours, dreams and hopes, as well as the courage to act in the name of love for all humankind.

This is an ode to ideas and designs that never came to be; a call to re-think where we stand; an appeal to step back hence unlearn whatever we believe we already know. This is a gentle reminder that life comes before buildings and an appeal to keep one’s mind and heart wide open for this is how one shall do good.

“What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.” (... "Who would you want to be friends with?") in The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton, 2006

Exhibition Design

Conceived as a single element that hosts an evolutive narrative, the scenography crosses the space intersecting with the existing architectural elements. Its configuration shows three differentiated parts which allow the content to be approached in three different ways according to its nature. 

A continuous element develops from a table, to a platform and a canopy offering a changing experience in the way the space and the works are perceived. In addition, a series of sculptural elements, which emerge as extensions of the main structure of the scenography, introduce complementary information to the main exhibition content and therefore add a counterpoint to the promenade. 

Biographies

Sonja Lakić (1983) is an internationally trained architect and researcher with a PhD in Urban Studies. Her work revolves around open architecture and dialectical urbanism, with a keen interest in lived forms of buildings hence anthropological and sociological aspects of architectural design and the built environment. Topics of her curiosity that she nurtured in Gran Sasso Science Institute and while briefly appointed as visiting researcher at ISCTE-IUL in Lisbon, include the everydayness of architecture, home(making), housing and informality, buildings as living archives, post-conflict societies. Sonja operates across different disciplines and scales, works visually, and collects oral histories, practicing unconventional ethnography and storytelling mainly through photography.

Diego Sologuren (1985) studied Architecture at the ETS of architecture in San Sebastián and later in Sint-Lucas Brussels, where he was involved in a Master Program in urban studies. Since his graduation with a project thesis of a theatre school in Denmark, he has developed his career in several countries around Europe. In 2014 he joined the office of African architect Francis Kéré and had the opportunity to come in touch with a reality which influenced his way of conceiving architecture and design: honesty, economy of means, and formal simplicity. In 2017, he took part in the exhibition of the first Biennale of Architecture of the Basque Country as one of the finalists for the Young Architect Prize. Based in Switzerland, he develops his own experimental praxis, which is committed to taking architecture to its conceptual boundaries with other disciplines.

Future Architecture Platform

Future Architecture is the first pan-European platform of architecture museums, festivals and producers, bringing ideas on the future of cities and architecture closer to the wider public. A well-balanced ecosystem of 26 European cultural players in architecture who perform specific roles within a complex European architecture program. It connects multi-disciplinary emerging talents to high profile institutions like museums, galleries, publishing houses, biennials, and festivals. It provides talented conceptual thinkers and practitioners in architecture with opportunities to speak up - and be seen and heard. Since its inception in 2015, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale has been part of this wide architectural network.