MANIFESTO
How will we live together?, the general topic of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the Biennale di Venezia 2020, proposed by the Lebanese curator Hashim Sarkis, demands that as architects, in the current global context where political divisions are widening and economic inequalities are growing, 'let us imagine spaces in which we can live generously together'. It is precisely this last word, together - and the varying degrees of closeness it suggests - that triggers PROXIMITIES, the exhibition proposal to curate the Spanish pavilion.
In an era of growing individualism and, paradoxically, the multiplication of spaces for interaction, both virtual and physical, the capacity to establish links and the places that favor them are being revised. This process, which corresponds to a new way of organizing behavior characterized by the minimum of constraints and the maximum of possible choices, not only speaks of a new type of architecture, or the adaptation of existing architecture, but also of the teams that design and build it, since, initially, they require greater complexity and diversity to adapt these places to the new conditions.
If Unfinished (2016) focused on the process over the result, and becoming (2018) focused on the learning environments of Architecture, PROXIMITIES seeks to bring together and make visible the different and complex degrees of interaction and proximity, through similarity or difference, of all those architectural productions and the elements that compose them made in recent years by Spanish architects.
PROXIMITIES contains in its polysemy the condition of the immediate future of architecture, of what is yet to come, but it also alludes to what is close and ordinary. The discourse is articulated under this double condition, and revolves around three vectors of proximity inherent to all contemporary architecture: entities, times and materials. These axes of action are not independent to each other, but are interrelated, giving rise not only to more projects, but also to more ways of interpreting them and, therefore, to new narratives.
PROXIMITIES aims to collect examples of works completed between 2016 and 2019 that, under the premises mentioned before, build a network of relationships of current themes whose objective is to expose Spanish architecture from a different perspective based on the visibility of the connections between objects/works/productions with society/users/citizens, and how architects/professionals/technicians deal with these issues.
Lighting
