"We" - who does that mean? The Architecture Biennale opened in Venice on May 22, 2021. The question that director Hashim Sarkis put to the participants many months before the outbreak of Covid-19 was "How will we live together-?". The answers from the pavilions in the Giardini are yearning and poetic, often stirring and political, at times even disturbing or dystopian. A dystopia is the opposite of a Utopia, as the latter refers to a good, beautiful, and peaceful future. Because, due to the pandemic, the architecture biennale had to be postponed by one year there was an opportunity to work more intensively on and to elaborate the national contributions. For instance: one contribution answers the question put by Hashim Sarkis with another question "Who is we'" i.e., what is meant here by "we"? The team from the Netherlands headed by Francien von Westrenen explains that in view of the social and ecological situation architects and urbanists should see "we" as a "pluralised pronoun" with "all people and, additionally, land, plants and animals." Although this was already defined in the past, in the world of architecture it continued to be marginalised. With "Multiplicity of Other" and "Space of Other" in the pavilion architect Afaina De Jong examines normative concepts of space and shows in an exemplary way how. using dance, music or poetry, public spaces can create a dialogue between users and architecture. The artist Debra Solomon demonstrates "Multispecies Urban-ism" with environmentally democratic urban landscapes in the form of urban food forests as a solution for a kind of urban development that extends across different species. The textile-focussed scenogra-phy in the pavilion has an atmospheric impact. Room is also given to feminist approaches. Certainly not without good reason - especially if one looks at certain phenomena on our planet.
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