Bienal de Arquitectura: A exposição como projeto. Um olhar sobre a representação portuguesa na Bienal de Arquitetura de Veneza

Abstract

The word "biennial" generically applies to an event of the artistic field, of great scale and media impact, that occurs every two years. The "biennial" may also be described as a genre of project-based exhibition. Being independent from the logics of colleting that characterize conventional museological institutions, asserting itself as a space for experience and spectacle, and being characterized by a dispersion of the event throughout the city , one might consider that exhibitions in the biennial genre allow each edition for a renegotiation of relations between the city, art and the public (more frequently in a conceptual level rather than real one). In the Venice Architecture Biennale, architecture encounters its biggest and most prestigious stage. The Biennale has yet the particularity of maintaining the national representation model initiated in the 19th century, in the form of national pavilions in the gardens of the event but also in spaces disseminated across the city. The inexistence of a Portuguese pavilion built in the gardens of the Venice Biennale allowed and demanded, therefore, that the Portuguese representation in the architecture biennale experimented a variety of possibilities for the project of architecture exhibition: from a display of projects and models to a mimetization of a newspaper, from a site-specific intervention to a pavilion in the heart of the Giardini. Conceived in close relation to its political and institutional context, each of these representations of Portuguese architecture stem from an interpretation of the biennale theme, a reflection on the the present of architecture in Portugal and the world, as well as a strategy for surpassing the limited means and visibility of the Portuguese exhibition.