Grove, at the Venice Biennale installation, leads us to ask if new forms of architecture can enable us to live together in a constantly changing and shared world.
With a combination of film and ambient sounds, Canadian artist and architect Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group have given us Grove: an architecture installation in the Arsenale at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. Curated by Sascha Hastings, Grove leads visitors to imagine new forms of architecture made from materials that are less harmful to the environment.
Visitors enter a dark area in a reclaimed industrial shipbuilding space with an illuminated, cloud-like ceiling of hundreds of interconnected, liquid-filled glass flasks. “The structure of the cloud is a prototype for a next-generation architectural canopy fabric that can flex and shift, accommodating all kinds of intense forces,” says Beesley. “The cells are marvellously flexible, resilient, lightweight, luminous, and consume minimal amounts of material. The whole cloud has a shimmering, hovering, weightless, ethereal quality, but it also frames and shelters a strong sanctuary that shelters and welcomes gathering inside it.”
Below the cloud is a circular zone of totem-like speakers surrounding a floor projection of Grove Cradle, a film by London-based Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, showing ephemeral glimpses of a constantly changing world where life and death are portrayed as a harmonious cycle throughout nature. The tunes and whispery noises of Dutch sound and technology artist Salvador Breed give Grove a dreamy vibe, inspired by Beesley’s “living architecture” environments, but altered for our COVID-19 times.
Grove is in response to the Biennale’s theme – How will we live together – which Beesley sees as one of the relevant questions of this pandemic. With Grove, he has created an environment where the visitor reconsiders the boundaries that we think divide us as humans, and us from nature. The visitor is then left with the undeniable reality that interdependence is necessary for our survival. “It’s a precarious and fragile experience – and I believe that being open to fragility, ambiguity, and precarity is essential for living together because they lead to mutual exchange and empathy.”
What was designed to be a tactile and interactive installation pre-COVID, became a virtual experience of sound and film. Though the pandemic changed how the message was delivered, the installation still makes visitors feel connected to their natural surroundings through body, soul, and spirit, and to each other.
Grove is open at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition until November 21, 2021
Words Phil Roberts
