Category: Space and Architecture of the Commons

SPACE AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE COMMONS – The refugee crisis has highlighted the relationship between space, mobility and inequality. The main markers of colonial dispossession and dependent development in the global South have been processes of urban favelisation, slummification and mass rural-to-urban migration associated with trajectories of forced industrialisation and debt dependency. Moreover, the logic of late capitalism is multi-scalar and entangled in broader processes of nation-building and neo-colonialist “development” with planetary economic, social and ecological impact. Most of such global and planetary trends of spatial inequality resist western and ethnocentric terms of gentrification, occupation and privatization. How can the relationship between space and power and the notion of common space be rethought from a non-ethnocentric and decolonized perspective? IRI is committed to experiments of urban co-habitation, commoning and post-capitalist architecture.

Illustration by Kaya, On the Biennale's ruins, 2020.
Articles, IRI Publications, Space and Architecture of the Commons, Work and Labour Commoning

ON THE BIENNALE’S RUINS? INHABITING THE VOID, COVERING THE DISTANCE

Illustration by Kaya, On the Biennale’s ruins, 2020.

On Biennale’s Ruins? by Marco BaravalleDownload

Too much love and friendship connect me to many people working for and around Venice Biennale. Too much admiration connects me to many that thanks to La Biennale made Venice a place to come back to instead of a “once-in-a-lifetime” tourist destination. Not light-heartedly these pages will go down as an exercise of speculation and critique. I am  participating in the uncertainty of those people risking to lose their jobs, watching their business fail, not getting their contracts renewed, being unable to access the already miserable existing welfare measures. Considering the earnings in monetary terms: room attendants, janitors, technicians, workers, freelancers, researchers, teachers, journalists, tourist-guides, artists, architects, curators, performers, etc. will –  more or less – lose something due to a possible (yet hopefully unlikely) cancellation or postponed events programmes linked to the various departments of La Biennale.

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