The Biennale Svizzera del Territorio 2024

Project Name: Blurred Boundaries

Year: 2024

Location: Lugano, Switzerland

Keywords: Participation, utopia, Personal contingencies, Public solidarity

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Prompt (from the Biennale): The future has been cancelled. Imagination, exhausted by successive crises, constant innovation, and immediate returns on investment, comes up against a closed horizon. Drunk with nostalgia, it has dismissed any long-term vision as utopian, a mere fantasy – until we face dystopia. Yet the prior task of architecture has always been concerned with the future: we still live structures built decades, even centuries ago. Where did we get lost? The 5th edition of the biennale svizzera del territorio is a call on imagination. A call to reclaim the future and project together alternatives to the slow unfolding of the present.

Response: Nested between two trees and merely 20 meters from Villa Saroli's southern edge, the installation engages with the site by harnessing tree canopies' intimate scale and shifting play of light and shadow.

The piece features a pair, each consisting of a smaller opaque polycarbonate cube nested within a larger transparent one, creating an obscure perimeter in the historic presence of Villa Saroli. Each outer cube measures 1.8 by 1.8 meters at the base and standing 2.3 meters tall. The installation's 15mm thick polycarbonate sheets, locally sourced from Varese, Italy, are secured with zinc braces and fastened to a sturdy lumber base frame, all firmly anchored to a skid foundation.

The installation invites participation, offering visitors to use the interior faces of the opaque cubes as canvases for self-expression, using washable glass paint. Here, the private realm is intimate, a sanctuary for the individual to create with abandon. Softly diffused through the cubes' materiality, the individual expressions are simultaneously showcased to the outside world, blending personal idiosyncrasies into a public exhibition of color and form.

This display of silet yet vivit exchnage between the individual and the collective is the heartbeat of Richard Rorty's "liberal utopia" [1], where the tension between personal contingencies and public solidarity becomes a creative, generative, and imaginative practice.

The installation is a medium and a mediator - a "literary critic" achieving political significance. After all, in times of hyperpartisanship and divergent realities [2, 3], a Utopian vision apathetic to social divide plays into the 'banality of evil' in its passive complicity [4]. Therefore, in its materiality, physical presence, and narrative, the piece is a manifesto for a future society that is contingent yet concordant, emergent yet deliberate, sensitive yet grounded, and intimate yet co-creative.

As the day wanes, the exterior faces of cubes are documented with photographs before the interior canvases are cleansed, The day after, cubes start afresh, as if they have woken up from a day-long dream, ready to receive yet another exercise in contingency and solidarity.

[1] Rotty, Richard. "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." Cambridge University Press, 1989.

[2] Krastev, Ivan and Mark Leonard. "A crisis of one's own: The politics of trauma in Europe's election year.·,European Council on Foreign Relations, 17 Jan. 2024
[3] Dimock, Michael, and Richard Wike. ''America Is Exceptional in the Nature of Its Political Divide ' Pew Research Center, 13 Nov. 2020.
[4] Arendt, Hannah. "Eichmann in Jerusalem.· A Report on the Banality of Evil.'' Viking Press, 1963