A visit to the Biennale d'Arte in Venice is always an incomparable emotion. Not only for the spectacular view of nearly ninety countries of the world gathered in such a singular, magical place as the gardens of Venice, but also because this universal reflection comprises the views on our time of so many artists.
And it‘s these about times that the title of the event alludes to with its deliberate play on the words of Confucius– may you live in interesting times – to talk about this time of challenges and the complexity of human events.
Hard times, in fact, as can be seen by the migrant boat dominating the Arsenale canal just before the entrance to the gardens. An installation that doesn’t simply denounce or report but rather, as always happens in art, suggests contrasting emotions about our way of living, the equilibriums in our societies, the encounter with the desire and fragility of human souls.
My passion for contemporary art and my many years of professional architect career lead me to observe works and installations with a different eye, every year charged with new points of view. Naturally so much creativity is awe inspiring, especially when expressed monumentally or by incorporating the latest innovations in technology and possibilities.

Subsequently and nearly immediately, I am reminded of how expressiveness is bound to our daily lives that are necessarily made up of time, space and functionality. Art, in itself, can strongly provoke but to do so, it has to come to grips with the possible and do-able, starting from where we are now and how we imagine the future to be. Perhaps this is what architecture has in common with contemporary art: constant dialogue with the vision and imagining of the world. On our part as professionals though, there is a particular accent on the “responsibility” of this vision that must be pragmatic in translating this “free” thinking into the rationality of an architectural structure also representing culture. Because in the end, what narrates the human adventure of our "interesting times" better than anything else, besides our capacity to observe and tell of our emotions and lives, is a concrete sign regarding the space where we live and its constructions, and the shapes and materials we surround ourselves with.
In this indispensable work of translation, contemporary art is our oxygen as two emblematic works, among the many in this biennial, demonstrate. The winner, Lithuania, with its “living pavilion” of a crowded beach with relaxing bathers unconscious of imminent disaster, or the equally evocative one with an installation where the innovative and courageous words of “poets” who paid for their creative fire with prison or their own lives: piles of pages whose words are declaimed in the many languages of the world, pierced by a forest of big menacing metal pins.

by Ilenia Girolami