The Pavilion of US explores seven spatial scales as; Citizen, Civitas, Region, Nation, Globe, Network, and Cosmos at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which are telescoping from body to city to heavens and addressing the questions on "Citizenship" positioned as a critical global topic.

The exhibition, titled "The Dimensions of Citizenship", is inviting architects and designers to envision what it means a citizen today, which it is said that on the occasion when the expansion of the United States-Mexico border wall looms over more nuanced discourses on national citizenship.

Curated by Niall Atkinson, Ann Lui and Mimi Zeiger with associate curator Iker Gil, the Pavilion presents commissioned installations by architects, landscape architects, artists and theorists addressing the spaces of citizenship marked by histories of inequality and the violence imposed on people, non-human actors and ecologies.

"These works aim to manifest the democratic ideals of the inclusion against the grain of broader systems: new forms of sharing economy platforms, the legacies of the Underground Railroad, tenuous cross-national alliances at the border region, or the seemingly Sisyphean task of buttressing coastline topologies against rising tides," stated in the Pavilion's manifesto.

It is remarked the installations and the film and video works on view do not solve the complex relationships of governance, affinity, and circumstance that bind us, citizen to a stranger, self to other.

Instead; it is clearly expressed on these installations that "they use architecture’s disciplinary agency to render visible paradoxes and formulations of belonging."

"Only, when spatial understandings of citizenship- legal, cultural, and ecological- are in sight might we struggle free from antiquated definitions, forms or bureaucracies and activate potent spaces for design," pointed by the Pavilion's manifesto under the commissioners of School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

"Questions of belonging, of who should be included and how, are posed with every athlete taking a knee, every #metoo, every presidential tweet, and every protest, or sign or first raised. Yet transnational flows of capital, digital technologies, and geopolitical transformations expand, conventional notions of citizenship undermined."

"We define the term as a tangle of rights, responsibilities, and attachments linked to the built environment. How might architecture respond to, shape, and express rhizomatic and paradoxical conditions of citizenship?," asked them in the manifesto.

The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara under the title of Freespace, will be on view from May 26th to November 25th, 2018 in the Giardini and the Arsenale, and around other venues in Venice.

The Pavilion will cover series of events and partner programs as; "Designer Artist Citizen site: Exploring Belonging", "The Architecture of Memory", and "Ports+Portals: Finding the Citizen Body" in Giardini and around the city of Venice during the Biennale. See The Dimensions of Citizenship for location and more details.

All images © Italo Rondinella, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Video © Dr. Hatice Ozhisar

> via Venice Archiecture Biennale