Submitted by Francesca Cuoghi

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Italy Architecture News - Jun 25, 2021 - 12:46   4368 views

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Resilient Communities is the name chosen for the Italian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2021 that turns  the focus of the exhibition, in all its vividly dramatic nature, onto the issue of climate change and the demanding challenges for architecture. In particular, it aims to underscore how climate change is seriously straining the sustainability of the urban, productive, and agricultural system, and to emphasize the critical areas and opportunities in our own present time. There is also an impressive Cyberwall made with antipollutants, antiviruses and antibacteria innovative ceramics. This artwork becomes a meeting place between Industrial and Creative Arts, and an icon of sustainability. The draws on the surfaces have been made by the curator Alessandro Melis himself, in order to express his intimate creative idea.

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Image © Francesco Gumier

The main objective of the Italian Pavilion is to cause visitors to reflect in a new way upon the resilience mechanisms of communities, a key priority for interpretation in recovering a new form of interaction between urban space and productive territory, in pursuit of interdisciplinary skills and non-deterministic evolutionary logic, central elements in moments of transition. 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

"Resilient Communities proposes concrete solutions for our country. Within twenty years, our peripheries will be called upon to transform into resilient communities, which is to say communities which are capable of positively combating the current social and environmental pressures. The Italian city is a concentration of applied knowledge to draw from in order to remodel urban peripheries – the country’s priority and complex areas – in order to reflect upon the contemporary challenges raised for the future of architecture." 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

"Capitalizing on this heritage of knowledge starting from the model of the compact and ecological Italian city, and disseminating the results of applied research especially outside disciplinary settings and academia, are the challenges that the curator Melis has given us all", has stated Onofrio Cutaia, Director-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry and Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion.

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

According to the curator Alessandro Melis: "The Italian Pavilion will itself be a resilient community, consisting of 14 “sub-communities” understood as operating workshops, research centres or case studies in accordance with two essential lines: a reflection on the state of the art in the matter of urban resilience in Italy and the world through the showing of works by eminent Italian architects, and a focus on methodologies, innovation, and research with interdisciplinary experiments straddling the ground between architecture, botany, agronomy, biology, art, and medicine."

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba revolutionized taxonomy in biology by introducing the term “exaptation”: the non-deterministic mechanism of natural selection. 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

"Heuristically, the Italian Pavilion will promote architectural exaptation as a manifestation of diversity, variability, and redundancy, challenging deterministic aesthetic homogeneity in favour of the diversity of creative structures." 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

"Like the human brain and genome, the pavilion will be a jungle inhabited by strange creatures, in which to listen to the background noise that is already deafening and requires an adequate response, by resorting to new knowledge paradigms. In the vision provided by the curator of Biennale Architettura 2021 Hashim Sarkis, the Pavilion will emphasize the aspects of experience and immersiveness, privileging forms of expression linked to graphic novels and gaming in tones and modes inspired by cyberpunk culture, while relying on the contribution of undisputed masters in the sector, in order to be able to approach and hopefully increase the awareness of a young, broad public."

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Furthemore, the distinctive curatorial project illustrates how today, having left the sphere of aesthetic research, architecture is committed to identifying increasingly qualified and interlinked solutions to the social and environmental problems of our everyday lives. 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

The investigation work, conducted by Alessandro Melis and the team of co-curators, is expressed in a laboratory-exhibition with cyberpunk inspiration, in a unique pavilion with practically zero CO2 impact. 

Cyberpunk Arts and Creativity on stage at the Italian Pavilion 2021 for a new Sustainability

Image © Francesco Gumier

Credits: Biennale Venezia, Pavilion of Italy, RESILIENT COMMUNITIES

Photos by Andrea Avezzù unless otherwise stated. 

Main Sponsors of the Italian Pavilion 2021: Iris Ceramica Group, Belvedere SpA, Fondazione Peccioliper