Oakland-based social art and design practice Hood Design Studio dives into an indigenous landscapes of Phillips, a former plantation site in South Carolina, United States, to translate the past and history of basket-making process into an architecture at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 

The exhibition, titled Native(s) Lifeways, situated at Giardini, is showcased as part of Force Majeure at the Central Pavilion that makes up one of six shows at the Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Image © Clelia Cadamuro

Native(s) Lifeways looks at the traces and the art of making of the Lowcountry tradition of Sweetgrass basket making which was adopted with a special technique that originated in Western Africa. 

The exhibition, extended to the Scarpa Garden in which the techniques are elaborated with wooden chunks wrapped around the columns, giving an artistic look to resemble an "arts lifeway" in the creek wetland of Phillips.  

Image © Clelia Cadamuro

The exhibition features, drawings, posters, one-to-one scale models, showing how these native cultural landscapes foster a dialectic between the enslaved Gullah Geechee people, plantations, Carolina Gold rice, sweetgrass baskets, and Africa.

"Erasure threatens the Black cultural landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Lowcountry," stated in a project description.

"Wetland development and diminishing rural land tenure endanger these ‘native’ cultural landscapes, which stretch 12,000 square miles from North Carolina to Florida, forging a dialectic between the enslaved Gullah Geechee people, plantations, Carolina Gold rice, sweetgrass baskets, and Africa."

Image © Clelia Cadamuro

"Descendent of its adjacent plantation landscape, the 1,000-acre rural agricultural settlement of Phillips is today a modest residential community along the historic Route 1," the studio added.

The studio calls this landscape as the "overgrown" since it remains beyond a small area of cultivated land, with rife with native ora such as pine, oak, and palm. 

According to the studio, the exhibition suggests that "Phillips can be born again." "It reconsiders the word ‘native’, exploring an alternate vocabulary to critically think about new hybrid formations of Indigenous and foreign landscapes."

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

"The world’s flora, colonized alongside the diaspora of human conquest, brings into question the very idea of the “native.” Yet although place is no longer particular, and the “unspoiled” and the “untouched” is antiquated, there remains a penchant for “native," stated the office.

"Colonized peoples—the conquered, the vulnerable, the marginalized—are classified in this way. And today, in the controlled natural ecologies we live in, there is an advocacy for an origin fiction: the native plant."

"We live in a hybrid world where people and flora are continuous strangers in new lands. Environments are already changed, in a state of constant becoming." 

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

"Understanding them in this light, I ask: what if they could be born again, purely natural human constructs that engender new ways of living with the particularities of a given place? Can design create infrastructure and context for a new beginning where everything belongs to the same place, creating new productions that are hereditary, not mere copies?," the studio asked. 

"The decolonized and decarbonized are not about sameness but difference." 

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

"We are all native to the places that we inhabit over time, along with the flora that sprouts up around us. What if we could connect to environments through native infrastructures that do not separate us from the world and each other, but that enmesh us in the raw, unspoiled architecture and landscape of our machinations?."

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Image © Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

The Force Majeure section at the Central Pavilion also features Edgar's Shed by Studio Sean Canty, Process by atelier masōmī, Adjaye Futures Lab by Adjaye Assocates, The African Post Office by Counterspace and artist Moad Musbahi, Counteract by by Diébédo Francis Kéré. 

Hood Design Studio was founded by Walter Hood in 1992. Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 is taking place from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 26 November, 2023 at the Arsenale and Giardini venues in Italy. 

The theme of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale is The Laboratory of the Future curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Professor Lesley Lokko.

Read more about WAC's coverage about the biennale pavilions on Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. To see more pavilions from this year's biennale, you can also visit WAC's Instagram/Reels for exclusive videos.

Top image © Clelia Cadamuro.

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Hood Design Studio Venice Architecture Biennale