Taubman College An installation by Assistant Professor El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn of Design Earth will be part of the exhibition, “Dimensions of Citizenship,” in the U.S. Pavilion in the upcoming 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Photo caption: Planetary Ark [1/3] (All Aboard) the Architekton (2018), Design Earth. From: Cosmorama, Design Earth.
Dimensions of Citizenship will feature the work of seven architecture practices to “explore how citizenship may be defined, constructed, enacted, contested, or expressed in the built environment at seven different spatial scales. Expanding from the body and city to the network and the heavens, the seven installations raise questions about issues including belonging, sovereignty, and ecology,” according to the curatorial statement. The seven spatial scales are used as an organizing principle to examine the ways citizenship affects and is affected by the built environment. Each studio is assigned a scale as the prompt.
Design Earth’s scale is the cosmos; their speculative designs suggest possible off-world architectural expressions. They posit that “the space above Earth, as a site of existing human occupation and potential belonging, has become a territory that both captures the imagination and serves as a theater for existing conflicts or conditions.” In response, they present three “geo-stories,” which speculate on the legal geography of citizenship when extended to “the province of all mankind.” Together the stories in Cosmorama—Mining the Sky, Planetary Ark, and Pacific Cemetery—ask how we should reckon with the epic and frontier narratives that have fueled space exploration, at a time when prospects of instability and extinction have become normal on Earth.
The exhibition is curated by Niall Atkinson, associate professor of architectural history at the University of Chicago; Ann Lui, assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC); Mimi Zeiger, an independent critic, editor, curator, and educator; and associate curator Iker Gil, lecturer at SAIC. The 16th Annual International Architecture Exhibition will be open to the public from May 26 to November 25, 2018 in Venice, Italy.
For more information about the Biennale: http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2018
