Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale

Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
The entry to Monditalia in Venice's Arsenale.
Photo © Architectural Record

Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
DAAR's Italian Ghosts installation satirizes Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's confession of Italy's colonial crimes in Libya, widely viewed as a cynical play for oil and gas contracts.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Screens hung throughout the space show important works of Italian cinema.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
A playful installation by Martino Stierli and Hilar Stadler titled The Architecture of Hedonism presents three villas on the Isle of Capri as represented in pop culture.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Lucia Allais served as historian/curator and MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample) were the architects of Legible Pompeii, which features ersatz artifacts frozen in resin that represent the ancient city's role as a historical testing ground for preservation practices.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
An installation documents the 2008 closure and pending sale of Rome's Ospedale San Giacomo, founded in 1339.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Ignacio G. Galán's Cinecittà Occupata breaks down the walls of the legendary film studios in Rome.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
99 dom-ino by the collective Space Caviar takes its name from a Le Corbusier design for a radically open, Ottoman-inspired house. Each installment in the series of 99 short video documentaries profiles a different Italian house and its relationship to its site.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Andrea Sarti and Claudia Faraone's presentation of photographs showing towns around L'Aquila affected by the 2009 earthquakes underscores the degree to which they have been abandoned since the catastrophe.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
A dance performance of Robinson by Italian Dance company mk.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Florence-based Superstudio's 1978 response to heroic modernism, La Moglie di Lot, dissolves monumental buildings cast from salt with slowly dripping water.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
The installation The Remnants of the Miracle shows structures built during Italy's Postwar economic 'miracle' now abandoned.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Giovanna Silva's Nightswimming looks at the Italian disco as an anthropological phenomenon.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
A dancer performs in front of the Radical Pedagogies wall. The installation by Beatriz Colomina with a group of students from the Princeton University’s School of Architecture surveys the work of activist designers and thinkers in Italy primarily in the second half of the 20th century.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
A deep, engaging presentation, Radical Pedagogies is a highlight of the Arsenale and the Biennale in general.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Andrés Jacque / Office for Political Innovation's Sales Oddity. Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-home TV Urbanism satirizes a 1970 suburban development backed by Silvio Berlusconi's company.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
A dance and choral performance in the Arsenale.
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Venice Dispatch: Monditalia at the Venice Biennale
Installation view of Monditalia.
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