Fertile Futures: Laboratório em Itinerância – the exhibition of the Portuguese Representation at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale opens in Lisbon
The 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2023, curated by Lesley Lokko, founder and director of the African Futures Institute (Accra, Ghana), had as its curatorial premise The Laboratory of the Future. During the Biennale, 89 participants, 63 national pavilions and 9 parallel events transformed the Italian city into a creative epicentre and a beacon of futures, bringing together a series of ambitious proposals that, between architecture and social and ecological thought, dared to imagine new times and possible territories for today and tomorrow. Now, Fertile Futures, a project presented by the Portuguese Official Representation at the Biennale and curated by Andreia Garcia, with deputy curators Ana Neiva and Diogo Aguiar, is travelling to Lisbon to share its entire research, experimentation and creation process.
On 27 January, at 6pm, at the Sinel de Cordes Palace, the exhibition Fertile Futures: Laboratório em Itinerância opens. Centred on the problem of water, both in its emotional symbolism and its political and economic materiality, the exhibition includes the work of the seven Hydrogeography Workshops, which deal with cases of anthropocentric action in the Tâmega basin, the Douro International, the Médio Tejo, the Alqueva reservoir, the Mira River irrigation perimeter, the Sete Cidades lagoon and the Madeiran rivers; the results of the International Summer Seminar, in which students collectively rehearsed speculative installations; and the reflections of the five Assemblies of Thought, moments of reciprocal (re)learning based on the coexistence of knowledge.
The projects that make up the body of the exhibition in Venice and now in the Portuguese capital were commissioned to a group of young architects, in collaboration with specialists from multiple disciplines, namely Space Transcribers, Álvaro Domingues, Dulcineia Santos Studio, João Pedro Matos Fernandes, Guida Marques, Érica Castanheira, Oficina Pedrêz, Aurora Carapinha, Corpo Atelier, Eglantina Monteiro, Ilhéu Atelier, João Mora Porteiro, Ponto Atelier and Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues. The futures imagined by them can be discovered until 27 April, at the culture hub of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, with free entry. Visiting hours are from Tuesday to Saturday, between 12pm and 6:30pm.
As a partner in this initiative, Umbigo was invited to take part in and expand the Fertile Futures challenge with a special section in issue #86 of the magazine, as well as taking part in a debate at the finissage of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. With the project’s itinerancy, we continue to feed the debate and critical reflection on the indispensability of art and architecture in transforming this and the worlds to come.