The Philippines Pavilion has created a stage from a modular bamboo structure acting as a place of gathering and investigation at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy.
Named Tripa de Galina: Guts of Estuary, the exhibition is curated by Sam Domingo and Ar. Choie Y. Funk with the work of The Architecture Collective (TAC).
The installation offers a diagnosis of the water’s condition and a prognosis of the people’s future. In a procedure of modular urban acupuncture materialized by a bamboo structure that serves as a place of gathering and investigation.
“Estuaries, or the estero, are supposedly the mouth of a river, where a freshwater streams meet waltwater tides from the bay. Besides that, history has shown that humans and other non-human entities are in deep dialogue with these river mouths,” the curators explained.
“There has been a natural tendency to seek the establishment of bustling communities along them prevail through the years. In the case of the longest estuary in Metro Manila that flows to Manila Bay through the Pasig River, communities living alongside, specifically Barangays 739, 750 and 751, have enmeshed with their waterways.”
“However, the enormous putrid muck amassed by the local people along Tripa de Gallina (Guts of the Roster) impedes this perceived conversation.”
“The estuary remains silent. The people are stuck. The kindships are now ultimately muddled. Just as murky as the waters are in the estuary, so are the relationships of the settlers.”
“The experience of the cries out that this persistent complication is reticular. It necessitates a fleshing-out,” the curators added.
The pavilion inspects the estuary’s guts: a flawed ecology of humans, waters and dregs. It serves as a buoy for this mesh to be carefully unraveled and sustainably mended through a gritty collaborative action among these entangled actants, in the name of resilience.
According to the curators, the project starts with the idea of a small-scale intervention as a way to mutate the larger urban context of the inhabitants.
Along with experts in architecture, natural sciences, social sciences, and the government, the barangays (village units) have created a safe space to assess their situation and speculate on their future well-being.
What is documented in the end and is the collective proposition, an estuarine inventiveness.
The windows in the installation provide screen on which moving archival materials play out, testifying to a tenacious urban struggle in history.
The narrative leads to the center where an immersive audio-visual encounter with the estero lurks day and night. From the groundwork, a lively prospect of the state of the entire ecology is imagined through the structure’s ethnographic projections.
The curators said that “this platform wishes for a symbiotic recovery, instead of human superiority over other entities. It presupposes forsaking hostility and inviting hospitality. It welcomes an assemblage that is in good shape.”
Image © World Architecture Community
Image © World Architecture Community
Image © World Architecture Community
The Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 will be held from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 26 November, 2023 at the Arsenale and Giardini venues. Curated by Lesley Lokko, this year’s theme is The Laboratory of the Future in which the theme is investigating the African continent.
Read more about WAC’s coverage about pavilions on Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
All images © Marco Zorzanello, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia unless otherwise stated.
> via Venice Architecture Biennale
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