"How will we live together?" was the question posed by the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

Drawing on creative minds across the world, responses have been wildly different. The urgency of the question sparked ideas and made connections in unexpected and compelling ways.

Join us to explore some of these responses, and to hear from some of the curators, architects and creatives that have responded to this year’s theme including the curators of The Garden of Privatised Delights, Entanglement, The Anthropocene Museum, Lithuanian Space Agency Presents Planet of People, and What if…?/Scotland. This event will be chaired by Tamsie Thompson, CEO of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS).

More on the projects:

Produced by award winning Edinburgh based architecture and design practice 7N Architects, in partnership with Architecture & Design Scotland. What if…?/Scotland seeks to re-engage the civic role of design professionals by asking communities from across Scotland to share their hopes and dreams for the future of the places they call home.

The British Council commission for the British Pavilion exhibition at the 2021 Biennale Architettura is titled The Garden of Privatised Delights. Taking inspiration from Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, the exhibition, curated by Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler, calls for new thinking around privately owned public space in cities across the UK. It challenges the polarisation of private and public organisations and instead poses solutions on how they might work together to improve use of, access to and ownership of public spaces.

</strong>The Anthropocene Museum: Exhibit 3.0 Obsidian Rain, Cave_bureau</strong>. Obsidian Rain is a transposed section of the Mbai cave in Kenya, which was inhabited in the middle of the twentieth century by anti-colonial freedom fighters who used it as a commune chamber to plan their resistance. The installation consists of a collection of obsidian stone hanging from the ceiling with steel rope. Beneath are tables with scaled bronze models of the cave, hybrid leather hide drawings, and recycled cedar logs meant to host discussions about the environment and the state of the architectural discipline in Kenya, the African continent, and beyond, among other pressing topics.

Entanglement, the Irish pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, explores the materiality of data and the interwoven spatial, environmental, and cultural impacts of information and communication technologies. Lithuanian Space Agency Presents Planet of People. The Lithuanian Space Agency (LSA) is an organisation for research into space architecture and gravitational aesthetics. It is an astro-disciplinary initiative—founded by Julijonas Urbonas—that aims to advance an extraterrestrial imagination. In Venice, the agency presents Urbonas’ most recent project Planet of People. Instead of sending humans to colonise other planets, what if we catapulted them into empty space to form a new planet from their bodies – a planet of people?

This event will be BSL interpreted.

This event is a collaboration with the Scotland + Venice partnership and the British Council. What if…?/Scotland is showing until 21 November 2021.

Image: Installation view, ‘Garden of Delights’, the Garden of Privatised Delights, British Pavilion, curated by Madeleine Kessler and Manijeh Verghese of Unscene Architecture for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2021 © Cristiano Corte © British Council