What if…?/ Scotland

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: Exhibit 3.0 Obsidian Rain, Lithuanian Space Agency Presents Planet of People and What if…?/Scotland.

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. Ewan Anderson, 7N Architects will be doing us.

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.

Entanglement, the Irish pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, explores the materiality of data and the interwoven spatial, environmental, and cultural impacts of information and communication technologies. We will be joined by Clare Lyster and Fiona McDermott.

We are delighted to announce two new contributors:

From Kenya, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi, The Anthropocene Museum: Exhibit 3.0 Obsidian Rain , cave_bureau. Their work charts explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature addressing the anthropological and geological context of the postcolonial African city as a means to confront the challenges of our contemporary rural and urban lives. They are recognised as the first recorded contribution at the Architecture Exhibition from Kenya and were also awarded a special mention at the Architecture Golden Lion awards this year.

and

Artist, Julijonas Urbonas joins us from the Lithuanian Space Agency Presents Planet of People.  The LSA researches space architecture and gravitational aesthetics taking the radical and unique experiences of space to redefine who we are and what we can know and imagine. It focuses on exploring what the roles of architecture, design and art can be in the new space age, both globally and in the context of Lithuania. A version of this exhibition was shown at Collective in the City Dome in Edinburgh last year.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

This event is a collaboration with the Scotland + Venice partnership, V&A Dundee 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