Palimpsest
Exhibition Design: Venice Biennale
2022
Shortlisted submission for the Australian Pavilion creative directorship and exhibition design for the 2023 Venice Biennale.
Palimpsest is traditionally writing upon writing, where previous writings can still be read. In visual culture it has also come to mean heterogeneity of authorship and a polyphony of voices. Here we invoke palimpsest in the realm of architecture: that the Laboratory of the Future is to build on/with/in what is already there.
We do this with two main convictions. The first is in the cause of pluralism. The idea that contemporary architectural trajectories find richness not only in the isolated individual work or person, but in the palimpsest: the relationships with other work and other people, in particular what is already there. It draws its strength from its associations. The second is an environmental imperative. The palimpsest city is the sustainable city par excellence. Building creatively on itself with itself is its raison d’être. Such a mode of practice demotes the cult of newness in favour of the richness and inventiveness of reuse. It elevates the value of what is existing and those relationships, and works with them.
The idea of palimpsest inherently refutes the blank page, Tabula Rasa, Terra Nullis. It recognises the pre-existence and equal status of others. It reminds current authors: "you too will one day be over-written". As a mode of practice it represents a shift: build now understanding others will build over, in, with and around you.
In the context of Australian history, the metaphor of palimpsest has special meaning. Contrary to a colonial narrative of erasure or assimilation, the presence and clear legibility of First Nations Australians themselves and their story is fundamental. A palimpsest is also an ongoing dynamic, involving ever more actors. It provokes the over-arching question: where are all our over-writings taking us?
Katja Pudor: Palimpsest (2018)
A terrace house in Sydney transmogrifies into a Buddhist Temple at ground floor. Such architectural over-writing is often inadvertently moving, or humorous.
The content proposed for the exhibition itself can be grouped under two heads: Photographic Essay and "Compositions". The Photographic Essay is a visual "letter from the field", capturing architectural palimpsest as it exists today, in a series of large-format high quality photographs. The "Compositions" are creative works. These are images, drawings, essays and objects by our contributors, who in their work will set out the architectural palimpsests of the future.
In the 5.0m Pavilion space is placed an array of 20 tall ceiling-hung Paper Frames which carry the exhibition content of images, drawings and text. The Paper Frames create a grid of three dimensional forms which modulate the space and are strategically rotated or omitted in the layout design. Interspersed among these are physical objects suspended from the ceiling about the palimpsest theme.
A key part of the palimpsest theme is focus on the material world from which all architecture is made. The dematerialised white-box of the Pavilion interior is both anti-thetical and places "quotation marks" on content in it. The proposed exhibition design deconstructs this - literally - by eroding the superficial plasterboard wall layer to its plywood substrate (to 2.1m high) to create a highly visually textured surface. This surface is left raw, with no works exhibited on them. Plasterboard fragments from the wall are dip-sealed and pinned into the volume of the exhibition seats, their edges expressed.
Urban wall with a history and a hair-do.
Australian Institute of Architects
Besley & Spresser
Georgia Birks, Rory GardinerClient
Creative Directors
Creative Team