A couple of examples of Geography being represented at the Venice Biennale.
The first came from the RGS social media feed. Geography and geology lie at the heart of the British Pavilion's theme.
The exhibition, GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, will investigate how architecture can reverse the destructive impacts of colonial systems of geological extraction through emergent practices of architectural repair.
The curators are leading an event on the 9th of June at the RGS.
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and social change.
Kabage Karanja is an architect, co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, an architectural and research firm based in Nairobi that he started alongside Stella Mutegi in 2014. He leads the research and aesthetic direction of the bureau and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation.
Stella Mutegi is an architect, co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, an architectural and research firm based in Nairobi that she started alongside Kabage Karanja in 2014. She heads the technical department at Cave, where she orchestrates the seamless coordination of Cave’s ideas into built form.
Meanwhile, in the Iceland pavilion, there is a focus on the landscape and lavaforming.
Lavaforming is a proposal on how the brutal force of lava can be turned into a valuable resource, capable of lowering atmospheric emissions through its future use as a sustainable building material. The idea springs from Iceland’s exceptional geological location on a rift between two tectonic plates, which causes frequent seismic activity on the island, including the creation of majestic lava fields. Throughout history, Iceland’s volcanic activity has been perceived as a local disturbance and even as an otherworldly event.
“In our story, placed in 2150, we have harnessed the lava flow, just as we did with geothermal energy 200 years earlier in Iceland. The main goal of Lavaforming is to show that architecture can be the force that rethinks and shapes a new future with sustainability, innovation, and creative thinking. A lava flow can contain enough building material for the foundations of an entire city to rise in a matter of weeks without harmful mining and non-renewable energy generation. Lavaforming is exploring a building material that has never been used before. The theme is both a proposal and a metaphor - architecture is in a paradigm shift, many of our current methods have been deemed obsolete or harmful in the long term. In our current predicament - we need to be bold, think in new ways, look at challenges and find the right resources.”
Arnhildur Pálmadóttir, curator, architect, founder and creative director of Lavaforming
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