Two days ago, at the presentation of the 61st Biennale Arte in Venice, in the shadow of loss, the curatorial team¹ gathered to honor Koyo Kouoh, the curator of the next Biennale who passed unexpectedly on May 10th. Choosing to carry out her exhibition as planned, the Biennale honored Kouoh’s vision with a heartfelt presentation, unveiling the theme In Minor Keys through a moving chorus of voices. As her words echoed, “though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos... the music continues,”² it became clear that the next edition would be shaped by both absence and resilience. The moment set a tone of vulnerability and hope, one that resonates far beyond Venice and into the shifting ground of these uncertain times.

This sense of instability—social, ecological, even disciplinary—has become the new baseline for the Biennale. Gone are the days of titles like May You Live in Interesting Times,³ which now feel almost quaint. Interesting times have indeed arrived, and the world’s crises are no longer abstract. In response, both the current Architecture Biennale and the upcoming Art Biennale are charting new paths: moving away from grand gestures (of archistars megaprojects), endless lists of intentions (the infamous Art English), and the hollow rhetoric that once dominated these events.

Instead, a quieter, more purposeful approach is emerging. The Architecture Biennale has pivoted towards feasible, concrete solutions—projects rooted in the realities of construction, adaptation, and sustainability. Meanwhile, the Art Biennale is giving us hope for this next edition, rediscovering the power of poetry and beauty, offering works that “propose [...] visitors an exhibitional experience that is more sensory than didactic, renewing rather than exhausting, and fortifying for the work ahead”, and thus speak to the deep needs of our time.
The Architecture Biennale is the ‘minor’ sibling⁴—less hyped, more manageable, and, crucially, more rooted in the city’s realities. Its projects spill out into the streets and canals, engaging with Venice as a living, breathing place rather than just a picturesque backdrop, making the whole event feel more honest, more urgent—and, in its own way, more hopeful.  As I addressed in a previous article,⁵ the last edition showed great promise in bridging the gap between local realities and visiting architects. 

The institution seems to be turning a page, embracing both the poetry of lived experience and the pragmatism of real-world action. As Venice’s cultural calendar increasingly revolves around these events, and art institutions across the island time their openings to coincide even with the Biennale Architettura, the boundaries between art and architecture continue to blur, raising questions about the unique voice of each discipline and transforming Venice into a year-round stage for exhibition spectacle. In this environment, what unites both fields now is a shared search for relevance—not through grand gestures, but through sincerity. 

However, I still remain uncertain about the possible positive impact on the island's inhabitants, but if the measure of this is a willingness to face the world’s complexity with humility and hope, then perhaps it is not only moving in the right direction—it is finally learning to respond to the urgencies of our time, even when expressed 'in minor keys'.

An exercise in relevance: five pavilions pushing back against disciplinary inertia

This year's Architecture Biennale, under the banner of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., is a showcase of solutions-projects that address climate change, social equity, and the everyday realities of life on a fragile planet. It is almost 100 events shorter than last year’s art edition, still making this one of the most extensive architecture exhibition in the Biennale's history⁶—and, possibly, smaller than the next one. What emerges is an architecture less concerned with heroic visions or signature styles (minus the shimmering dock by Norman Foster),⁷ and more invested in building resilience amid conditions that refuse to hold still.

The Venice Biennale’s themes rarely inspire much excitement, often leaning toward broad, catch-all slogans—Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—is no exception. While the aim is to encompass diverse perspectives, there is always a risk of sounding generic or overly expansive. Yet, as is often the case, the real substance is found not in the Biennale’s official framing but in the pavilions themselves, where architects and artists are left to interpret, subvert, or simply ignore the curatorial prompt.

While the last Biennales were usually content to display intentions, this edition of the Architecture Biennale manages, at its best, to propose concrete propositions. Performance, sensory experience, and immersive installations may have become the lingua franca of both art and architecture, but the strongest pavilions here refuse to settle for spectacle or abstraction. Instead, they insist on concrete solutions to pressing issues. 

The Nordic Pavilion, Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, curated by artist Teo Ala-Ruona, exemplifies this crossover by hosting a performance-based exploration of queer and trans bodies in architectural spaces. This is not architecture as mere form but as lived experience and political critique, challenging the discipline’s often rigid, exclusionary norms. One of the scores titled When you practice a performance long enough is a stark reminder of how architecture shapes identity and power, and how urgent⁸ it is to rethink these inherited legacies in a world facing social upheaval. 

Similarly, Lebanon’s The Land Remembers by Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL) is a powerful example. The pavilion functions as both an ecological archive and a living memorial, constructed from earth bricks embedded with wheat seeds that will sprout over the exhibition’s six months. This living architecture confronts Lebanon’s environmental devastation—burned olive groves, poisoned soils—and insists on memory, healing, and regeneration as essential acts of resistance. In a country grappling with political instability and ecological collapse,⁹ this pavilion’s urgency cannot be overstated. It transforms architecture into a tool for reclaiming land and future—an urgent response to a context where the ground, both physical and social, is anything but stable.

The participation of countries like Lebanon and Pakistan, both currently facing conflict and giving voice to pressing ecological challenges, reinforces the critical role of representation in global conversations. Pakistan’s pavilion, (Fr)Agile Systems, also curated by a collective of architects and educators, highlights the country’s climate fragility and advocates for localised, nature-based solutions using symbolic materials like rock salt to represent endurance and fragility.

Some pavilions, however, embrace a more poetic and sensory approach, offering architecture as a medium for reflection and emotional resonance rather than direct intervention, very much playing similar notes of what we can expect to be In Minor Keys.

In times when the world feels fractured and overwhelming, these works are a great refuge for the senses and imagination. Like a whispered question in a noisy room, they ask us to pause and consider the intangible qualities of space—its temporality, its textures, its scents. The interventions from Serbia and Kosovo offer a delicate, almost poetic counterpoint. Kosovo’s pavilion, Lulebora nuk çel më. Emerging Assemblages, featuring artist Sissel Tolaas, creates a scented landscape that quietly engages the senses, inviting visitors to experience architecture beyond the visual. Serbia’s Unraveling: New Spaces uses textile art and solar power to create a fabric structure that slowly unravels over six months, emphasising circularity, temporality, and the fragile beauty of impermanence. These delicate interventions present a counterpoint to the Biennale's urgent calls for action, suggesting that even in the most challenging circumstances, architecture has the capacity to provide spaces that facilitate the process of change and offer a venue for hope.

In this sense, the Argentinian Pavilion’s Siestario, offers us another form of gentle resistance and reminder of human rhythms. The contribution by Juan Manuel Pachué and Marco Zampieron, engages with a topic that has gained traction in contemporary art: the politics of rest and labor. By transforming the silobag—a heavy plastic tube containing grain, widely repurposed in Argentina—into a collective space for relaxation, the pavilion critiques the relentless pace of modern life and the built environment’s complexity within it. Here, architecture becomes a tool for reclaiming space for ourselves. In a biennale packed with ideas, it’s a rare invitation to pause, rest, and dream.

What Comes Next: From Biennale to Annuale?

After this rare moment of a collective exhale,¹⁰ the reality is still overwhelming and a larger question surfaces: what does all this mean for the future of the Biennale, and for the evolving relationship between art and architecture?

Will architecture be absorbed by the relentless expansion of the art world? Could the Biennale itself evolve into a year-round event—an ‘Annuale’—further diluting these boundaries?

There is a beautiful series of photographs taken at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. A small crowd clustered around the Strada Novissima,¹¹ that temporary “new street” of postmodern facades that was built inside the Arsenale Corderie. It’s a snapshot of a city and a discipline at a turning point—architecture stepping out from the shadow of art, offering not just models but full-scale, walkable ideas. That first Biennale was about inhabiting space, and it set the tone for everything that followed. 

Fast forward to 2025 and one difference is immediately evident: fewer scale models on display, more experiences to walk through. A renewed focus on direct, sensory engagement gives access to architecture to people without specialised knowledge in the field. In this sense, the Architecture Biennale is more and more resembling its art counterpart, not only with regards to its topics but also in its means, raising questions of what belongs in each Biennale.

This collapse of boundaries is also evident in the selection of Hans Ulrich Obrist—a celebrity curator from the art world—as head of the Golden Lion jury. Why not someone like Mpho Matsipa (part of the commission), whose work actually interrogates the politics of space and representation, who has a long-standing architectural research (of their own)?

Footnotes

1. The team of professionals, selected and directly involved by Koyo Kouoh, consists of the advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira and Rasha Salti; the editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and the assistant Rory Tsapayi. ↑

2. “Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.” Curatorial Text by Koyo Kouoh, “In Minor Keys”, La Biennale, 2025, online https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/curatorial-text-koyo-kouoh. ↑

3. Title of the Biennale Arte 2019, curated by Ralph Rugoff. ↑

4.  The financial sustainability of the architectural edition is primarily reliant upon the revenues generated by its art counterpart. ↑

5. Livia Emma Lazzarini, “Bridging the Gaps: The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale”, UMBAU Journal, Issue 2, 2023, online https://umbau.hfg-karlsruhe.de/posts/bridging-the-gaps. ↑

6. Hosting 66 national participations including first-time pavilions of Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar, and Togo. ↑

7. Designed by the Norman Foster Foundation in collaboration with Porsche, the Gateway to Venice's Waterway is a floating dock made from the same aluminium used for Porsche racing cars. ↑

8. Particularly as it happens during the rise of transphobic policies in the UK (2025 Supreme Court ruling on sex definition) and US (president Trump’s executive order that defines ‘sex’ as strictly biological), alongside right-wing rollbacks of gender rights across Europe. ↑

9. In particular, addressing the military use of white phosphorus munitions that render land inhabitable and impossible to cultivate. ↑

10. An Exhale is also the curatorial invitation in Koyo Kouoh’s text for the 61st Venice Biennale. Kouoh, “In Minor Keys”. ↑

11. The Strada Nova (New Street), is one of the main Venetian streets, running from the train station to the Rialto bridge. ↑