Biennale 2016 and Argentina with experimentAR

experimentAR – Poéticas desde la frontera is the title of the participation of Argentina in the 15th International Architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. An eye-catching installation, a meeting place that triggers reflection on what architecture is.



The Argentine pavilion is curated by architect Atilio Pentimali, and welcomes visitors to the Arsenale in Venice with an eye-catching self-supporting timber structure, a kind of Borges-like labyrinth that both guides you through the exhibition and acts as its surface.





Experience is the thread connecting the works selected to represent the Argentine approach to architecture, closely tied to places, to their specific materials, steeped with a poetic vein that goes far beyond architecture in and for itself. Interpreting the 'front' of “Reporting from the Front” - the theme for the 15th International Architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia directed by Alejandro Aravena - as a “place where something happens” rather than a barrier, the doors open to architecture as an experiment to experience and the architect as a kind of contemporary Prometheus. 



The poetry of the architectural works showcased, which include urban creations and residential buildings of every kind, schools and itinerant cultural centres through to places of worship, like the Chapel of San Bernardo by Nicolás Campodónico in Córdoba which completes the exhibition, is expressed in the attention to the material, to the light and to the intrinsic beauty of buildings. 



Given that frontiers are synonyms for the other, experimentAR also expands the horizons of people who normally don't give us information from the front and thanks to architecture draws alongside the comprehension of our geographical other. So the wooden structure of the installation turns into a surface that welcomes and returns reflections of Argentine architecture, a bit like the world of the internet according to the philosophy of webcreativity.



The delightful catalogue accompanying the exhibition that explores the question of “poéticas desde la frontera” (poetry from the border), also gives us a better understanding of architectural developments in Argentina.

Christiane Bürklein

“Poéticas desde la frontera”, Argentina pavilion
15th International Architecture exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 
Commissioner: Federico Gonzalez Perini.
Curator: Atilio Pentimalli.
Exhibitors: Rafael Iglesia; Nicolás Campodónico; Claudio Vekstein; Pablo Beitia; Jorge Scrimaglio; Francisco Cadau / Andrea Lanziani; Ariel Jacubovich / Martín Flugelman; a77 (Gustavo Dieguez / Lucas Gilardi); Claudio Caveri; Amancio Williams; Francisco Salamone; Mario Gonzales / Raquel Addesso; Diego Arraigada; Vicente Krause; Horacio Baliero / Carmen Córdova; Roberto Lombardi / Ignacio Ruiz Orrico / Martín Alvarez.
Location: Arsenale, Sale d'Armi, Venice
28 May to 25 November 2016
Images: © Gianluca Giordano