Beta 2022: Timișoara Architecture Biennial
Beta 2022 focuses on the city as a common good in an attempt to investigate the personal relationship that each of us has with the urban space in which we live and manifest. In this sense, Beta comes with concrete tools that encourage the public to become more active and to claim, along with their responsibility, their right to the city.
The general theme of this year’s edition is approached from different perspectives throughout the biennial in a wide range of formats, some classic, others informal or experimental.
Collaboration with fellows
Invited Fellows #1 >>>>> Unfolding Pavilion
> first met in the context of Future Architecture Programme 2020
As a consequence of our first meeting back in Ljubljana in 2020 with the Unfolding Pavilion team that consists of Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando, a fruitful collaboration started between us. First during the 3rd edition of Beta - the Timișoara Architecture Biennial, when they have been invited to hold a lecture on the topic The future of architecture practice in the context of the pandemic and the new challenges of the contemporary architecture realm.
Daniel Tudor Munteanu (b. 1980) is an architect and curator based in Suceava, Romania. He has exhibited at the 5th Shenzhen Urbanism/Architecture Biennale, contributed to the ‘State of the Art of Architecture’ project for the 1st Chicago Architecture Biennial and to the U.S. Pavilion for the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. His texts were published, among others, in San Rocco, Log or Volume. He has lectured in academic and cultural institutions including The Architecture Foundation in London, Genève’s HÉAD, the University of Melbourne, the Politecnico of Milano, Ljubljana’s MAO, Prague’s VI PER, the ÉAVT in Paris or the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. Together with Davide Tommaso Ferrando, he initiated and co-curated the “Unfolding Pavilion” at the 15th, 16th and 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and will co-curate Beta 2022 Timișoara Architecture Biennial. Daniel is the founder and editor of the research project ‘OfHouses – a collection of old forgotten houses’.
Davide Tommaso Ferrando (b. 1980) is an architecture critic, curator and researcher particularly interested in the intersections between architecture, city and media. He is currently Research Fellow at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He has lectured in several institutions including La Biennale di Venezia, the University of Melbourne, The Berlage in Delft, the Architectural Association in London, and the ETSA Madrid. Together with Daniel Tudor Munteanu, he initiated and co-curated the Unfolding Pavilion at the 15th, 16th and 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and will co-curate Beta 2022 Timișoara Architecture Biennial. Director of Viceversa and editor of Realismoutopico, his writings are published in magazines such as The Architectural Review, Log, Casabella and Volume. In 2018, he published his first book: The City in the Image.
The Unfolding Pavilion is an expanding curatorial project that pops-up in the occasion of major architecture events, with an exhibition featuring each time a different theme inspired by the space it occupies, made of commissioned original works that react to it as well as to its cultural and historic background.
In its first edition, the Unfolding Pavilion entered Ignazio Gardella’s Casa alle Zattere on the occasion of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia, transforming one of its apartments in a temporary gallery of installations made by some of the most unique authors of architecture-related curated archives. In its second edition, the Unfolding Pavilion entered Gino Valle’s Giudecca Social Housing on the occasion of the vernissage of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia. In order to do so, it refurbished one of its empty dwellings to convert it into a temporary gallery of works, and use the common spaces of the complex as the poetic backdrop for a three days-long program of public events.
Due to the success of our first above-mentioned collaboration with Unfolding Pavilion, Beta coordination team invited Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando to curate the main exhibition of the 4th edition of Beta, titled The City as a Common Good that took place during the 23rd of September to 23rd of October 2022. An architecture biennial is a special type of event. Because it only lasts a few weeks, it has the privilege of being a place for experimentation. When they were invited to respond to the theme proposed by the Beta organizers, namely the City as a Common Good, Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando decided that the most suitable place to talk about the city is the city itself. So, from the very first stages of conception, Another Breach in the Wall, the main exhibition within Beta 2022, curated by the two, was conceived as an exhibition capable of expanding its borders beyond the walls of a gallery space, invading the city that hosts it to animate its spaces and the citizens who inhabit them.
The main feature of the exhibition (and its basic principle) is an urban route with a length of 23 kilometers that connects, in a closed loop, eleven neighborhoods of Timisoara. Along this route, more than one hundred and twenty works were proposed: in the open air spaces - on the streets, in the squares and in the parks of Timişoara, as well as inside the Monkey House (Stefania Palace) – the interior exhibition space in an old secession building in Fabric - the historical industrial neighborhood of Timisoara, a space of more than 1000 sqm space owned by the City Hall that was unused for the last years and was in an advanced state of decay. With the occasion of Beta, the space was activated and given back to the citizens and also integrated in the cultural infrastructure map of the city, being used now for other exhibitions and events within the context of Timișoara 2023 - European Capital of Culture.
The geometry of the Route follows a situationist logic based on chance and accidental encounters. Two symbolic places were selected on a map of the city - Piaţa Traian, the center of Fabric neighborhood, and Gara de Nord (North Train Station) - and, starting from them, an equilateral network made up of nineteen equidistant nodes was defined. The nineteen nodes thus found were later connected by a continuous and closed alley which, once adapted to the irregularities of the real streets of Timisoara, ended up defining the geometry of the Route. This self-imposed rule allowed the curatorial team not to be influenced by their previous knowledge of the city, which would have inevitably affected the definition of the exhibition's trajectory. Instead, new and unexpected areas of Timişoara could be included in the Route, activating marginalized territories and building an alternative imaginary of the city.
The exhibition overall discussed breaches in the metaphorical walls that surround us, all citizens of cities. Walls are devices of control. They are binary tools of inclusion and exclusion: if one side is ‘in’, the other is surely ‘out’. Walls are manifestations of power: they regulate mobility, behavior, communication, and ownership. Behind all walls – of brick and mortar or lines of code – stand the laws, commandments, norms, rules, regulations, contracts, codes, protocols, standards, terms, conditions, beliefs, and ideologies. These social constructs are the true walls that shape our environment.
These invisible walls are in perpetual negotiation: they are amended, expanded, revised, updated, compiled, censored, forged, erased, translated, interpreted, forgotten, neglected, or canceled. It is only through this process of negotiation, that it becomes possible to change the nature of a wall: what was there to entrap, can also protect. Indeed, walls enclose certain groups of people to exclude others. But walls can always be breached, and when they are, they become capable of embracing more numerous and more different groups. Walls are the manifestations of the existing, naturalized order. To breach them means to disrupt the way in which they are made, opening the possibility for a different society to exist.
A particular kind of breach is the ‘loophole’ . In military architecture, a loophole (or arrow-slit) is a device for defense and surveillance that allows archer or gunner weapons to be fired out from a fortification while the firer remains unseen and under cover. In common language, loopholes are rather understood as means of escape: ambiguities or omissions which allow the intent of a statute, a contract, or an obligation to be evaded. Material or immaterial, loopholes are meant to be weaponized.
Another Breach in the Wall was dedicated to loopholes: projects and actions that are capable of generating exceptional urban spaces by questioning the laws, rules, and codes according to which cities are produced and inhabited. These interventions do not follow laws, rules, and codes by default, but rather negotiate them, reinterpret them, visualize them, exploit their gray areas, evade them, or radicalize them. If laws, rules, and codes are the invisible walls that organize our everyday life, the object of Another Breach in the Wall were the loopholes by means of which breaches are opened through these walls, making new and unexpected paths of behavior possible.
As such, Another Breach in the Wall exhibited breaching strategies that are not only performed by architects and planners but also by designers, artists, activists, excentrics, and all those who are capable of adopting a creative and critical approach to the city, transforming the way in which it is inhabited and produced.
The aim of Another Breach in the Wall was thus to make people acknowledge, question, and expand the boundaries of their political agency, empowering them to transform their environment in disruptive ways, and affirming everyone’s right to the city.
The participatory process
Another Breach in the Wall was made with the huge collective effort of very different actors such as: architects and actors invited to create installations that would activate and change perspective in the 19 nodes generated by the route designed by Daniel and Davide, the communities living and operating in all those sites randomly selected by the route, the public administration that supported and guided us through the process of reopening the Monkey House and authorizing all new installations in the city, architecture students and high-schools pupils, inmates of the local penitentiary that were involved in the production process and a lot of other actors active in the cultural life of Timișoara.
In order to facilitate the understanding of the content created by the curators, we have organized a dense mediation programme consisting of guided tours both of the interior exhibition and of the outdoors trail, on foot or by bike, panel talks with a part of the authors exhibited, workshops related to a selection of the exhibits etc. One of the event was the launch of the publication entitled Radical Rituals by forty-five degrees.
Invited Fellows #2 >>>>> forty-five degrees
> first met in the context of Future Architecture Programme 2020
During the same meeting in Ljubljana back in 2020, at the Future Architecture Platform event, we met Alkistis Thomidou and Berta Gutiérrez Casaos, members of the forty-five degrees - a design practice dedicated to the critical making of collective space. 45°N: the watershed between the Mediterranean of our idealism and the North of our pragmatism, an imaginary border for thousands of migrants. 45°C: the highest temperature recorded in several European cities, a reminder that we can no longer postpone a societal shift towards degrowth. 45°: x=y, two terms of equal weight, the parity between chromosomal differences, the interchangeability of alternative identities.
Beta team kept in contact with the group, met a couple of times while they were doing the research on the 45º parallel in Romania, and answered their questions for the publication they prepared - Radical Rituals. In the opening weekend of Beta 2022, the book was launched in Timișoara in the presence of both Berta and Alkistis, with a public of more or less 50-60 people who participated in a discussion about their investigation and the link between Beta and the LINA platform.
During 2022 Beta has supported emerging creatives stemming from the Future Architecture platform, LINA's predecessor, due to architectural programme being scheduled and realised before the selection of creatives from the LINA Open call.