Welcome
to Borderland
Biennale Architettura 2021
Welcome to Borderland explores the reality of border away from the geographical lines that define it via the prism of plants. A critical take on botany, identity and space enables us to explore a tension, a nexus of architectures, social constructions, imaginaries, objects and discourses. Plants are invasive, wild, indigenous, naturalised. Plants have IDs, they follow rules. Yet more often than not, they flout them, they crack the walls. In all plants and in their behaviours, we find traces of the border away from the border, the contradictions of flows and fences. In the space they create, we recognise the segregated sociospatial archipelagos that, together, make our planetary borderland.
Welcome to Borderland was a mixed-media installation that answered the theme set out by Hashim Sarkis for the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021: How will we live together? Displayed in the Central Pavilion, Giardini from 22 May-21 November 2021, it was also a hybrid performance where those who could not come to Italy could order elements of the exhibition to receive at home. In November 2021, when it was time to take down the exhibition, the curator tore down the works displayed into postcards and sent it from Venice, together with seeds to plant wherever you are.
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The project is curated by Justinien Tribillon in collaboration with Cécile Trémolières, Offshore Studio (Isabel Seiffert and Christoph Miler), Caroline Fodor, Adrien Coste, Pedro Escobar and Misia Forlen.
It has received the generous support of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and Migrant Journal.