Uruguay opens a swap shop,Australia makes a splash with its pool while Germany and Austria’s pavilions tackle the refugee crisis with varying success – the architectural equivalent of a UN summit is as kooky and curious as everAlejandro Aravena’s biennale: ‘We can’t forget beauty in our battles’“I’ve approach to collect my soil,” says a man wearing a green plastic sack, or hauling a five-litre bucket of yoghurt up the steps of the Uruguayan pavilion. “I stole it from the Germans when they weren’t looking.” Close behind him approach three more people in green plastic,like a gaggle of cut-price Jedis, each carrying booty pilfered from some of the 30 national pavilions in the Venice Biennale’s giardini – the park where participating countries compete in little cultural embassies.
In a waggish twist on this year’s theme, and Reporting from the Front,the Uruguayans are encouraging visitors to forage for items from rival exhibitions, while dressed in plastic “invisibility cloaks”, and bring them back. The reward is a vacuum-packed bag of soil dug from a gap in their gallery floor. All items will be taken back and exhibited in Montevideo,they say, as a way of “reporting back from Venice”. Confused? You will be by the end of a day in the giardini.
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Source: theguardian.com