Terra

On September 29 we will land on Terra, the result of a three-year-long collective exploration of local communities around the world to embrace our common home, planet Earth. How do the depletion of resources, socio-economic inequalities, and climate alter-actions intertwine at different scales?

This edition is a call to action for a more sustainable future where transdisciplinary spatial practices, newfound tools, and reimagined systems answer the emergent challenges of place-making in a globalised world. Terra is an ecosystem encompassing installations, workshops, seminars, awards, books, and much more, with our forward-thinking exhibitions acting as milestones.

Cycles tells many tales of a viable circular economy, where donor buildings and disassembled structures are stored and then reembodied again in an endless loop. These are accompanied by installations commissioned to artists, architects and multidisciplinary collectives, and by a series of short documentaries from the Harvard Graduate School of Design on the extraction and production of construction materials.

Retroactive tackles the ever-growing broken fabrics of our cities, searching for projects that suture these built environments by providing much-needed infrastructure or public facilities and thus restoring spatial dignity. These can be in the periphery of cities like Madrid, at the heart of metropolises like São Paulo, or even along the borders where both hemispheres meet, as in Tijuana.

Multiplicity asks how can we reinvent architecture’s role in a world that is building itself at such a fast pace—and overwhelmingly without architects. This exhibition displays collective or informal processes that adapt and subvert modes of action with ad-hoc methods such as friendship benches, community fridges, wiki houses, or plug-in dwellings.

Lastly, Visionaries looks into ambitious and controversial projects that aspire to have a broad or universal impact, rescuing architecture’s sense of agency and its potential to change the world. Some are utopian, others already a reality, prescribing radically new city models or poetic manifestos about beds.

Sinel de Cordes Palace, Triennale’s home venue, will be in permanent transformation, hosting a series of Independent Projects in quick succession, ranging from lectures to installations and performances that expand the chorus of perspectives that make up Terra.

For our Awards trilogy, the Lifetime Achievement winner Marina Tabassum, the Début award laureate studio, and the researchers selected from the Universities’ competition will all present their groundbreaking work at a lecture.

From October 26 to 28 we host Talk, Talk, Talk, gathering twelve different voices ranging from architecture to anthropology or social activism such as Arjun Appadurai, Vandana Shiva and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, among others. Find out sustainable models of placemaking towards a systemic paradigm shift.

The Triennale 2022 is calling. Take part in the debate on the future of ecology in architecture, we await you in Terra!