May 20–November 26, 2023
Open for Maintenance—Wegen Umbau geöffnet is dedicated to matters of care, repair, and maintenance. Using leftover material from over 40 national pavilions and exhibitions of the 2022 Venice Biennale, the German Pavilion will become a productive infrastructure, promoting principles of reuse and circular construction. In collaboration with a broad network of Venetian and German activist groups, the contribution by ARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / BÜRO JULIANE GREB renders visible processes of spatial and social care work typically hidden from the public eye.
By squatting in the German Pavilion at the Giardini through a series of maintenance works, Open for Maintenance sheds light on contemporary debates over existing building stock in the context of sustainability and resource conservation. The curators’ approach is informed by a historical and social perspective: During the 1980s, the social practice of maintaining urban fabric by the squatters’ movement in Berlin and other cities made an important contribution toward developing a more cautious approach to urban renewal, and thus to the conservation of urban communities and built environments.
The act of squatting and maintaining the German Pavilion starts with adopting it in its preexisting condition: Rather than dismantling Relocating a Structure, Maria Eichhorn’s intervention at the Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, the work is actively incorporated into the new design. In this way, the Art and Architecture Biennales become spatially and programmatically interwoven for the first time.
The German Pavilion becomes a productive infrastructure—a workshop, serving to collect, catalog, provision, and process used material from the Biennale—that has an impact beyond the confines of the institution. In particular, Open for Maintenance deals with questions of social and spatial inclusion in Venice. Due to the commercialization of urban space through mass tourism and Biennales, everyday life is disappearing, and with it go networks of social and material maintenance oriented toward the common welfare. This circumstance has resulted in a variety of local activist groups taking practical approaches to solving the problem. Open for Maintenance offers these actors a platform: The workshop program Maintenance 1:1 will feature interventions within the Pavilion as well as in the urban space of Venice, where university students and crafts apprentices will assist several groups from civil society in maintaining, repairing and caring for social infrastructures across Venice.
Open for Maintenance transforms the monumental German Pavilion into a living place of (re)production. As an action framework for a building culture beyond the prevailing model hinging on the exploitation of resources and humans, it sheds a light on the social, material and urban dimension of maintenance, demonstrating that ecological sustainability is inextricably linked to the social question.
Curatorial team
ARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / BÜRO JULIANE GREB
Anne Femmer, Franziska Gödicke, Juliane Greb, Christian Hiller, Petter Krag, Melissa Makele, Anh-Linh Ngo, Florian Summa
Press contact
BUREAU N, Caroline Wolf & Inga Krumme, architecture [at] bureau-n.de
Comissioner: Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building
Partners: Goethe-Institut, Senate Department for Urban Development, Building and Housing, Berlin, Sto-Foundation, AIT-Dialog, Rebiennale/R3B
Main Sponsor: Volkswagen Group; Corporate Partners: ALBRECHT JUNG, EQUITONE Fibres cement facade materials, Hand schafft Wert x VHV Versicherungen; Sponsors: Agrob Buchtal, Heidehof Foundation, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Friends: Euroboden Architekturkultur, NEW TENDENCY
