On November 14th, 2014, three meetings will take place throughout the day from 11am on stages E and C of the Corderie of the Arsenale.
The first part of Freeport, titled Denouncing the Block. A Critique of Modernist Residential Architecture, will be devoted to the issue of residential architecture from the perspective of its users – using Poland as an example, with some international references. Agnieszka Sural’s lecture will be accompanied by performative elements, representing the voice of the inhabitants of modernist housing estates. It will be complemented with short stories introduced by artist Karolina Breguła and developed by the opera singer Joanna Cortes.
Modernism, Power and Death is the name of the second meeting, devoted to the relationship between modernism, power and death and directly related to the exhibition in the Polish Pavilion. It will focus on links between modernist philosophy and the emergence of nations in the 19th and 20th centuries, ways of expressing power in modern architecture, and the instrumental use of death and memory in creating modern political identities, as well as how the forms and modes of presentation of mausoleums from the interwar period were shaped.
The third discussion is titled Shock Doctrine and Architecture. In Poland of the 1980s, architecture rejected ideological domination and oppression, and became an expression of the anti-communist opposition. After the fall of the communist regime, architecture lost its social touch and awareness. The debate will focus on this turning point in the broader political and economic context, using Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism as a point of reference.
The Freeport programme, conceived as part of Monditalia, a trans-disciplinary polyphonic exhibition, will allow national participants to match their pavilions’ presences with a series of live talks, debates and movie projections in the Arsenale’s Corderie. Freeport animates the Arsenale on weekdays, a counterpart to the Weekend Specials calendar, both essential parts of the Meetings on Architecture organized by la Biennale di Venezia.
The Anti-social Modernisation Freeport is curated by the Polish Pavilion and organized with the support of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art (Warsaw) and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Culture.pl).
The calendar of all the meetings happening during the six months of the exhibition is available at: http://www.labiennale.org/en/calendar/
Source: press materials, ed. szm, November 2014