Is it possible to find a balance between the forest as a resource and the urgent need to preserve and rebuild fragile ecosystems? Our installation – One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Trees – at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia unpacks Sara Kulturhus in Skellefteå, Sweden, exploring building technology, material supply chains and their impact on the forests from which it was built.
We are honored to be participating in the Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition of six parts. It includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora.
The exhibition digs deep into questions of how to live in a world of binaries, and the global issues of decolonisation and decarbonisation.
Our contribution – One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Trees – at the Biennale di Venezia, can be found in the section Dangerous Liaisons at Corderie dell’Arsenale.
From the outset, it was clear that the essential gesture of The Laboratory of the Future would be ‘change’. In those same discussions that sought to justify the exhibition’s existence were difficult and often emotional conversations to do with resources, rights, and risk.
White Arkitekter from Sweden ruefully notes that “The Laboratory of the Future comes at a time when any imagined future looks bleak.
Architecture has played a complicit role in environmental degradation, social inequality, and energy imbalance. Dangerous Liaisons hints at the risks involved in our misinterpretation of complex entanglements, the reductive view of nature and numerical approaches to landscape management. Timber is a wonderful material for building at scale, but can a balance be struck between the forest as a resource and the urgent need for fragile ecologies to be preserved and re-built?
Viewing the global ecological crisis solely through a climate lens is fraught with false solutions and spurious dilemmas.
Our installation – One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Trees – unpacks a recent timber project from Skellefteå, Sweden, exploring building technology, material supply chains and their impact on the forests from which it was built. Sara Kulturhus, completed in 2021, is a symbol for sustainable timber architecture and is a perfect case study for dissection. Using carbon as an agreed measure and currency, The Workshop exhibition format of the Biennale allows us to unpick the politics of ‘zero carbon’ and point towards positive new forms of practice which work in balance with the environment.
Everything is finite. Everything we use, we take from someone or something else.
The exhibition reaches beyond the building to include the landscapes of timber extraction, and through connecting hard data with a real place, look to reveal what is often intangible. Large-scale films present the reality of the industrial forest, the efficiency of manufacture and the quotidian use of the public building at true scale. Wildlife, people, and weather add layers to further connect the very north of Europe with the audience at the Biennale.
Multiple voices are heard, from ecology, technology, activism and carbon discourse which illustrate the complexities and contradictions within current approaches to counter the climate and biodiversity emergencies which we are all facing.
Three animation sequences conceptually reference back to the main films of Forest, Factory and Building.
The forest in ariel view illustrates the phenomena of “crown shyness” where tree crowns avoid touching one another, bio-diversity where micro-organisms overtake their hosts and an exploding log illustrates timber as resource.
‘Like Hemingway, who famously ended each day’s work mid-sentence, The Laboratory of the Future closes with an open-ended question: what next?’
The Biennale, the world’s biggest architecture festival, opened to the public on 20 May, and is running through to Sunday 26 November 2023.
Jake Ford
Elena Kanevsky
Clara Terne – Digital artist
Martin Lang, Lang Film – Cinematographer & editor
Pär Olofsson – Cinematographer
Oliver Börnfelt – Sound engineer
Magnus Lewrén, Lewrén Produktion – Video technician
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