Located inside the Australian Pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennale, first to be built within the Giardini in the 21st century, we find 'The pool' exhibition by Aileen Sage Architects and Michelle Tabet. It's aim is to step outside the architect-to-architect discourse to show how a familiar, common object, the pool, is in fact pregnant with cultural significance, it is both artefact and catalyst of change. The Pool is about public space as a vital component to society and shows the many ways in which its public character is interpreted and occupied.
As explained by the Creative Directors, Aileen Sage Architects and Michelle Tabet,‘Pools in Australia are currently facing significant challenges as social institutions. The threatened closure and demolition of Australian public pools is a perennial theme of community protest and activism and is an issue to which architects and urban commentators are inevitably drawn. [...] By identifying the pool’s cultural importance to Australia, we are pushing for a more critical engagement with the civic and social values that underpin our work as architects. The power and breadth of these places should not be underestimated nor simply jettisoned as uneconomical. Architecture can and does have an impact that transcends conventional economic models.’
Thus, Creating a pool as the focal point in the space, the exhibition does at first seduce the senses, but it does also capture the imagination and intellect of those who choose to dive deeper, as we have throughout our research and development process.
The Australian Pavilion is transformed through the use of light, scent, sound, reflection and perspective to create a series of perceptual illusions within a designed landscape. The exhibition engages visitors through an immersive experience that transports them poolside and evoke the pools of Australia in all their forms, be they natural or manmade, inland or coastal, temporary or permanent.
Recognisably Australian, The Pool is joyful, celebratory and accessible. It is also a setting for the sharing of stories, tales of personal and collective struggle, of community building and transformation and refusal of the status quo.
The project has inspired the sharing of stories of many Australians – all collected around the pool. This has led to eight narratives about aspects of Australian cultural identity, and eight high-profile storytellers.
Storytellers include Olympic gold medal winning swimmers Ian Thorpe and Shane Gould, environmentalist and 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, fashion designers Romance Was Born, writer of best-selling book The Slap Christos Tsiolkas, winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Prize Anna Funder, Indigenous art curator Hetti Perkins and Australian rock-musician Paul Kelly. Each narrative touches on a different scale, from the scale of the body to the scale of the continent, and together all reveal the myriad meanings and impacts of the pool on Australian society; as a means to enable survival in an unforgiving landscape, to tame our environment, to provide spaces that facilitate direct contact with nature, to create democratic social spaces, but also spaces for healing racial and cultural division.
Through the description of events, experiences, histories or memories, the narratives presented collectively describe a powerful relationship between place and society, intrinsic to this year’s Biennale Architettura theme 'Reporting from the Front'. The voices of the storytellers will be presented as a sound installation within the Pavilion of Australia as part of an immersive installation.
A similarly culturally significant narrative preceded the opening of the Pavilion, with the ‘Guunumba Elements Ceremony’, performed by Gumbaynggirr Elder and Poet Aunty Bea Ballangarry. Drawing upon elements of earth, air, fire and water, the ceremony provided a rich and immersive introduction to the formalities that followed.
