Challenges of today's society. Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion by Alessandro Melis

15/07/2021. 17TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION. LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2020. [VEN] ITALY 23.05 > 29.11.2021
metalocus, ÁLVARO ARRIERO
Asemas 2024.01
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Resilient Communities is the name with which the creators of the Italian pavilion of the XVII Venice Architecture Biennale summarize their proposal, based on the need to adapt and overcome one of the greatest challenges that humanity is currently facing: climate change.

Curated by Alessandro Melis, the Italian pavilion has been created seeking a minimum impact on the environment, reusing all the waste produced in its creation process, and with the intention that all the materials that are now part of the exhibition are reused when it is disassembled.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
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The Italian pavilion project for the VII Venice Architecture Biennale answers the question posed by the organizers, "How will we live together?" from the perspective of the necessary transformation that society must face dealing with climate change. The focus is on the role of the architect, crucial to counteract the unsustainability of today's cities and the pollution generated by the construction industry.

In this way, the pavilion shows projects that put into practice new models of habitability, rethink the urban fabric and the city model, or use materials and construction processes with low environmental impact. They are projects that, in a way, rethink the model of society to transform communities into open, virtuous and resilient systems.

Resilient Communities is based on the firm conviction that architecture must contribute significantly to improving the quality of life that we lead, providing adequate responses to the environmental and social changes of our time.

From the project created by Milovan Farronato for the 2019 Art Biennale, the 2021 Italian Pavilion took shape through a subtraction/integration action. All the waste material produced during its creation and construction was reused for new purposes. In addition, the installations present, as well as the exhibition, will live a second life.

The Italian pavilion is a unique opportunity to study the life cycle of a creation born with a resilience approach. For this same reason, within the pavilion multimedia supports are used to tell the story of the selected projects, minimizing the canonical means of expression and communication.

The website of the Italian pavilion can be found here.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù. Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Resilient Communities, Italian Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia by Alessandro Melis. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù.
Asemas 2024.01
CIN-VALENTINE 01

More information

Curator
Alessandro Melis.
Commissioner
Onofrio Cutaia, Managing Director of Creatività Contemporanea, Ministero della Cultura.
Assistant curator
Benedetta Medas.
Section managers
Concept Architectural Exaptation.- Alessandro Melis, Telmo Pievani. Architectural extension.- Alessandro Melis, Benedetta Medas, Paola Corrias, Alice Maccanti. Dolomiti Care.- Gianluca D'Inca Levis, Marta Boni. Decolonizing the built environment.- RebelArchitette, Alessandro Melis. DESIGN (ING), from the spoon to the city.- Paolo Di Nardo, Francesca Tosi. Architecture as caretaker.- Antonino Di Raimo, Maria Perbellini. Global South.- Paola Ruotolo. Universities, resilience agencies.- Maurizio Carta, Paolo Di Nardo. One minute story.- Alessandro Gaiani, Emilia Giorgi, Guido Incerti. Good Italian practices.- Gian Luigi Melis, Margherita Baldocchi, Benedetta Medas. Peccioli Laboratory.- Ilaria Fruzzetti, Nico Panizzi, Laura Luperi. Ecology Cup.- Ingrid Paoletti. Resilience, landscape and art.- Annacaterina Piras (LWCircus), Emanuele Montibeller (Arte Sella), Giacomo Bianchi, Laura Tomaselli. Garden of the Virgins.- Dario Pedrabissi. Industrial and Creative Arts, Crossover Section.- Benedetta Medas, Monica Battistoni, Dana Hamdan, Antonio Lara-Hernandez. Virtual section.- Tom Kovac, Alessandro Melis.
Collaborators
Favara Cultural Farm.- Andrea Bartoli, Florinda Saieva. New York Institute of Technology.- Maria Perbellini. General assembly project.- Heliopolis 21. Project coordination.- Gianluigi Melis, Alessandro Melis, Paolo Di Nardo, Simone Chietti, Liam Donovan-Stumbles, Barbora Melis, Ilaria Fruzzetti, Dana Hamdan, Laura Luperi, Filippo Mariani, Nico Panizzi. Management and business relations sponsor.- Simone Chietti. Collaborative project.- Margherita Baldocchi, Monica Battistoni, Pietro De Pasca, Alice Maccanti, Benedetta Medas, Lorenzo Parrini, Roberto Poziello, Martina Mancini, Lorenzo Pucci. Coordination of events.- Daniele Menichini. Social networks.- Benedetta Medas, J. Antonio Lara-Hernandez, Nicoletta Podda. Web design, video design and production.- DIRTY WORK web design-grafica-comunicazione.
Dates
May 22 to November 21, 2021.
Location
At the 17th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Arsenale della Biennale di Venezia, Campo de la Tana, Venice, Italy.
Photography
Andrea Avezzù.

Alessandro Melis

Alessandro Melis (Cagliari, 6/7/1969) is an Italian architect and curator of the Italian National Pavilion at the XVII Venice Biennale. He is also a professor of architectural innovation at the University of Portsmouth.

Alessandro Melis is also Director of the International Sustainable Cities Cluster, and was previously Director of Graduate Engagement at the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Urbanism. He has also been invited as keynote speaker at the Chinese Academy of Art, MoMA in New York, Cambridge University, TEDx, the Italian Institute of Culture in London, the New Zealand Cycling Conference, the Foster Foundation (as a member academic staff) and UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

In 1996, he founded Heliopolis 21, a multi-award winning architecture firm based in Italy, Germany and the UK. His projects, such as the SR1938 Institute of the University of Pisa, the Stella Maris Hospital and the Sant'Anna Auditorium, are recognized in both academic publications and popular magazines as examples of excellence in sustainable projects. The recognition of Alessandro's research is corroborated by a record of more than 150 magazine and book publications.

On the other hand, Alessandro Melis is recognized, together with Telmo Pievani, for introducing the concept of Exaptation in Architecture. His work on it was the subject of several exhibitions and a recent monograph (Rome, 2020) written by several scholars from the universities of Palermo and Bari and edited by Francesco Fallacara Chirico, entitled “Alessandro Melis, Utopic Real World”.

In 2017, Alessandro Melis and Steffen Lehmann created the interdisciplinary project CRUNCH: Climate Resilient Urban Nexus Choices: Operationalising the Food-Water-Energy Nexus, a research project funded by Horizon 2020, Belmont Forum Belmont Forum, ESRC and other funding bodies. Alessandro Melis is leading the project on behalf of the University of Portsmouth, where he is a professor of innovation in architecture.
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