Kond, one of Yerevan’s oldest neighborhoods, emerged through continuous adaptation to the natural landscape.
The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, Laboratory of the Future, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect and author Lesley Lokko, centered on questions of decolonization, decarbonization, and deinstitutionalization, which Lokko had previously outlined in the ARCH+ issue Contemporary Feminist Spatial Practices. The German Pavilion, curated by ARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / BÜRO JULIANE GREB, built on these notions with Open for Maintenance.
Instead of staging a conventional exhibition, the pavilion was transformed into a workshop for socioecological building practices. Echoing Berlin’s Instandbesetzungen (squatting and maintaining vacant buildings) of the 1980s, the building was appropriated and made accessible through a newly constructed ramp. In the pavilion’s main hall, a material repository was created with leftover materials from more than 40 national pavilions of the Biennale Arte 2022. With these materials, a workshop, an ecological sanitary facility, a kitchenette, and a meeting space were built inside the German Pavilion.
