Introduction: Notes on the Pluriversity
Zachary Torres

During the opening days of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, a group of young activists gathered outside the gates of the Giardini. Every morning, on our way to press conferences, pavilion openings, interviews, and collateral events, my colleagues and I passed them by. They appeared to be about our age, most likely students, too, passing food and blunts around their small circle, which they occasionally broke, when suddenly reminded of their purpose, to brandish a poster or sing a chant. We never lingered to speak with them. I regret that now, but how relaxed and idyllic they appeared to me, adjacent to but separate from the chaos of the vernissage. But they were also part of the biennale, even if they were there to protest its culture of waste and hegemonic taste-making.

Initially, caught up as I was in the excitement of a discourse-shifting biennale, I thought it strange that eco-activists should be protesting this event, which centralized decarbonization as one of its tenets. Running between the Arsenale and Giardini for interviews, I largely forgot about the protestors, and it is only with hindsight that I have begun to appreciate the important role those activists played in demonstrating what alternative forms discursive gathering may taket. In their small circle, surrounded by handmade posters, the activists enacted the biennale’s themes better than some of the curators themselves. Their gathering was an exercise in an alternative pedagogy, informal discourse, and grassroots eco-consciousness. Their radicalism flowed between them like the smoking blunt they passed around, illicit and free of disciplinary boundaries. The activists' work did not require thousands of dollars in national grants, press releases, or tons of building materials that would later be discarded. They did not need wall plaques or didactic texts; their message was clearly marked on the park benches they graffitied: Why the fuck do you go to the Venice Biennale?

I like to think that Lesley Lokko, the curator of this biennale, also witnessed these activists and smiled to herself as she passed them by. Lokko writes of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, which she titled Laboratory of the Future, as an “agent of change.”Lesley Lokko, “The International Exhibition as an Agent of Change,” La Biennale di Venezia, February 20, 2023, https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-architettura-2023-laboratory-future-0. And in many ways, it is. For the first time in its history, the biennale centralized non-Western voices: of the 89 participants, over half are from Africa or its diaspora, participants’ average age is 37, and full gender parity was achieved.“Exhibition Structure,” La Biennale di Venezia, February 20, 2023, https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-architettura-2023-laboratory-future-0. In its curation, Lokko emphasized a narrative approach “so that the exhibition is not a single story, but multiple stories that reflect the vexing, gorgeous kaleidoscope of ideas, contexts, aspirations, and meanings that is every voice responding to the issues of its time?” (emphasis her own).Lokko, “The International Exhibition as an Agent of Change.” Moving through the Arsenale and national pavilions, one is bombarded by a constellation of dissimilarity and dialogue, in which cartoon maps of Uyghur labor camps abut microslides from the Amazon’s archive, while a few rooms over, videos made in Nigeria converse with precolonial maps of Ireland (see our interview with BothAnd Group). Saturated in critical practices and experimental representations, we come to understand that decolonization and decarbonization are not sisters but conjoined twins.

Field Notes from the Pluriversity takes its cue from Lokko’s understanding of the exhibition as an “incomplete narrative.” Field notes are partial observations, quick scribbles, and parti sketches, and many of the essays presented here emerged from our early musings and meandering recaps over dinner. Meanwhile, the pluriversity captures our world’s epistemic diversity as a series of horizontal rather than vertical relationships. In her essay on the Brazilian pavilion, Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz discusses the pluriversity’s indigenous roots as a tool of epistemological resistance, and this theme flows throughout all the essays and interviews collected here.

Field Notes from the Pluriversity is an exercise in multiplicity. It is a collection of critical essays and insightful interviews that illuminate, analyze, and challenge the discursive practices of the international exhibition. Specifically, Field Notes from the Pluriversity is a textual and visual journey through the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, and it aims to extend the exhibition’s multiple voices, critical insights, and representational experiments beyond the temporal and spatial limits of the Venetian Lagoon. In her visual essay, “#Untitled 1 #Untitled 2 #Untitled 3,” Tianyu Yang extends such representational experiments to analyze Lokko’s curatorial conceptualizations of the biennale as “tapestry between the emancipatory and the institutional.” Yang’s collaged visual language is carried through to the interview fragments. While we interviewed close to fifty curators and designers, we could not include every conversation here in its entirety. Those fragments we do collect offer incisive and succinct insight into the logistics and discontents of exhibition practice. Meanwhile, the longer interviews multiply and disseminate decolonial curatorial practices in a more conversational and informal format that we hope is engaging, easily accessible, and at times, jocular and sardonic. Additionally, we hope to engage a wider audience and continue Lokko’s storytelling approach as nonlinear: As an online publication, readers are invited to randomly journey through the texts.

We think doing so may also give readers a better sense of our own experience at the biennale, as we frantically dashed back and forth between the Arsenale and the Giardini to keep interview appointments, attend press conferences, and of course, get to the parties before the free champagne dried up. Yet, as we ran over the bridges of Venice, we became intimately familiar with the exhibition spaces, the alleys between the two venues, and the notion of the biennale as a spatially discursive pilgrimage, as my own essay discusses. Some of the other essays here also grapple with the multiple layers of travel an exhibition requires. Karla Andrea Perez’s bilingual analysis of the Mexican pavilion, for example, asks what knowledge we bring and leave with. Others, like Yidan Karel Li’s “‘Down to Earth, Cloud to Ground’: Towards a Poetic Infrastructure Criticism,” also aims to place seemingly incongruent actors, like Israel and Luxembourg, in dialogue with each other. Meanwhile, Nicolay Duque-Robayo’s “Neighborly Behavior” discusses the tension between the Venezuelan and Swiss pavilions as a reflection of geopolitical power relations.

While we learned many lessons from the pluriversity that is the 18th Architecture Biennale, we—as designers, curators, critics, historians, and educators—need to continuously engage with them if we hope to truly decolonize and decarbonize our practices and our world. It is imperative that these terms not be reduced to academic jargon, but that, like the young activists gathered at the gates of the Giardini, they be daily enacted and seamlessly embedded in our critical practices. While Lokko has initiated this challenge, subsequent biennales will need to take up her mantle and push the boundary even further. A decolonial exhibition practice must, for example, question the hegemonic role the national pavilions play in consolidating architectural practice. More than creating space for nations of the Global South, a decolonial biennale should do away with nationalism altogether, as fences only dam the rich epistemological flow that is the pluriversity. We must also question the biennale’s format itself, wondering at other ways we may gather as an international architectural community that does not engage with fossil capital and that refuses the biennale’s historic culture of waste and elitist access. If we don’t, there won’t be a Venice for us to return to in two years. Taking a cue from the activists, maybe all we need is some paint and a good blunt.