ROTTERDAM.- Het Nieuwe Instituut, the commissioner of Work, Body, Leisure, the official Dutch contribution to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, announced the commissioned exhibitors at the Rietveld Pavilion in the Biennale’s Giardini, and selected projects for the extended program.

Rietveld Pavilion
The curator of the 2018 Dutch Pavilion, Marina Otero Verzier, has invited a group of architects, designers, historians and theorists, whose work is a reference for a critical understanding of emerging technologies of automation, and their spatial implications. Each of the contributors will conceive an intervention inside the Rietveld Pavilion as part of the collective exhibition Work, Body, Leisure, and will be in dialogue with the projects developed as part of the extended program:

Amal Alhaag, curator, cultural programmer and radio host, will address technologies of the body and how these are informed by the concept of the cyborg, enslaved and ethnographic body. Alhaag will work in collaboration with The Research Center for Material Culture (RCMC), a research institute within the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden) and the Afrika Museum (Berg en Dal), which serves as a focal point for research on ethnographic collections in the Netherlands.

Architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina will reexamine the bed as a unique horizontal architecture in the age of social media and will look at its use as a workspace transforming labor.

Marten Kuijpers, architect and researcher, and Victor Muñoz Sanz, architect and postdoctoral researcher, will explore the architecture of full automation in the city of Rotterdam and across agricultural clusters in the Netherlands, jointly with Het Nieuwe Instituut and TU Delft.

Designer and researcher Simone C. Niquille will unravel the parameters embedded in design software shaping contemporary work spaces and bodies optimised for efficiency, ergonomics and human/machine interactions.

Architecture historian, theorist, and critic Mark Wigley, will revisit New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys, and discuss its proposal for an alternate architecture and an alternate society in which human labor is rendered superfluous.

Floris Vos, art director and set designer, has been appointed as the spatial designer for the exhibition.

Results of the Open Call for the Extended Program
Het Nieuwe Instituut and Creative Industries Fund NL jointly organized an Open Call to engage researchers and practitioners in the development and dissemination of unconventional, critical ideas. Applicants were asked to submit a project proposal reflecting upon and responding to the theme of the pavilion, as part of the extended program of Work, Body, Leisure.

The jury, comprised of Willem Schinkel (Professor in Social Theory, Erasmus University), Lara Schrijver (Professor in Architecture, University of Antwerp) and Aslı Çiçek (interior architect, Architecture Workroom Brussels), recognised and awarded five projects. The selected proposals are The Institute of Patent Infringement by Matthew Stewart and Jane Chew, The Port and the Fall of Icarus by Northscapes Collective (Hamed Khosravi, Taneha K. Bacchin and Filippo laFleur), Songs for Hard Working People by a multidisciplinary team lead by Noam Toran, Shore Leaves by Giuditta Vendrame and Renderlands: installation by Liam Young.

The selected projects offer an entrance into the embodied, ethical, and spatial dimensions of labor, by deploying diverse but complementary strategies and tools for public engagement. In conversation with the curatorial team, the five projects will be presented in Venice and other locations. On April 26, 2018, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Creative Industries Fund NL will organize an evening with the teams selected through the Open Call, as part of the Thursday Night Live program at Het Nieuwe Instituut.

Collaborative Research
The 2018 Dutch Pavilion is envisioned as a collaborative research endeavor by a national and international network. This network will test and disseminate outcomes before, during, and beyond the exhibition timeframe and venue of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018. Together with the exhibitors and selected teams for the extended program, associated institutions and teams in The Netherlands and abroad will conduct research, disseminate architectural knowledge, and develop projects that will manifest beyond the physical space of the Rietveld Pavilion in the Biennale’s Giardini, thus expanding the geographies, audience, and legacy of the official Dutch contribution to the biennale.

From 15 December 2017 to 15 March 2018 Het Nieuwe Instituut presents Automated Landscapes at the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen. The presentation, which comprises an installation, a public forum and an academy programme, focuses on the architecture of automated labour in the Pearl River Delta region. The research is conducted by Het Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with Future+ Aformal Academy, and is supported by Design Trust Hong Kong, and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou.

On 24 January, 2018, the Master of Interior Architecture Corporeal at ArtEZ University of the arts (Zwolle, Netherlands) will launch Corporeal Intervention #4, a public program and multi-layered, transdisciplinary learning experience inspired by Work, Body, Leisure.