VENICE.- The Canada Council for the Arts is presenting Picoplanktonics at the Canada Pavilion as part of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, from May 10 to November 23, 2025.

Amidst the ongoing global climate crisis, the Living Room Collective has developed a ground-breaking exhibition that showcases the potential for collaboration between humans and nature. Comprised of 3D printed structures that contain live cyanobacteria capable of carbon sequestration, Picoplanktonics is an exploration of our potential to co-operate with living systems by co-constructing spaces that remediate the planet rather than exploit it.

The Living Room Collective’s exhibition is the culmination of four years of collaborative research by Andrea Shin Ling and various interdisciplinary contributors. It is focused on harnessing the design principles of living systems to develop sustainable, intelligent and resilient materials and technologies for the future. By leveraging ancient biological processes alongside emergent technologies, it proposes designing environments under an ecology-first ethos.

When visitors enter the Canada Pavilion, they will encounter 3D printed structures that were originally fabricated in an ETH Zürich laboratory. These are the largest living material structures produced using a first-of-its-kind biofabrication platform capable of printing living structures at an architectural scale. The unique Picoplanktonics experience stems from adapting the Canada Pavilion to provide enough light, moisture, and warmth for the living cyanobacteria within the structures to grow, thrive and change. For the duration of the exhibition, caretakers will be onsite tending to the structures, emphasizing care and stewardship as essential elements of the design.

As global carbon emissions continue to rise to untenable levels, Picoplanktonics presents a vision of how a regenerative system of construction could operate. It is an ongoing experiment centered on leveraging the reciprocal relationship between living structures, the built environment, and humans. In this way, the Living Room Collective is rethinking building principles and prioritizing ecological resilience beyond human species survival.

“The Canada Council for the Arts is delighted to unveil Picoplanktonics by the Living Room Collective at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Through the lens of architecture, this year’s Canadian exhibition brings technological innovation and ecological stewardship together. It is a unique exhibition, sure to inspire global audiences and to ignite important conversations, about how our built environment might better house and use natural systems for a more sustainable future.” – Michelle Chawla, Director and CEO, Canada Council for the Arts

"Picoplanktonics marks four years of research at ETH Zürich with international collaborators in material science, biology, robotics, and computational design. As we move these living prototypes into the Canada Pavilion, we are thrilled to invite the public into this open experiment and reveal all phases of the material’s life, including growth, sickness, and death, while collectively imagining a regenerative design approach that seeks planetary remediation.” –Andrea Shin Ling, The Living Room Collective

Commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts, this year’s exhibition, Picoplanktonics, curated by the Living Room Collective, was selected through a juried competition. The selection committee was comprised of: Aziza Chaouni (architect, principal, Aziza Chaouni Projects and associate professor, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto); David Garneau (Métis, painter, curator, critical art writer and professor, Visual Arts Department, University of Regina); Daniel Pearl (archi- tect, principal, L’OEUF Architectes and professor, School of Architecture, Université de Montréal); Siamak Hariri (architect, founding partner, Hariri Pontarini Architects); and Sepake Angiama (curator, educator, and artistic director, Institute for International Visual Art).