VENICE.- Committed to the commissioning and production of contemporary art and architecture projects, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary has also been involved in the development, production, and discourse of contemporary architecture for years, with projects such as Your black horizon by Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaye and The Morning Line by Matthew Ritchie and Aranda\Lasch, as well as collaborations in conjunction with Venice Biennales of Architecture.

This year T-B A21 has been invited to coproduce thebuildingwhichneverdies by R&Sie(n) and Modern Primitives by Aranda\Lasch and to collaborate on Ça va by Berger&Berger presented in the official exhibition People Meet in Architecture, curated by Kazuyo Sejima, along with a commission by Hernan Diaz Alonso in the Austrian Pavilion.

Aranda\Lasch, Modern Primitives, 2010
With Island Planning Corporation
Modern Primitives is a space that seems both to fall apart and to build itself back up again. It is a contemporary ruin, where objects overgrown with plants and plants overgrown with objects are dispersed loosely across the gallery space. Depending on how the cycle is perceived, this space is either where we came from or where we are going.

Like huge rock piles, its parts are built from small, primitive pieces that form larger clumps, and these clumps can be sat on, leaned against, or held in your arms. On another level, Modern Primitives is simply a way to furnish a space. This idea can spread beyond the gallery and into the city—into the streets, canals, and gardens of Venice. (a\l)

Also currently on view: The Morning Line, Istanbul, Eminönü Square. A platform for contemporary music and composition, The Morning Line is a public art structure – 8 meter high and 20 meter long, built of 17 tons of coated aluminum – exploring the disciplinary interplays between art, architecture, music, mathematics, cosmology, and science.

R&Sie(n) / New-territories, thebuildingwhichneverdies, 2009
R&Sie(n)’s contribution to the 12th International Architecture Exhibition–a project for Zumtobel Lighting–could become a cabinet of curiosities in the Biennale context. As a laboratory thebuildingwhichneverdies is a research center dedicated to three issues: the physiological adaptation to darkness as a means to reduce urban light pollution, the effect of artificial light intensity on the human circadian rhythm (melatonin effect), and the UV pathologies that result from the weakness of the ozone layer. For this third aspect of research, the lab’s external surface is covered with glowing components made with UV-sensitive Isobiot®ope pigments that indicate the level of danger. The purpose is to show the substance of light through apparatuses that are simultaneously physiological, psychological, and pathological, articulating the ambiguity and contradiction of safe and unsafe effects.

Berger&Berger, Ça va (a prefabricated movie theater), 2010
Ça va (a prefabricated movie theater) is the creation of a unique space dedicated to the meeting of films and their audiences. Originally proposed within the framework of a play, Ça va, written by Philippe Minyana and directed by Robert Cantarella at the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, this public alcove is an envelope placed within another. A temporary movie theater based on protocols that determine an audience’s behavior can lead to a viewer experience that goes beyond the basic, core uses of a constructed object.

For the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, the prefabricated theater presents a selected array of pieces: films, videos, and sound installations created by invited artists. T-B A21 contributes some films from its collection to Berger&Berger's film program: Mario García Torres’s Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl, 2005), Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler’s Single Wide (2002) and Olaf Nicolai’s Rodakis (2007).

Hernan Diaz Alonso, T-B A21 Patagonia, 2010
The model of T-B A21 Patagonia shown at the Austrian Pavilion embodies the continuation of the T-B A21 Patagonia animation from 2008 as a manifest experiment in the notion of a remote form of architecture. The Pavilion will be located at the base of the Andes in Argentina, itself a remote habitat, this permanently occupied proto-museum, which is in development and will act as an augmented aesthetic environment within the otherwise barren landscape of the region. Interjecting a foreign yet sensible intelligence into this habitable node allows a new condition to arise. Those who engage with it find a new and unexpected capacity to access the dynamic and profoundly energetic condition that produces the very environment that it lives within. As this mutant form, more organ than creature, transitions from its lightly rooted periphery toward its center, pockets of space emerge, forming the interior of the project. (Hernan Diaz Alonso)