My final full week in Milan was highlighted with our visit to the Cimitero Brion and the Biennale.
After a long day of traveling and walking, the Cimitero Brion felt almost like a quiet retreat into a place of solace. Although Treviso possessed a quality of stillness that other the other cities I’ve visited lacked, the Cimitero Brion (from the corn fields to the long walkway amidst tall trees) was even more of a withdrawal from worldly occupations. Reading Frampton’s essay on Carlo Scarpa made my visit to the cemetery all the more fascinating – from the mysterious detailing hinting at something more to the Asian-inspired details implying the Asian perspective of death, which is a reverent/celebratory one, rather than a guilt/fear-ridden one traditional in most Western cultures. Also, I found that inside the floating chasms present at each turn/corner/joint, Scarpa has placed a smaller world of sorts locked in its own dimension of time.
The Biennale was more than I expected. Trying to visit all the pavilions in Giardini fried my brain by the end of the day – there were so many issues of all types being addressed, most of them ones that I never thought to think about !!
The exhibit in The Central Pavilion that recreated the best pieces of architecture into smaller versions so as to make the effects more immediately noticeable/tangible/effective was an interesting one, and an approach I thought very suitable for the people in our times: consumed with immediate-information culture and unable to fully appreciate the impact of well-designed architectural spaces.
This was an essay found in one of the hidden cabinets of the Netherlands Pavilion:
The rhetoric and contents made me think of it as a modern Futurist Manifesto. It was also interesting to see how the Netherlands’ culture and history of strict, unemotional design has related to their decision on making their pavilion about the information age and the future of our relationship with AI.
This was a still from a video projected in the U.S. Pavilion. An incredibly clear and evocative video defining the reality of inequality inflicted by big corporations and historical injustices. Just as Netherlands’ culture of unemotional design seemed related to their AI-themed pavilion, the U.S. Pavilion dealt much with its relations to other countries, the definition of the word “freespace” amidst current issues of immigration, along with environmental and technological boundaries as well.
-Linda