StudioXAG Team Profiles: Meet Daniel

LIKES:
Corduroy, artichokes, disco, anything sparkling

DISLIKES:
Microwaves, polyester, Jeff Koons, bananas

Daniel, what’s inspired you recently?

For the first time ever, I travelled to Venice to visit the Architecture Biennale 2023. I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d love it!

The idea of each individual country taking over a space to platform their talented designers, speak about a topic which they care about and express their creativity is so cool. It was like travelling around the world in just 2 days.

This might sound strange, but as I strolled around the neighbourhoods surrounding the Biennale, I got to thinking about how Venice felt like a futuristic, eco-utopia. No cars, surrounded by water, with forward-thinking art and architecture wherever you looked.

As for the exhibitions, my main takeaway was how ‘alive’ many spaces felt. The architects had incorporated some element of interactivity or sensory stimulation, which meant I left with really strong memories of my favourite spaces. Here are just a few of them…

The German Pavilion was a space we referenced this Summer in our Radical Circularity report for its approach to material re-use. Titled ‘Open for Maintenance’, it was transformed into a bank of materials recovered from last year’s art biennale. The salvaged materials, recovered from over 40 installations, will be used to repair and upgrade buildings and public spaces all over Venice.

The space also housed a workshop where viewers could watch materials be reconstructed into their future purpose. It was great to see materials being added and taken away as I walked around the space – it was a real life, living and breathing, circular system.

The Mexican Pavilion created a 1:1 scale replica of an imagined basketball court – a utopian vision where the indigenous peoples of Mexico are offered a space to speak, play and exist.

I like that the space invited you in with a simple and playful gesture: to play a game of basketball. Plus the space felt so joyful and colourful. Only once you’d finished playing and began to explore further, did you learn of the deeper message behind the work.

Belgium’s Pavilion was literally alive. An enveloping space, made entirely of natural, living materials. It experiments with the installation of panels of mycelium fungi in a wooden structure and rests on a floor of raw earth from excavated soil.

It provided an opportunity to experience the sensory, tactile, acoustic and poetic characteristics of these materials.

The materials – mycelium, wood and earth all stemmed from the urban area of Brussels – and will be dismantled and re-used once the Biennale has finished.

I loved the French Pavilion – a super camp, retro-futuristic metallic orb.

In an overwhelming, often depressing world, this space was created to appreciate being in the current moment. To step into a giant disco ball, a kitsch icon of a partying era, where instead of focussing on emergencies, we imagine somewhere and something different.

For one week in every month, they hosted different events and parties, where artists, researchers and students inhabit and occupy the theatre, transforming the dynamic of the space.