19. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura – Padiglione Irlandese

Il progetto Assembly rappresenta l’Irlanda alla Biennale Architettura di Venezia.

Comunicato stampa

“To assemble is to gather as a group of people with a common interest.
To assemble is to construct a whole from constituent parts.
As congregation and construction, assembly is at the heart of the architectural process.”
ASSEMBLY is the result of an interdisciplinary collaborative process between Cotter & Naessens Architects, sound artist David Stalling, architect and poet Michelle Delea, curator Luke Naessens, and woodworker Alan Meredith. Inspired by the innovative political model of the Citizens’ Assembly, the design features a multi-sensory installation that offers visitors a soundscape to be inhabited and a space to be heard.

In 2016 Ireland established the Citizens’ Assembly, which brings together 99 Irish residents to deliberate issues ranging from marriage equality to biodiversity loss. This political experiment has been promoted as a form of participatory democracy, meant to bring the ordinary citizen closer to the processes of governance. Could Citizens’ Assemblies be realised at different scales, their principles expanding into the spaces of everyday life?

An instrument designed to harmonise a multitude of dissonant voices, the Pavilion of Ireland reflects on assembly as a product and process of making. ASSEMBLY is a prototype for a structure that facilitates non-hierarchical communication between strangers. Circular, modular, and small in scale, it can be inserted into public spaces from the school to the shopping centre, transforming them into sites of civic participation. Its resonant voids house a chorus of soundboxes, each delivering a partial fragment of a polyphonic soundscape incorporating music, poetry, interviews with the Citizens’ Assembly’s designers and participants, and recordings that reflexively document the structure’s own fabrication.