Alessandro Petti, Professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art, and his practice together with Sandi Hilal, DAAR – has been selected for la Biennale Architettura di Venezia: Architecture Exhibition – The Laboratory of the Future.
Open from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 26 November at the Giardini, Arsenale and Forte Marghera, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition is curated by Lesley Lokko.
Alessandro Petti is hoping the biennale will open up diverse architectural practices in dialog with social, political, and environmental burning questions.
– The Biennale di Architettura, curated by Lesley Lokko, is centered around the twin theme of decolonization and decarbonization. For more than two decades, first in Palestine, then USA and now Europe, we have continuously asked ourselves: what does it mean to decolonize? What the western media continue to call the political, environmental, or refugee crises is, in reality, the incapacity to understand today’s consequence of 500 years of colonization and exploitation.
Alessandro Petti is the co-founder of the architectural and artistic practice DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), centering around the relations of politics and architecture. In 2012, he initiated the experimental program Campus in Camps to overcome conventional educational structures.
Petti has written about the emerging spatial order dictated by the paradigm of security and control in Archipelagos and Enclaves (Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2007), and together with Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman, co-authored the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014), an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality from the perspective of a continued struggle for decolonization.
More recently, together with Sandi Hilal, Petti published Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019), a book, a catalog and an archive that account for more than fifteen years of socially and politically engaged collective work. He also published Refugee Heritage (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2021), a book-dossier that attempts to deactivate the claims of objectivity and universalism contained in the conventions followed by UNESCO in determining World Heritage status.
At the Royal Institute of Art, Alessandro Petti is the responsible teacher for the year-long research-based course Decolonizing Architecture. Applications for his new course, Decolonizing Architecture: Al Masha – Rural Commons, open March 15 2023.