Location:

Venice - Tese delle Vergini, Arsenale

Date:

10 May - 23 November 2025

Terrae Aquae. Italy and the Intelligence of the Sea - the title of the Italian Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia - turns to today’s socio-political and urban landscape to investigate the relationship between contemporary society and the environment. As a prompt to spark a meditation on the fraught status quo, the exhibition features works by Alfredo Pirri and Marya Kazoun whose wide practice comes as a timely commentary. 

The inclusion of Long Winter (2024) by the Venice-based Lebanese-Canadian artist reflects the pressing nature of an ecological-human crisis which she renders through the delicate and haunting traces of residential and industrial buildings from different places. Resembling a frozen ghost town, the installation unravels as a diorama of a place in a parallel world. In a painstaking process, Marya Kazoun glued together broken glass pieces of various dimensions, petrifying them one by one with UV light. The impassive cityscape appears to hover in a perennial state of desolation, surrendering to its inevitable fate. Migration, displacement, natural disasters and social injustices have permanently left its imprint of desperation against a world in turmoil. Of poetic fragility, Long Winter thereby exposes the essence of a human condition in the face of history‘s caprices amidst shifting global dynamics. 

Image: Courtesy of Marya Kazoun