ASSEMBLY #9: ECOLOGIES OF BETTER LIVING
Austrian Pavilion
Giardini della Biennale
11 a.m.
Environment, Patrimony, and Mass Tourism.
Encounter with Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (Rome), Sarah Gainsforth (Rome), and Maurizio Veloccia (Assessor of Urban Planning, City of Rome)
2.00 p.m.
Curator’s guided tour through the pavilion
3.00 p.m. - 5.00 p.m.
OPEN ASSEMBLY
Guests: Michele Colucci (CNR - ISMed, Rome), Michele De Sanctis (Sapienza University, Rome), Forum Territoriale Parco delle energie with Centro di Documentazione Maria Baccante - Archivio Storico della Viscosa, CSOA eXSnia, and Lokomotiv (Rome), Sarah Gainsforth (Rome), Sergio Scalia (Assessor for Urban Planning, V Municipality, Rome) Lina Streeruwitz (Studio Vlay Streeruwitz, Vienna), Philip Ursprung (ETH Zürich), Alessandra Valentinelli (Rome), Maurizio Veloccia (Assessor for Urban Planning, City of Rome).
Planned and spontaneous re-naturalizations in urban environments are giving rise to unpredictable, emerging ecosystems. These are places where ecological dynamics are becoming negentropic — promoting biodiversity instead of reducing it, as is happening in most places today. Such ecosystems are becoming crucial in addressing climate change and global warming in cities. They function as new kinds of urban nature reserves, developing unpredictable ecological relationships right in the heart of urban areas. But how should humans interact with and inhabit these spaces without putting their ecological future at risk? These places are becoming increasingly attractive — for both residents and tourists. But how should they be visited or temporarily inhabited? How should urban development engage with them? Human behavior has always transformed the environment — but could the environment now begin to shape collective human behavior? And as former urban spaces revert to nature, how might their use become truly environmentally friendly? Land use has always shaped environments — but could environments now begin to shape land use?
Michele Colucci is a historian and senior researcher at the National Research Council – Institute of Studies on the Mediterranean. He is the director of the research project History of Mediterranean Migrations in the Contemporary Age. His work focuses on contemporary history and pays particular attention to migration, migration policies, labor, and social policies. He is the author of numerous scholarly publications and the recipient of several academic awards. From 2013 to 2016, he served as Scientific Director of the Naples-CNR Research Unit within the FIRB-MIUR project Mediterranean Sea Borders: What Permeability? Exchanges, Controls, Rejections (16th–21st Century).
Michele De Sanctis is a researcher in botany at the Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienza University of Rome. His research investigates how plant community composition and species diversity respond to environmental, historical, and anthropogenic factors. He has taken part in several international cooperation projects on nature conservation, both in Italy and across diverse biogeographical regions, including the Balkans, Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia, and Africa. In Italy and Europe, his work has contributed to the design and implementation of the Natura 2000 network under the EU Habitats Directive.
Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie, since its foundation, has been committed to protecting the abandoned industrial area and publicly advocating for the city to have a naturalistic-archaeological park on the former Snia Viscosa industrial site, where Lake Bullicante emerged in 1992: a unique ecosystem to be protected, which has arisen in the heart of a heavily urbanised neighbourhood. Through the monthly assembly, attended by residents, activists, researchers, artists and local administrators The Forum is the meeting point for the different social forces of the district and the city to manage and look after the entire Parco delle Energie.
CSOA eXSnia is a self-managed social center established in 1995 through the occupation of part of a former artificial silk factory. It was conceived as a permanent outpost to reclaim denied urban spaces and resist real estate speculation, promoting forms of social and collective expression outside of profit or delegation-based systems. The center has become a vital hub of self-management and cultural self-production, supporting experimental arts, migrant communities, and intergenerational encounters. Its initiatives range from folk dance gatherings and Italy’s first schools for migrants, to Epiphany and Carnival celebrations, and theater workshops involving dozens of artists and playwrights. During nearly 30 years of activity, CSOA eXSnia has supported political action on the local, national, and international levels in the fields of migration, the environment, public health, and independent cultural dissemination. It also pays special attention to childhood (with the LudOfficina Mompracem), sustainable mobility (with the Don Chisciotte bike kitchen), and food sovereignty (with the collective vegetable garden and the Solidarity Buyer Group).
Centro di Documentazione Maria Baccante – Archivio Storico della Viscosa
After occupying the former silk factory, activists began recovering and organizing long-abandoned materials, including machinery plans, technical drawings, and workers’ files. In 2012, the Soprintendenza Archivistica of Lazio recognized this collection as being of notable historical interest, leading to the foundation of the Archivio Storico della Viscosa. A few years later, it evolved into the Maria Baccante Documentation Center, which now houses additional archives. The center functions as a self-organized space for participatory research and the promotion of history and contemporary memory from a grassroots perspective.
Lokomotiv is a popular sports club that has been active since the late 1990s and was created by activists from the Ex SNIA Social Centre to meet the sporting needs of a working-class district – hence the name Lokomotiv. Formally established in 2015 as Lokomotiv Prenestino Sports Association, the club now offers fourteen different sports and includes nearly 300 athletes. Its mission is to make sports accessible to all, overcoming economic, social, and gender barriers while fostering a sense of community in a multicultural neighborhood. Respect, solidarity, inclusion, and fairness are the club’s founding values – reflected in its club colors, which are inspired by the flag of Kurdistan.
Sarah Gainsforth independent researcher, non-fiction writer and freelance journalist. Her work focuses on housing, tourism, gentrification, in the context of the social and environmental costs produced by capitalism. She is a contributor to Il Manifesto and Internazionale and the author of Airbnb Città Merce, Storie di resistenza alla gentrificazione digitale (Airbnb city product, stories of resistance to digital gentrification), Premio Napoli 2020 finalist; Oltre il turismo, Esiste un turismo sostenibile? (Beyond tourism. Is sustainable tourism possible?), Abitare Stanca, La casa: una storia politica (Housing fatigue, a political tale); Dopo la gentrificazione, un quartiere laboratorio dalla crisi economica all'abitare temporaneo (After gentrification, a neighborhood-laboratory, from the economic crisis to temporary living), L’Italia Senza casa, Politiche abitative per non morire di rendita (Homeless Italy, Housing policies for surving rent exctraction).
Lina Streeruwitz studied architecture in Vienna and Buenos Aires. In parallel with her practice as an architect, she has taught in Vienna at TU Wien and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, as well as at the University of Stuttgart, and she completed her dissertation entitled GRAS RASTER STAUB NICHTS. She has worked with Bernd Vlay since 2009 and they founded the office StudioVlayStreeruwitz together in 2017. One focus of their joint work is the development and implementation of urban master plans, in which they always interpret existing structures as a resource and a starting point for new possibilities. The planning of large-scale residential buildings in the subsidized and privately financed sectors is directly related to the question of sustainable neighborhood development. In addition to the intensive study of residential typologies, questions of openness and mixed use have become a central theme for the office, which it pursues in research, urban planning, and construction projects.
Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Head of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich. In 2023, he represented Switzerland together with Karin Sander at the Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition Neighbours. He studied art history in Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin, and earned his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin. Ursprung has taught at the University of Zurich, Columbia University (New York), Berlin University of the Arts, Cornell University, and TU Vienna. He is the editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (2002), co-editor of Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook (2022), and author of Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (2013). His most recent books include Joseph Beuys: Kunst, Kapital, Revolution (2021) and Architektur der Gegenwart (2025).
Alessandra Valentinelli is an urban planner and landscape historian who works as a consultant to public administrations in the areas of strategic environmental assessment, climate adaptation, and soil protection. She has lectured on these subjects at IUAV Venice, Sapienza University of Rome, and Milan Polytechnic. Her writing explores the intersections between land-use planning, landscape, and environmental protection, emphasizing their importance in safeguarding public assets.