Program

3.30 p.m.
Curator´s guided tour through the pavilion

4.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
OPEN ASSEMBLY

Guests: Andre Krammer (TU Vienna), Nicola Ussardi, Ca’Rapace (Venice), Katharina Weinberger-Lootsma (Linz)

When it comes to a future BETTER LIVING, questions of community will be essential. How do we want to live, work, and love together in the future? A workshop with architecture students from the University of Art and Design Linz is dedicated to questions about the history and the future of community. Students and interested visitors to the pavilion join invited guests to discuss the longing for community as an opportunity for both bottom-up and top-down strategies. If self-organization and activism are indispensable for creating community, it is imperative to ask how these can be initiated and what architecture is necessary for this process. Who will need what kind of community in the future? What formal or informal processes have to be set in motion? And what does community even mean in a city like Venice, Rome, Vienna – or in any other city?

Katharina Weinberger-Lootsma is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Architecture at the University of Art and Design Linz. From 2017 to 2022, she headed the off-space project “kulturtankstelle,” a cooperation between the OK (Offenes Kulturhaus) and the University of Art and Design Linz. She is also a curator and cultural manager. From 2004 to 2017, she was curator of the art collection of the Tiroler Sparkasse, and, from 2003 to 2005, she was involved in the international traveling exhibition “austria west.” In 2016, she co-curated the Montenegrin pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. In 2021, she curated the international project “NOW,” which is part of the series “Stories of Critical Change” (2020-2024).

Andre Krammer studied architecture at TU Wien and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He subsequently worked in various architecture offices and has been a registered architect since 2009. Since then, he has been engaged in projects across practice (architecture, urban planning, and urban design), theory (research), and teaching (TU Wien). Andre Krammer is a long-time editor of dérive – Magazine for Urban Research. He completed his doctoral thesis “Das Wilde Wien” on the history of informal urbanization in the city at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at TU Wien in 2025. His current work focuses on the interplay between formal and informal processes of urban production.

Nicola Ussardi is a Venetian activist and the co-founder of A.S.C. (Assemble Sociale per la Casa). Since becoming the spokesperson of A.S.C. in 1999, he has been facing and fighting the problem of abandoned sites in Venice and working to combat depopulation. He participated in protests in Genoa during the G8 meeting in 2001, and has also been active in the movement “comitato NO GRANDI NAVI” in Venice since 2012. As a sportsman who has always sought to connect social issues with local sporting needs, he founded “A.S.D. pallacanestro Crabs Venezia,” a basketball club that speaks to the city through the practice of sports, in 2014. He was a candidate in the municipal elections in 2020 with the list “Tutta La Città Insieme.” In 2021, he opened “Cà Rapace,” which is formally the site of the Crabs Club but actually an open space for the community of the quarter.

11 a.m.
Environment, Patrimony and Mass Tourism.
Encounter with Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie (Rome) and Sarah Gainsforth (Rome)  

2.30 p.m.
Curator's guided tour through the pavilion 

3.30 p.m. - 5.30 p.m.
OPEN ASSEMBLY

Guests: Forum Territoriale Parco delle energie (Rome), Sarah Gainsforth (Rome), Lina Streeruwitz (Studio VlayStreeruwitz, Vienna), Maurizio Veloccia (Assessor of Urban Planning, 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?

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.

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.

11 a.m. 

Visit to Isola di Sant'Andrea together with Forum Territoriale Parco delle Energie
hosted by Microclima

Microclima was founded in 2011 in Venice as a research-driven program focused on nature, cultural heritage, and the public sphere. It is based in the Serra dei Giardini, a greenhouse built in 1894 for the Biennale to preserve exotic plants from the first International Art Exhibitions. In addition to various other activities, Microclima aims to activate part of the Island of Sant'Andrea as an independent, non-commercial space for architecture and artistic creation and to integrate it into the cultural life of Venice. 

Meeting point: TBC

2.30 p.m. 
Guided tour through the pavilion

Symposium
“get involved VII – patternlanguage” - to act and impact in space for better living

International symposium of architectural and built environment education for young people. get involved VII is dedicated this time to the development of a non-verbal, internationally understandable spatial sign language and the possibilities of sharing this with young people.

For more information and to sign in please visit https://www.bink.at/en/get-involved-vii-patternlanguage/

3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
FINAL ASSEMBLY

Guests: Elke Krasny (Vienna), Verena von Beckerath (Berlin), Tim Heide (Berlin)