Entitled “Resilient Communities” (“Comunità Resilienti”) and curated by Alessandro Melis, the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Architecture Exhibition Venice Biennale 2021, offers a reflection on the resilience mechanisms that some communities take to respond to the great global challenges, starting from those linked to climate change which is putting a strain on the sustainability of urban, productive, and agricultural systems.
The exhibition borrows the term “exaptation” – a mechanism of natural selection introduced by Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba in the field of biology, which indicates how organisms often opportunistically readjust structures already available for new and unprecedented functions. Commissioner Onofrio Cutaia, the Director-General at Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry and Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion, ‘Resilient Communities’ promotes architectural exaptation as a manifestation of diversity, variability, and redundancy, challenging deterministic aesthetic homogeneity in favor of the diversity of creative structures.
