US Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennale in Venice: Dimensions of Citizenship

In the “Dimensions of Citizenship” exhibition, the curators have commissioned the architects with examining how nationalities and national belongingness are defined, constructed, contested and expressed. Working from seven spatial dimensions – citizen, civitas, region, nation, globe, network and cosmos – the installations investigate themes such as belongingness, sovereignty and ecology.

The first dimension of the national is the citizen. With their project “Thrival Geographies”, Amanda Williams and Andres L. Hernandez have cooperated with artist Shani Crowe to look at the relationship between questions of race and identity, as well as private and public spaces in historical African-American communities. For the dimension of region, the SCAPE studio examines the extent to which landscape architecture can be a critical tool in shaping awareness of climate change.

The dimension of nation, which has been taken on by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, calls for a universal concept that goes beyond national borders. Their MEXUS project presents a transnational area of eight water divides between Mexico and the United States. Under the dimension of cosmos, the Design Earth studio visualizes human projections and expectations onto celestial territory. These projects present constructions and narratives in a time characterized by ecological and political instability.