Challenging relationality and participation. The Austrian pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

This article offers important practical insights for policy-makers, cultural managers, and urban governance practitioners. It moves beyond theoretical critique to highlight how non-convergent relationships between powerful organizations, public authorities, and civic actors can transform potential goods into contested and rival resources. For professionals working in fragile urban contexts, the study provides a roadmap to understanding the governance pitfalls of large-scale institutions. Most importantly, the authors identify the regulatory design of concessions as a primary site of institutional friction. By demonstrating how standard concession models can block grassroots participation, the findings call for a shift toward context-sensitive regulatory frameworks that transcend New Public Management constraints. This research serves as a catalyst for reforming concessionary models and institutional arrangements, advocating for governance structures that are inherently dialogic and capable of supporting the 'urban commons' rather than merely managing cultural assets.This article investigates the enactment of relationality within the governance of global cultural and heritage contexts, using the Venice Biennale as a critical lens. While the relational public management literature emphasizes participation as a normative ideal, empirical evidence on its implementation within large-scale cultural events remains scarce. This study addresses this gap by analysing the Austrian Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale. Through a qualitative reconstruction of its conception, negotiation, and implementation, the research explores how participatory ambitions are mediated, and often curtailed, by institutional dynamics. The findings identify a state of 'problematic relationality', where genuine engagement is stifled by power asymmetries and systemic rigidity. By bridging relationality, participation, and the commons, the article demonstrates how entrenched New Public Management logics actively hinder collaborative governance. It contributes by providing a critique of how relational ambitions clash with traditional governance structures, calling for a radical rethinking of institutional frameworks in cultural production.