Introduction by curators

To celebrate an unconventional dialogue between Italy and New Zealand, on the 15th of July 2021, the Italian Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale hosts Weaving, a symposium which welcomes contributions from the two countries creating an unprecedented bridge between them. The symposium was composed by the intertwining of a multifarious set of presentations, readings, interviews, sound and visual performance. Far from a comparative report between the two countries, and to contrast the ephemeral and superficial modes of exchange we are being accustomed to by a distorted use of digital means – and by the increasingly pervasive instrumentalisation of knowledge – Weaving adopts a twofold strategy: a selected collection of 11 original short stories which play with the idea of antipodal counterparts and heuristic Doppelg ngers. Giving voice to local excellences from architectural, artistic, urban and cultural studies, all contributors were asked to weave their narratives around a trigger: a drawing, an image, an artefact or any other mode of representation as the conveyor of ideas, or something that is able to circulate thoughts even between antipodal contexts, realms and zones of imagination. The exchange that occurred during the symposium was grounded on these tangible roots. That’s why we – the curators – felt comfortable in using the metaphor of weaving to enhance the idea of this trans-hemispheric dialogue. The title, in fact, plays with the two levels of the term: the material, related to the craftsmanship and artisanal knowledge of both countries, and the metaphorical one, related to the dialectic intertwining between the two hemispheres.