Curated by a team of Momoyo Kaijima, with Laurent Stalder and Yu Iseki, Architectural Ethnography, Japanese Pavillion’s exhibition at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale is an extension of the project which Kaijima has been working on since the late 1990s. Through fieldwork and observations, Kaijima has been compiling people’s life and the reality of cities in a form of guidebook using architectural drawings as references. Capturing the realness of cities with keen and humorous point of view, the project questioned the nature of architecture from the perspective of its users and received a strong response in and outside of the country. Since then, in the last twenty years when our society made a remarkable change with the advance of informatization and globalization, a similar projects that followed her approach arose spontaneously across the world. By collecting, showcasing works and architectural drawings around the world, whether influenced by her project or naturally occurred, and looking over them as “Architectual Ethnography”,the exhibition aims to develop and deepen the discussion about life and architecture, the role of architecture: our society in the future.
Photo © Andrea Sarti/CAST1466, Courtesy of the Japan Foundation