“Tracing Transitions”, Exhibition of the Luxembourg Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2016

FORM SOCIETY took part in the Architecture Biennale 2016 in Venice. Together with architectural activist Claude Ballini and artist Serge Ecker, we curated and designed the exhibition “Tracing Transitions” for the Luxembourg Pavilion. Commissioned by LUCA (Luxembourg Center for Architecture), the exhibition was on display in the Ca‘ del Duca at the Canal Grande from May 28 to November 27, 2016.

Tracing Transitions addresses current housing issues in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, as well as aspects of a possible future transformation of the situation. Housing is a fundamental human need. In Luxembourg, the conditions for meeting this need have become increasingly unstable. Its geography and economic development, the competitive and high-priced real estate market, population growth and demographic change have made

Luxembourg a complex and conflicting area of tension. Tracing Transitions examines interventions aimed at gradually diffusing the current situation. These interventions present alternatives: they are options for the realization of housing solutions that stand in contrast to ownership or built-to-rent models; they offer different housing configurations as answers to demographic changes; they question traditional and known housing types; and they make use of Luxembourg’s greatest resource for the realization of housing – vast former industrial areas, remnants of Luxembourg’s past as an iron and coal nation. Tracing Transitions looks for indicators of possible change in the production and social sustainability of housing. It is primarily a story of processes, events and the consolidation of networks. In this way, architecture becomes part of activism. And Tracing Transitions is part of architectural communication – to communicate the challenges of producing the conditions for realizing the “good project.”