Robert Wilson is a writer, editor and architect, previously the exhibition curator at the RIBA and one of the founding editors of uncube magazine. The Oslo Architecture Triennale has established itself as a rich event of international dimensions β and international ambitions. The Triennale is entitled "After Belonging". It examines what it might mean to be at home in a world that is changing at an accelerating pace. Robert Wilson visited the main events of the Triennale.
For AirBnB β with all it symbolises technologically, socially and anthropologically β seems to stalk this Triennale, appearing as a direct referent, inspiration and player in several of the projects shown. These transfers bring greater accessibility to ever-new commodities and further geographies. Such richly variant veins of contemporary reference β from the technological to the geo-political β appeared to underline what the curatorial team at the opening press conference said was their interest in dealing with architecture as a subject for newspaper front pages, not just for the architectural press: a desire for finding contemporary relevance.
And as might have been expected, given that two of them are currently PhD candidates at Princeton, by the end of the opening press conference their joint explanation just served to make the focus and intent behind the Triennale more theoretically diffuse than before. It had all seemed so simple to start with. But with the zippy title graphics, littered with random international accents jumping around in differing combinations above and below the letters β graphics apparently inspired by the emails one used to get advertising Viagra and designed to get through Spam filters β this promised to be a Triennale curated with a fresh eye and a deftness of touch.
The title After Belonging seems a catchily straightforward, if inevitably glib, frame for the show. The latter is an off-site installation by Jonathan Stael, which opens in November β its full title The New World Embassy: Rojava , designed as a stateless embassy for the Kurdish communities of the autonymous region of Rojava in northern Syria. It randomly mixes up projects from both exhibitions, in between essays, its layout complicating rather than helping to explain the curatorial structure.
The exhibition design is striking: with graphics and elements of the displays dropping down from the ceiling. That said, there is some fascinating content β although often more documentarily presented than analysed. A Wunderkammer of research β although, as with the Renaissance version, all somewhat randomly categorised and displayed.
