BATHING BEAUTY
Every Australian’s backyard dream becomes a fascinating inclusion at this year’s Venice Biennale of architecture
THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION sits like a black monolith overlooking the Giardini canal in Venice’s Biennale Gardens. Designed by Melbourne architects Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), it replaces the tent-like, white and ‘temporary’ structure devised by Philip Cox in 1988, a pylon-and-drape shape that has since been rolled out everywhere from Darling Harbour to Uluru. The only national pavilion to be built in Venice this century, DCM’s black box sits among 20th-century bijoux by the likes of Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto. Its only ‘Australian-ness’ is its very evident otherness. Inside, accessed via ramp and terrace, sits an almost perfectly formed white box. The idea is to intrigue and
entice on the outside, reveal and elaborate inside. It’s like a gigantic, modernist Russian doll. “Inside, almost anything goes,” says John Denton, a DCM founding partner. “We intended that artists, curators and other creative thinkers should be able to appropriate the space to their own ends.” Inaugurating the pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, Sydney artist Fiona Hall painted the white cube black to display her mock-Gothic totemic creations. At this year’s Venice Biennale, curators Michelle Tabet, Isabelle Toland and Amelia Holliday are installing a pool. That’s right — a swimming pool. This asymmetric pentagon of glittering water will anchor an installation dedicated to that most idiomatic of childhood arenas. But more than an homage, The Pool is a multisensory invocation of formative experience, a tactile, olfactory and visual conjuring of our national essence. Sydney-based scent artist Elise Pioch of Maison Balzac created two aromas to infuse the space: Strangeness, to evoke the fresh, heady eucalyptus and mint one detects on arriving in Australia; and L’Obscurité, a smoky, earthy counterbalance base note. Theatrical lighting designers Nick Schlieper and Sian James-Holland will use the water as a magic lantern, bathing the space in liquid light. A sound installation will feature a crack team of Australian storytellers — including swimmer Ian Thorpe, Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins and author Christos Tsiolkas — narrating their individual experiences of the collective unconscious, which can be heard moving around the space through speakers. “We asked this highly diverse group to tell us about their experience of the pool,” says Michelle Tabet. “It’s an architecture many of us are familiar with, but which speak to us so differently.” The Pool is both architecture and artefact, the simple incarnation of our complex national psyche. The Venice Biennale of Architecture runs until 27 November; visit labiennale.org.