Something there is that doesn’t love a wall… (Notes on the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2018)

The article reviews two exhibitions presented at the Israeli and German pavilions at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale,where the 16th International Architecture Exhibition was themed and titled as FREESPACE.The Manifesto,written by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the chief curators of the Biennale, proclaimed, among other things, that FREESPACE provides its participants with «…freedom to imagine the free space of time and memory, binding past, present and future together, building on inherited cultural layers, weaving the archaic with the contemporary…» In accordance with the Manifesto, the curators of the Israeli exhibition named In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation attempted to deconstruct, in the historical and architectural perspective,the stages of interfaith struggle for holy sites in Israel and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. The German exhibition Unbuilding Walls was dedicated to the twenty-eighth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. One of its key exhibits was the visual installation Wall of Opinions, composed of video interviews with residents of various countries, including Israel, where demarcation lines (all kinds of walls, fences, barriers) still exist today, turning «free spaces» into exclusion zones. Both exhibitions convincingly showed the political and social problems that the modern society faces when attempting to create «free spaces» for informal interaction between diverse ethnic and social groups in different countries. Moreover, the exhibition of the Israeli pavilion clearly points at the hidden dangers of new demarcation barriers when the sides of interethnic and interconfessional conflicts fail to reach an agreement about the status of one or another place, while the curators from Germany, symbolically dismantling the global walls of misunderstanding, give us hope to overcome such problems.