Photo © 2016 Laurian Ghinitoiu. Courtesy of Pierre Bélanger.
by Pierre Bélanger, Landscape Architect & Urbanist, ASLA, CSLA, SBA
The Canadian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale is the first ever national pavilion curated by a landscape architect. It is also the first pavilion to be located outside in the Giardini during its 40-year history, since the beginning of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1975.
The project explores the systems, spaces and scales of Canada as a global resource empire under the banner of the theme EXTRACTION. The project calls attention to both the territories of extraction that cities rely upon and the histories of colonization in these territories. In other words, the project is entirely about land, law and territory. Photo © 2016 Nils Koenning. Courtesy of Pierre Bélanger.
The Canadian exhibition itself entails the planting of survey stake?the preeminent legal and technological instrument to mark territory and map?at the intersection of former and future empires in the Giardini of the Biennale: UK, France and Canada. Facing the British Pavilion, visitors are invited to kneel down and look through a keyhole in the survey stake to experience a second component of the project: a film of the territories of extraction across 800 years with 800 images, from 2015 to 1215, the birth of the British Magna Carta.
In the foreground of a blockade placed in front of the Canadian Pavilion, a wall filled with gold ore has been erecte...