U.S. Pavilion at Biennale Architettura 2018 Announces Details of DS+R’s Installation, "In Plain Sight"

The U.S. Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and The University of Chicago (UChicago), today announced new details about the exhibition Dimensions of Citizenship, including DS+R's installation, In Plain Sight. The exhibition's curators have commissioned seven architecture practices to explore how citizenship may be defined, constructed, enacted, contested, or expressed in the built environment at seven different spatial scales. Expanding from the body and city to the network and the heavens, the seven installations raise questions about issues including belonging, sovereignty, and ecology.

In Plain Sight, a collaboration among Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, and Robert Gerard Pietrusko, with Columbia Center for Spatial Research, explores the spatial scale of the Globe. The work uses data drawn from images created by the Soumi National Polar Partnership satellite to visualize where people live on Earth. When we zoom out to the scale of the globe, the primacy of the individual citizen drops away and is replaced with data: electricity, trade routes, migratory shifts, and the flow of capital, goods, and people. Two contrasting NASA images of the Earth taken at 1:30 pm and 1:30 am show us the gaps in the network: the places with many people and lights, and those with bright lights and no people. This information maps out a political geography of belonging and exclusion.

Curators Niall Atkinson, Associate Professor of Architectural History at UChicago; Ann Lui, Assistant Professor at SAIC; Mimi Zeiger, an independent critic, editor, curator, and educator; and associate curator Iker Gil, Lecturer at SAIC, said: "Whether we think about it or not, we all occupy different, overlapping categories of space at the same time, from the level of the neighborhood, to the nation, to the planet as a whole. The deeply thoughtful and remarkably inventive teams that have created the projects in Dimensions of Citizenship have made lasting contributions toward understanding the potential meanings of citizenship at these difficult scales, each of which can involve varying legal, political, economic and social issues. In mapping out these territories, the installations make is clear that the stakes of citizenship will be exceedingly high in the years to come."

For more information on Dimensions of Citizenship, please visit their website