Amphibious: Living Between Water and Land in the Amazon

2021
ATELIER MARKO BRAJOVIC
17th INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Venice - Italy, 2021
Creative Director: Marko BrajovicProject Director: Bruno BezerraProject Designer: Guilherme GiantiniContent Production: Mayra ShinzatoGraphic Design: Barbara Helena MoraisGraphic Design: Lucas BioInstallation Set-up: Green SpinPhotography: Massimo Pistore3D printing: 3DMAKER
Support: Vento Leste
Temporary/Itinerary Art InstallationStatus: Built
Role: project design and supervision, modelling for 3D printing, final set-up assistance and PR representation

The project Amphibious: living between water and land in the Amazon was conceived based on the theme How will we live together? proposed by architect and scholar Hashim Sarkis, the curator of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and will be presented at the Central Pavilion (Giardini) from May 22nd to November 21st 2021.
The question proposed by the general curator of this year's Biennale edition is of great relevance and topicality for the moment we are living, offering reflections of existential nature on our human species, a theme that transcends the discipline of architecture and finally involves all areas and public.

“On the day we were invited to participate in the 17th Biennale di Venezia, our purpose was clear: answering to the curatorial general theme by presenting research and projects symbiotically integrated into the natural and cultural ecosystem of the region, on a border between water and land. The Amazon is the physical and metaphysical place where the future of life on earth is discussed and the objective is to bring light to the initiative and collaborations that present positive and possible ways of living together", comments Marko Brajovic, founder and creative director of Atelier Marko Brajovic.

CONCEPT
The Amazon basin is a liquid landscape where boundaries between land and water move constantly and dramatically, influencing the biotic and abiotic environment. Depending on a water annual tide, rivers and lakes change completely the landscape morphology, where humans and other species adapt to those changing conditions.
“From ancestral times, humans learned how to adapt to a transforming environment, using the energy, materials and information that flows through the system, between water and land. Regional architecture and agroecological practices manifest a highly efficient synergy with the rainfall seasons environment changing patterns. Great civilizations arose in those tight and dynamic boundaries, where millions of people lived in highly organized societies and still live lives integrated into an ever-changing Amazon. In the same way, numerous other species are organizing themselves in allied colonies and symbiotic relationships thereby creating resilient conditions for life. In both human and non-human cases, the survival strategy is the same: cooperation and interdependence”, explains Marko Brajovic.
The Amazon is a natural, high-tech laboratory of the future, the most advanced and complex ecosystem, from which we can learn with and apply functional, behavioral and structural knowledge to design future settlements in dynamic harmony with the Amazonian environment.

The contents presented at the exhibition are organized in nine tables displaying handmade and digital graphics, with a 3D model in the center of each one, forming an organic configuration in the room of the Central Pavilion (Giardini). The round tables refer to waterlily (Victoria Regia) plants, positioned as to allow free movement between each one, causing interrelations between the exposed projects in each one. The room’s thematic ambience is presented as a “scientific laboratory”, in which the drawings “float” in space and the projects’ translucent 3D printed models, thanks to the backlighting, evoke a showcase of "species" of organisms.

Videos installed on wall screens, with footage of floating plants, riverside communities, submerged forests and indigenous ceremonies, complete the contextual immersion of the exhibition. The expography’s intention, also designed by Atelier Marko Brajovic, proposes an experience of evolution of the common place of communication in the Amazon, presenting the contents in a futuristic vision of the “forest’s high technology” as an ancestral organic and cultural dimension of the Amazonian biome.

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