Login
Registered users
The Holy See Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2025, titled Opera Aperta, is “a construction site, an ongoing process, which everyone is invited to collaborate”, said Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. “Our wish is that this pavilion-parable may give concrete expression, in the field of architecture, to the prophetic intuitions contained in the encyclical Laudato si' and become an active workshop of human and community intelligence”.
The Holy See Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, which was unveiled at a conference held Wednesday, April 9, in the Vatican Press Office, will be open to visitors from May 10 to Nov. 23 in the spaces of the former Oratory of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in the Castello district.
The curatorship is entrusted to Marina Otero Verzier, curator and researcher, and Giovanna Zabotti, artistic director of Fondaco Italia and former curator of the Venice Pavilion, in collaboration with the design studios Tatiana Bilbao Estudio of Mexico City and MAIO Architects of Barcelona, both characterized by an ongoing commitment to responsible construction and collective care.
Opera Aperta will be an experimental laboratory, a social as well as physical space, aimed at promoting restoration and cultural exchange, proposing a living practice of repair and collective care, in a historical moment marked by ecological precariousness and accelerated consumption.
>>> Discover the Italian Pavilion, curated by Guendalina Salimei
During the seven months of the Biennale, alongside the contributions of the two architectural firms, the pavilion will also host the collective work of associations and living realities of Venice, with the aim of creating a project open to the entire community.
Among the initiatives that will be proposed to visitors, there are a series of restoration and redevelopment workshops coducted by the UIA - International University of Art, and a community kitchen managed by the NONSOLOVERDE cooperative. Inside the pavilion, in addition, the “Benedetto Marcello” Conservatory of Music will provide rehearsal rooms with availability of instruments, accessible on weekends.
