catalonia in venice lets water speak for justice at biennale architettura 2025 parliament

the project curated institut ramon llullby, presents architecture as activism, a space for reflection and design on multiple scales. The post catalonia in venice lets water speak for justice at biennale architettura 2025 parliament appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

May 16, 2025 - 22:00

catalonia in venice lets water speak for justice at biennale architettura 2025 parliament

Institut Ramon Llull at Venice Biennale 2025

From the water canals of Venice and into the echo of a new kind of conversation—one not spoken, but pooled, and evaporated. For 2025, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia does more than display; it debates. At the center of this dialogue is ‘Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures,’ presented by Institut Ramon Llull and curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño. In times where the climate changes are increasingly recognized as a crisis of water, this ambitious project asks: What if water had a parliament? What if architecture didn’t just house life, but negotiated with it? Housed in the historic shipbuilding warehouses of Docks Cantieri Cucchini, the collateral exhibition unravels like a river, branching into installations, films, vocabularies, laboratories, and a global atlas. Catalonia brings to Venice not only water, but the voices it carries.

Institut Ramon Llull presents the project Catalonia in Venice_Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures, curated, designed and produced by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño | image © Flavio Coddou, all images courtesy of Institut Ramon Llull

catalonia’s ‘Water Parliaments’ on ecological dialogue

The Institut Ramon Llull—Catalonia’s cultural vanguard and international ambassador—has long championed bold intersections between art, language, and identity. As the commissioning body behind Catalonia in Venice, the institution continues its legacy of spotlighting visionary thinkers on the world’s most prestigious architectural stage. In 2025, the team composed of Eva Franch i Gilabert (Delta de l’Ebre, 1978), Mireia Luzárraga (Madrid, 1981), and Alejandro Muiño (Barcelona, 1982) were selected by a rotating jury of prominent architects and curators to represent Catalan culture. Their proposal stood out not simply for its aesthetics, but for its insistence that architecture must respond, radically and responsibly, to planetary conditions.

The curators, each with international accolades and academic posts from Columbia to Tokyo, draw on feminism, ecology, and speculative design to propose a paradigm where buildings don’t just reflect society but shape it toward fairness, survival, and shared futures.

(from left to right) Alejandro Muiño, Eva Franch i Gilabert, and Mireia Luzárraga | image © Flavio Coddou

A Parliament Made of Fog, Film, and Fabric

So what, exactly, is Water Parliaments? At its core, it’s an ecosystem, a hybrid, living exhibition that merges research, design, activism, and global participation. Anchored in the conviction that ‘all architecture is water architecture,’ the project positions water not just as a technical resource, but as a right, a storyteller, and a co-architect of environments. Drawing on the United Nations’ assertion that the climate crisis is fundamentally a water crisis, the project responds with multispecies collaboration and transversal thinking.

Rather than showcasing finished objects, it stages a parliament of ideas, drawing from workshops, community debates, and regional studies across Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, and linking them to planetary concerns—drought, extraction, pollution, and privatization. Through seven full-scale installations, an immersive film, a participatory atlas, and a newly published lexicon of hydrological language, the curators construct not just a space, but a platform. One that invites every visitor—whether farmer, architect, or flâneur—to sit at the table of tomorrow.

at the entrance, a short film presents the seven issues that frame the case studies of the exhibition | image © Flavio Coddou

As visitors step into the Docks Cantieri Cucchini, they enter a living metaphor. A suspended tensile membrane, hovering like a cloud above the old shipyard, sets the stage. Fog cycles intermittently wash the air in mist—an architectural embodiment of change, flow, and breath. The first space greets the audience with a cinematic collage, where interviewees from the Laboratories speak candidly about floods, water tables, global supply chains, and ancestral stewardship.

Then, like an unfolding river, the exhibition opens into a choreography of seven immersive Projective Architectures. Each is a tactile translation of an issue: “Data Fountains” visualize Barcelona’s water quality through DNA sequencing stations; “Sediment Saloon” stages a meditative protest for the Ebro Delta using suspended tanks and hydrosuction tools. In “Hydric Doors,” building codes and flood maps are etched into glass, interrogating Valencian urban planning. From speculative forests in the Pyrenees to flags mapping the journey of exported pears from Lleida to New Zealand, each piece demands both awe and accountability.

after the screening there’s a tensioned fabric membrane suspended within the building’s structure | image © Flavio Coddou

Long before any walls were erected or fabrics suspended, Water Parliaments began on the ground. Over six months, a series of workshops called Laboratories of Futures were held across Lleida, Tarragona, Girona, Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca. More than 100 participants—scientists, artists, activists, anthropologists, architects, and farmers—gathered in local institutions to map out their shared water conflicts. From analyzing aquifer depletion in the Balearics to sediment starvation in the Ebro Delta, these sessions were not theoretical; they were tactile, urgent, and site-specific. Each became a micro-forum of collective learning, speculation, and resistance.

The meetings were recorded, both audiovisually and through narrative memory, becoming the backbone of the Biennale’s installations. What emerged were not only case studies but projective scenarios: daring, place-based visions for coexistence. These laboratories rejected top-down design models in favor of participatory, horizontal dialogues, embracing a design ethos that is as collaborative as it is critical.

the project presents architecture as activism, a space for reflection and design on multiple scales | image © Flavio Coddou

If architecture is language, then this project needed a new dictionary. ‘100 Words for Water: A Vocabulary,’ co-published by Lars Müller and the Architects’ Association of Catalonia, is a publication-as-manifesto. Curated by Franch, Luzárraga, and Muiño, it collects over 100 terms—from “Hydrocommons” to “Liquid Violence”—offered by a global cohort of thinkers including Andrés Jaque, Beatriz Colomina, Timothy Morton, and Cooking Sections.

More than a glossary, the book is a tool for shifting consciousness, inviting readers to reframe water not as inert matter but as a legal subject, cultural memory, and multispecies collaborator. Its entries are philosophical, poetic, scientific—and deeply political. Illustrated and polyphonic, the book functions as both exhibition guide and standalone provocation, extending the reach of the Water Parliaments beyond the walls of Venice into classrooms, policy debates, and public imaginations.

Water Parliaments is an ecosystem, a hybrid, living exhibition that merges research, design, activism, and global participation | image © José Hevia

Perhaps the most forward-facing element of the project is also its most accessible. The ATLAS for Water Architectures is an open-access, ever-growing repository of global initiatives that rethink water through architecture, activism, and research. Accepting submissions across nine categories—from institutions and independent agents to tech innovations and educational platforms—the Atlas foregrounds environmental justice and local knowledge as engines of planetary design. Already populated by nine featured case studies, it aims to become a network of water parliaments worldwide—distributed, participatory, and transformative. By inviting the world to contribute, the curators invert the usual logic of the Biennale: this is not a stage for authorship, but a platform for assembly.

Water Parliaments doesn’t offer solutions; it offers scenarios, proposals, and possibilities. It doesn’t decorate space—it activates it. At a time when the climate discourse is dominated by apocalyptic abstraction or techno-utopianism, Institut Ramon Llull’s project stands out for its grounded radicalism. It connects soil and code, fog and law, protest and design. And most importantly, it understands architecture not just as form or function, but as forum—a place to debate, dream, and demand.

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inside, seven installations materialize in full-scale models and prototypes that promote urgent reflection, critical discussion and the active participation of communities, architects and policymakers | image © Flavio Coddou

image © Flavio Coddou