On May 22nd 2021, from 10:00 to 19:00, the Unfolding Pavilion will open its doors to the public. Now in its third edition, the Unfolding Pavilion will pop-up on the occasion of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia, inside of the belly of an old mercantile sailboat - a trabaccolo - moored at Punta della Dogana. Now managed by a non-profit organization, the trabaccolo once belonged to Countess Luisa Albertina di Tesserata: an eccentric art collector who in the 1970s commissioned the construction, on a small island of the Venetian archipelago she owned, of an almost exact replica of an unrealised project by John Hejduk: the House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate.
The curators of the Unfolding Pavilion came to know about the house by pure chance, and decided to organise an exhibition inside of its spaces. An agreement was made with the current owners of the island, who were about to demolish the house in order to build a luxury glamping facility in its stead: the house could be temporarily occupied for artistic purposes, but no images of the event were to be published before the demolition took place. It is so that, in the summer of 2020, twelve architects and scholars were invited to spend one week of residency locked inside the replica of John Hejduk’s house. One per room. Each room equipped with only one piece of furniture, which they couldn't choose. The outcome of the one-week residency were twelve site-specific works dealing with issues of privacy, domesticity and isolation.
Unfortunately, the house was demolished in December 2020.
