The Venice Biennale for architecture this year has Kazuyo Sejima as its curator, who recently announced her curatorial intent of bringing back the real essence of architecture: space and material without trendy fluff. This leaves me thinking that no matter how hard architects try, architecture and space can never have the abstract power felt at the installation created by artist Teresa Margolles in the Mexican pavilion last year. In a few empty rooms, families of the victims of Mexican gang violence repetitively mobs a mixture of their blood and biological remains (collected from morgues) onto the floor over and over again, layers upon layers; yet everything stays pretty much invisible except for the mop and bucket. The layer of human remains, the smell of death and the sorrows of the families transcended architecture space and materiality in the most profound way, imbuing the space with a primal awareness of human destruction and extinction.
