Curatorial statement:

Luanda, Encyclopedic City

The Encyclopedic Palace has been given an impossible task: no building can contain a universal multiplicity of spaces, possibilities, and objects. When a building tends towards the encyclopedic, it becomes a city. The city includes multiple conditions in the coherence of form—even though this is an urban, conflict-ridden form. Luanda is the privileged research site of the Republic of Angola Pavilion, which continues the curatorial line adumbrated by Beyond Entropy at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. The complexity of Angola’s capital, Luanda, derives from the presence of unpredictable spaces and the coexistence of irreconcilable programs: city and country, infrastructure and habitations, garbage tips and public spaces. Luanda is an encyclopedic city. How can the knowledge of a city be organized through the taxonomy of its spaces? Central to the pavilion is a reflection on the ways in which images are used to give form to the way the city is experienced. Edson Chagas’s Found not Taken series concentrates on the systematic cataloguing of abandoned objects that are repositioned within an urban context to create new relationships between the objects and their context, form and its codification. What relationship is created between spaces and their images? What role are imagination and creativity allowed to play in this urban taxonomy? In the ambiguity of a vision which uncovers and nonetheless reconstructs, what is delineated is an urban cartography mixing documentary-like precision and poetic reconstruction: a new way of observing the encyclopedic wealth of spaces around us and, perhaps, a new way of inhabiting these spaces.

Paula Nascimento
Stefano Rabolli Pansera