INTERVIEW WITH AL BORDE - EVENTS IN THE GREEK PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE

An Interview with Esteban Benavides of Al Borde, on the occasion of the installation “Dark Resources (Recursos Oscuros)” that Al Borde created for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, (part of the series “Towards a Manifesto for a New Architecture” / Anastasopoulos, Travlou). Al Borde’s work attempts to redefine the role of architecture itself, by looking for ways that it could address human needs without the intermediation of the economy in the form that we know it. Their installation visualizes the cost of their projects per square meter expressed in coins, as a comment on the fact that money is only one factor of architecture.

 

Al Borde began in 2007 in Ecuador. They give lectures, workshops and present their work in various countries around the world and have won many awards including the Schelling Architecture Prize, the Ecuador Cultural Recognition award (2012) and World Sustainable Architecture (2013). Candidates for the International Award for Young Architects Iakov Chernikov (2014) and the Mies Crown Hall-MCHAP (2016). They are part of the official selection of the Venice Biennale 2016.

 

Nicholas Anastasopoulos, PhD researcher, architect, lecturer, NTUA. Areas of research include the commons, degrowth, sustainability, complexity, alternative communities, and  P2P  urbanism. In 2014, he conducted research in Ecuador on sustainability, Buen Vivir, the commons and their impact on urban environments.

 

 

 

 

The installation “Dark Resources (Recursos Oscuros)” by the Ecuadorian collective Al Borde at this year’s Venice Biennale is a direct comment on the cost of construction of their projects in a demarcated with white tape square meter on the floor compared to the equivalent cost for a typical building in Venice. Most of the times the realization of their work depends on social involvement and labor by the recipients of their work, and the use of discarded or recycled materials.

 

In a period when the economy has collapsed and architecture is also going through a period of questioning its very role, while the needs for housing and recovery of empty buildings are greater than ever, it is necessary to look for different economic structures enabling us to meet human needs by bypassing a formal monetary economy, in the form at least that we knew it until today. The Al Borde group, consisting of four people in their thirties and forties, are experimenting precisely with this kind of tools and processes. I met Esteban, together with Pasqual and David, two years ago in a coffee shop in Quito, then at their office and a year later we met during a workshop in one of their projects.

 

On Friday June 10, we met again at the Greek pavilion for our scheduled interview one day prior to his participation in the Biennale’s Peripheries discussion. We talked about the team’s intention from the beginning to operate outside conventions set by the formal economy.

 

We referred to some examples of their projects to this day and their social and experimental nature such as the school Nueva Esperanza which was designed and built together with parents and children in a remote community on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Ecuador, made of cane and wood available locally. We also talked about their current job, which I happened to see a year ago, in the Atucucho community.

 

Atucucho was founded as an illegal settlement by about 200 people in 1988 on land belonging to the Ministry of Health. It is now a legalized neighborhood of about 17.000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Quito. Al Borde is working together with the community itself on producing a community and cultural center, made mostly with discarded material from a cement factory in the form of test cylinders and supported by the Banco Communitario (a local bank operating on the community’s local currency).

 

I always had the impression that their name means “border” or “boundary, threshold” and imagined that it involved a political, and an architectural reference. But Esteban gave me another dimension. Al Borde symbolizes a condition of an unstable equilibrium, from which one may fall at any moment. To literally be on “the edge”. Towards the end of our discussion I asked him how they cope. The answer once more verified their name: it is about the condition of living always on the edge.

 

This year’s participation of Greece entitled # ThisIsACo_op is characterized by a pavilion taken over by a friendly amphitheater conducive for all sorts of events and encounters, a band that runs as blackboard on the lower part of the walls and two large projection surfaces, placing communication and effective    information exchange in the center. 

 

I was thinking that consciously or unconsciously we made something missing here from our lives and that we are badly in need of…Let’s hope that this is a step to gradually bring it home.