Indonesia | 14th Architecture Biennale

Craftsmanship: material consciousness
Pavilion of Indonesia

The pavilion of Indonesia at the 14th Architecture Biennale, located at the Arsenale, is focused on the peculiar role that the Tukang (master craftsman) has in the Country’s building realization. In Indonesia, the craftsmanship (Ketukangan) is still a fundamental aspect of local architecture and the Tukang is a key figure in the process of construction, someone who has the capability to create a relationship between people and matter and that acts at the same time as a contractor, master builder, artisan, and architect.
The exhibition, simple yet very effective, is constituted of six semi-transparent screens, placed in a darkened room, on which different videos are projected, each depicting at the same time a building material: wood, stone, bricks, concrete, metal and bamboo, and the corresponding craftsmanship activity.

Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014
Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 is an invitation to the national pavilions to show, each in their own way, the process of the erasure of national characteristics in architecture in favor of the almost universal adoption of a single modern language and a single repertoire of typologies – a more complex process than we typically recognize, involving significant encounters between cultures, technical inventions, and hidden ways of remaining “national”.