Biennale Architettura 2023
URUGUAY PAVILION
18th International Architecture Exhibition
– La Biennale di Venezia
En ópera: escenarios futuros de una joven Ley Forestal
In Opera: Future Scenarios of a Young Forest Law
PRESS PREVIEW: 18 – 19 May 2023
OPENING: 18 May 2023 | 1.30pm RSVP*
Curators: MAPA+INST – Mauricio López, Matías Carballal,
Andrés Gobba, Luciano Andrades, Silvio Lagranha,
Sebastián Lambert – and Carlos Casacuberta
Commissioner: Facundo De Almeida
20.05 – 26.11.2023
Giardini della Biennale
@inst___inst___inst
Pavilion-of-Uruguay_credits MAPA+Inst
In Opera:
Future Scenarios of a Young Forest Law
Since the birth of its Forestry Law, Uruguay, “a country with four cows per capita”, has experienced unprecedented changes. For the first time, its exports from the forestry industry exceed those of meat, while its landscapes are being transformed.
“In Opera” is a story told by this young law through a peculiar multi-authored opera staged in the Uruguay Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The law looks in the mirror and sings to us in an attempt to understand what is going on around it and why it does not receive the same attention as other regulations. In the piece, it shares the stage with the spaces, territories and bodies around the wood in Uruguay, along with musical interventions by a new generation of Afro-Uruguayan artists that interrupt the lyrical narrative.
Thus, the Forestry Law is revealed as an active text that is part of a trans-scalar assemblage -legal, spatial, environmental and social- that can derive in the construction, symbolic and literal, of other multiple futures. When most of Uruguay’s abundant new forests end up being exported abroad as cellulose pulp, how can we imagine Uruguay as a laboratory for fairer and more inclusive wood futures?
To collectively seek answers, the opera is complemented by a publication that explores the multiple scales affected by the law based on an extensive series of interviews with forestry stakeholders; an overview of the present of timber construction in the country; and a series of parallel programming in Uruguay that will broaden a situated view into the future.
Photo: Matilde Campodónico
About the curators MAPA+INST and Carlos Casacuberta
MAPA
MAPA is a creative studio whose field of action is architecture. It is a practice focused on creating new material, digital, natural and cultural realities in a sensitive and disruptive way.
The studio carries out works and projects of diverse scales and complexities in various parts of the world. It develops explorations linked to prefabrication, construction in new wood technologies and landscape, through projects, works, prototypes, workshops, theoretical inquiries and exhibitions.
MAPA has active offices in Montevideo, Porto Alegre, Garzón, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Berlin. Their works have been recognized in several awards such as the Buenos Aires Biennial of Architecture, the Premio da Associação Paulista dos Críticos de Artes, Interior Design Magazine Best of the Year Award, Dezeen Award, the IX and X editions of the Iberoamerican Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, and the Mies Crown Hall Americas
Prize of the IIT College of Architecture, in addition to having been winners of several architectural competitions.
MAPA has participated in conferences at universities and cultural institutions in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Finland and has been published in TIME Magazine, Financial Times, Wallpaper*, Dwell, Interior Design, Azure, Wired, Elle, Arquitectura Viva, Casa Vogue, and by the publishing houses Taschen, Thames & Hudson, Gestalten and Arquine, among others.
INST
INST is a dissemination of the cultural dimension of architecture initiative. It is a space for trans disciplinary reflection and experimentation with new media and forms of communication.
INST carries out research, exhibitions and publications, among other activities, in collaboration with various architectural and cultural references.
INST is a project of the creative studio MAPA.
Carlos Casacuberta (Montevideo, 1964) is a musician, performer, composer and producer.
He is a member of the Uruguayan hip-hop and alternative rock band called Peyote Asesino, with whom he has released the albums El Peyote Asesino (1995), Terraja (1998) and Serial (2021). The latter won the Graffiti 2022 award for best hip-hop album, as well as band of the year. As a solo artist he has released the albums :carlos (2006) and Naturaleza (2013).
He has worked as artistic producer on the albums Frontera (1999), Sea (2001) and Eco (2003) by Jorge Drexler, as well as Soy sola (2006) by Ana Prada and Todos estos cables rojos (2007) by La hermana menor. He has also scored music for visual arts installations and documentary films.
He holds a degree in economics. As a university researcher he has published papers in peer-reviewed journals on the economics of art and culture, made presentations at conferences and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the subject.
Pavilion-of-Uruguay_Credits MAPA+Inst

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