shared grounds british pavilion 2025

The exhibition journey begins with a single, spot-lit demolition stool, highlighting how mundane materials of demolition can be elevated into something more. Standing at the entran ce to the pavilion, this terrazzo ‘jewel’ is at once beautiful and ambiguous, its provenance - for the moment - unclear.

The Arrival space then leads into a corridor built using a timber-framed sequence of ribs that echo the shape of the mould in which the stool is formed. A black elastic fabric is stretched across the timber frame to create a clear tunnel passage. This darkened tunnel begins the sensory experience of the pavilion: immersive sound installations evoke the site-specific aural landscapes in which the stools were made.

Inspired by the hallowed stool rooms of West African kingdoms, in which the traditional stools of royal lineages are ceremonially stored, this room displays a series stools produced over the course of the Shared Grounds exchange. Each stool is product of place: they each will incorporate the site-specific materials of our four workshop sites in Snowdonia, The Highlands near Inverness, Nairobi and Lamu. They are also the result of exchange, in which the diverse expertise of the team, as well as local experts in slate or salvage or ground excavation, are materialised through the reuse of demolition materials and architectural leftovers, highlighting the richness of their origin. Each stool will be geotagged, allowing visitors to understand its origins and the transformations which produced it. The walls of the Stool Room will feature audio-visual installations, highlighting human-landscape-architecture engagements at each site.

As well as beautiful, finished stools that symbolise the unique materials and practices of different sites, we anticipate that the workshops will generate an element of material failure – constituents that don’t work, stools that don’t hold together – and these will be included and explored as a means of highlighting the unruliness of architectural interventions, and the recognition that built practice, however sustainable, can never be perfectly circular but must work with the realities on site.

The sensory journey continues through a timber-frame ribbed walkway with inset shelves that encourages tactile engagements with architectural remnants. The ribbed frame is built using reclaimed timber sourced from the Bienale Arte: The 60th International Art Exhibition 2024. The walkway will be lined with small ‘touch boxes’, enabling visitors to touch and feel the materials which go into the demolition stool. This echoes on site practices; the quality of materials and understanding of their properties is often understood through touch, when builders and architects run sand through their fingers or feel the surface of bricks and concrete.

This interactive tactility also supports access for visitors with differing visual capacities as well as others who learn by touch.

Underpinning Shared Grounds is a series of exchanges, movements and journeys in which materials, knowledge and ourselves move and are transformed.

Shared Grounds actively seeks to share expertise across the UK and Kenya, and beyond formal classifications, highlighting the knowledge of those who work closely with materials on the ground. Members of Wajukuu are experienced in using rubble, building waste and foundation excavations from elsewhere in Nairobi to strengthen the riverbanks and raise up the footprint of their Mukuru homes and reduce flood risk. Craftspeople in Snowdonia have deep knowledge of the properties of slate, using its remnants for external walling, roof tiles and insulation infill. Meanwhile, architectural waste often contains materials sourced from all over the world, materialising the global value chains of the sector, whilst the stools themselves have travelled to Venice from Snowdonia, Inverness, Lamu and Nairobi. Using mapping techniques and data visualisations, we trace these diverse transformations to highlight the material, knowledge and geographical journeys behind the stools.

The blue shipping drums in which the stools are formed are included here as a sculptural installation, symbolising the transformational journey of waste into a substance of value. Audio installations will juxtapose different forms of knowledge about architectural waste and material value, including excerpts from interviews with a demolition engineer and a Mukuru resident using rubble for riverbank reclamation.

This room will highlight the forms of co-production that have taken shape across the project, and which will continue through the course of the Pavilion’s installation. We hope that this room of the pavilion can gradually take shape over the course of the biennale, filling with visitor-made stools made in the workshop space. These stools can be used for visitor seating, creating a space for reflection and discussion.

Shared Grounds is intended to be an open-ended conversation, a journey in which visitors can participate, learn and share their own expertise. We don’t want to pre-empt the conclusions and are open to refining the concept in collaboration in order to best serve the curatorial proposal and audience experience.

A Venice Fellowship co-production space: At the heart of the pavilion will be an active workshop area, in which visitors can engage in material experimentations for themselves. We intend that the outcome of our contribution is not only display but the creation of new objects through practice. Visitors will be able to sign up for one of six pre-scheduled stool making workshops over the course of the biennale, to be led by members of the project team. The practical participation will be supported by the Venice Fellows, who will be provided with appropriate training. This will be accompanied by talks that explore the pavilion’s themes, enhancing opportunities for knowledge exchange.

Throughout the exhibition, the make-space will be open for smaller scale drop-in activities, so that every visitor has a chance to engage with the materials. The walls of the room will be lined with an iteration of A Small Studio’s ‘sustainable material library’ showcasing how surface tiles can be created through binding recycled material with PLA. In this room, the material library will be created by making surface materials (tiles) re-purposing the leftover material from the Biennale Arte: The 60th International Art Exhibition 2024. In doing so, we connect the finished tile back to the country’s 2024 pavilion. These surface materials can be made in quick 15-30min workshops open to audience of all ages.