The largest contemporary art festival in Asia, The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is held once every two years, in abandoned factories and warehouses repurposed as galleries and cafes, in Fort Kochi-Mattancherry in Kerala, South India. Every biennale, a pavilion is constructed to host performance and cinematic art at Cabral Yard, a one acre campus full of large canopied trees in the heart of Fort Kochi. This year, the curatorial brief envisioned a more intensive and inclusive programmatic use, of both the structure and the campus. This included workshops, lectures, social performances, conferences and book launches.
Designed by New Delhi based Anagram Architects, the architectural notion of a pavilion is that of an island: of respite, reinvigoration, contemplation, conversation and of transience. Unlike the other Fort Kochi Biennale venues, Cabral Yard carries no architectural vestiges of its past. It follows a cycle of natural rejuvenation during its dormancy between Biennales—a venue for art, as a process, an event or an incident with people. In order to explore the curatorial vision for KMB2018, we deconstruct “the pavilion within the yard.” Unpacking its architecture and programme to occupy the whole one acre site, the entire Cabral Yard is activated to perform as a engaging island-hub for art with people. The design—references the Koothaambalam, a traditional Kerala temple adjunct used for ritual performances, similarly modulating plinth, trellis and canopy. However, it explores the possibility of diffusing its opacity and weight while infusing it with light and accessibility. By making Cabral Yard an open people’s pavilion, the design counter argues traditional exclusivities associated with performative spaces through openness, transparency, lightness, temporariness and accessibility.The design also seeks transience through lightness. The structures are designed to sit “lightly” on the site. Built in a record time of two months, the pavilion is designed to completely dismantle into components salvageable for reuse, leaving the site largely unmarked, to allow for its rewilding over the coming two years.
Monolithic buildings induce distance from the natural and the social. The pavilion is deconstructed to reveal through its porosities, programmatic flexibilities and skeletality, the (un)making of a monolith. The intent is to widen experiences of architectural coalescence, both material and programmatic. Walls and ground fluidly morph and, similarly, canopy and foliage merge to create opportunities for spontaneous and social spectacles, encounters and conversations.
