Ornamento y Detritus
Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025
Spanish Pavilion
Remains, waste, discards, offcuts, rubble, debris, detritus, rubbish, RESIDUES. Scraps of our material activities are encapsulated in terminologies that reflect a lack of contextual value.
No waste is ever truly residual, but rather something that settles –linked to the Latin term sedere (to sit) – lingering somewhere, neglected, forgotten, contaminating and being contaminated. We manage this situation as though it were an externality, the price to pay for a civilisational model based on constant renewal, thus forging a fractured relationship with materiality in which we design so that enduring resources serve ephemeral functions. This pace is unsustainable and must be subjected to profound revision: after all, each material that becomes waste contains all the processes and energies that once made it useful – and in many cases, that investment can still be recouped. A potential medium-to-long-term strategy would be to create incentives that reframe each waste item as an opportunity to add value and extend its useful life, while imposing penalties for its undervaluation through downcycling processes. In the short term, however, the tactic should be to avoid incinerating waste to generate energy as an unquestionably good option, and certainly to avoid any accumulation in landfill sites.
pictures of Lucas Muñoz and Luis Diaz