Who we are

Rebiennale is a joint, collaborative platform created by a network of venetian citizens, students, architects, artists and political activists to share methods, procedures, skills and know-how in the field of self-building and to describe what the project of architecture can’t illustrate and that the establishment hard put to realize:  the arise from below of a living as practice of making a common.

The project was born in the occasion of the 11.th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice thanks to the synergy between curators and architects,  participating in the Biennale with the exhibits Experimental Architecture (Padiglione Italia, Giardini) and L’italia cerca casa (Padiglione Italiano, Arsenale),  with collectives and associative bodies active in the city of Venice and beyond in the experimentation of auto-recover and self-building as innovating solutions for housing emergency.

Our work from the very beginning focused on the enormous amount of waists produced by the Biennale Exhibit and the innovative project we set in such contest had the aim to reuse scrap materials for a shared project of urban regeneration.

 This key concept has been crucial for the development of the firsts workshops in collaboration with the University of Architecture of Venice IUAV: together with students and professors, we started to study and examine the life cycle of a variety pavilions till the point of succeeding on one hand in compiling their Life Cycle Assessment and on the other hand to provide  useful tools for the comprehension and solution of the critical issues encountered.

From 2008 we developed several workshops on pavilion disassembly and self-building that involved and enstrenghted collaborations with professionals and international institutions such as Citè di Parigi (partnership developed during the european application on sustainable architecture Gaudi), British Council (Art and Architecture) Architecture Foundation of London ( in that occasion Rebiennale is the case-study during a research project on the possible second life of materials of Olimpic Games 2012), the Roma 3 University, 2012 Architecten,  Stalker Osservatorio NomadeExyzt  and many others.

Especially thanks to the possibility offered by artists and curators sharing their installations, all this cooperations gave us on one hand the chance to deepen the materic issue and to open the way for new strategies to gain life cycles more and more susteinables, and on the other hand the opportunity to link with local communities in terms of active networking for second life projects of the scrap materials.

You can find more infos here: the Call for Second Life

Share this Post