I was honored to be invited to contribute music from the Fermentophone project to the exhibition “The Other Side of the Hill” at the 2025 BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA.
At the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale, the unique interdisciplinary team of Beatriz Colomina (Princeton), Roberto Kolter (Harvard), Patricia Urquiola (Studio Urquiola – Spain), Geoffrey West (Santa Fe Institute), and Mark Wigley (Columbia) have fused microbiology and theoretical physics with architectural history, theory, and design to produce The Other Side of the Hill. This dramatic thought-provoking installation at the entrance to the Corderie in the Arsenale confronts visitors with the shocking unsustainable super-exponential rise of the global human population but also the imminent equally shocking population collapse in less than a generation as fertility rates have steadily fallen across the globe. The Other Side of the Hill provokes new ways of thinking about the kinds of city and shared life possible in a future beyond relentless growth. Bacteria, the experts in growth for more than four billion years, but also the experts in living collaboratively with limited resources, act as guides towards a more adaptive, trans-species, and regenerative future.
For the installation, Patricia Urquiola designs a massive sculptural hill in the shape of the human population curve since the first cities 5000 years ago. It is made from 1500 modular bricks created using Cimento®️, a composite material that incorporates hydraulic binders, mineral aggregates, recycled glass, spirulina, and organic elements sourced from the Venetian lagoon, including marsh reeds, shells, fishing nets, and algae filaments. This living material forms the massive ever-steeper hill while conveying the installation’s themes of interdependence, recycling, and the potential for regeneration.
When passing to the other side of the hill, our unknown future, visitors enter a grotto-like space inhabited by germinating mosses assisted by bacteria that also feels like a kind of laboratory where floating petri dishes present multimedia reflections on the behavior of microbial cities—biofilms—and how microbes adapt to environmental challenges. The project draws inspiration from the concept of trans-scalar, trans-species collaborative plasticity, highlighting how human architecture could evolve in response to future crises by learning from microbial systems that thrive through collaboration, adaptation, and innovation. The work of visual and sound artists, motion designers, and an agronomist is integral to the installation.
–eflux
