Geopolitics in Miniature, Venice

Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen organized the symposium The Nordic Pavilion: Geopolitics in MiniatureConference, Venice 29–30 September 2022. The conference was sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and took place at IUAV´s Palazzo Badoer.

The Nordic Pavilion turns 60 this year, and it is 70 years since the establishment of the Nordic Council. Sverre Fehn’s masterpiece in the Venetian Giardini was conceived and built in a cold war climate, against the backdrop of friendships and animosities, power play and diplomacy. The detours and disappointments, the successes and failures of the Venice affair make a prism in miniature to understand the mindset and conflicting ambitions of the Nordic countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Recent geopolitical developments and the Nordic NATO debates bring a renewed topicality to the Nordic postwar cooperation in Venice.

Based on AHO professors Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen’s book Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives (Pax/Lars Müller, 2021), and generously supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oslo, the symposium The Nordic Pavilion: Geopolitics in Miniature opened with a reception in the pavilion with welcoming words by Martin Andestad from the Norwegian Embassy in Rome, Benno Albrecht, the dean of UIAV, Irene Lønne, the dean of AHO.

To contextualize their micro-historical account on the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion, and the extensive cast involved in its making, Lending and Langdalen brought together colleagues from across the world to illuminate Nordic, postwar geopolitics with an eye to present political debates. In the wonderful Tafuri room in UIAV’s Palazzo Badoer, Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen (AHO), Iver Neumann (Fridtjof Nansens institutt, Oslo), Léa-Catherine Szacka (University of Manchester), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University), Helena Mattson (KTH, Stockholm), Markus Lähteenmäki (University of Helsinki), Tom Avermaete (ETH Zürich), Antonello Alici (Università Politecnica, Ancona), Adrian Forty (Bartlett, London), and Dag Erik Elgin (artist, Oslo), discussed topics spanning from The Nordic states between the US and the USSR, The Geopolitics of Nature and The Biennale and the Nation, to Soviet in Postwar Venice and Nordic Geopolitics beyond Europe, shedding new light on a familiar period in European architecture.