Biennale Internazionale Donna

Curated by Riccardo Rizzetto

The fifth edition of the Biennale Internazionale Donna takes shape in today's nostalgic present; an enduring moment in which the past is frequently mobilised as an image to return to. Gathering female artists from across the world, the exhibition brought together a range of artistic and research practices collectively considering the potential of womanhood not merely as a descriptive category, but as a critical tool.

Reverberations is a group exhibition showcasing the work of the MA Research Architecture 2025 cohort. The exhibition gathers projects that act as sensors for different conditions: from slow violence to sudden rupture, ancestral memory to digital surveillance, collapse to refusal. Together, they form a constellation that reverberates across time and space, forging fragile yet urgent connections between struggles and realities. Throughout the week, Reverberations unfolded through workshops, screenings, and radio activations, proposing multiple ways of navigating these worlds. Reverberations insists that things can be otherwise.

As part of the public programme for Reverberations, the graduating MA exhibition from the Centre for Research Architecture, MA candidate and architectural researcher Laura Russell was joined by multidisciplinary artist Parham Ghalamdar for a joint film screening and discussion. Together, Parham and Laura invited their audience to consider how defacement and decay can operate as artistic and activist tactics of dissent against the precarious impossibility of contemporary image-making.

How to give back a stolen glance probes the inadequacies of repatriation, framed by the impossibility of its central question: How do we return a glance that has been stolen? Implicit in the act of restitution (the return of a stolen object) is the assumption that the object alone was taken. Such material gestures fail to address the far more violent, complex, and toxic relations binding the Global North and Global South. Performed as strategies of distraction and deferral, restitution risks re-fetishising the very objects it claims to liberate.

The video depicts gloved hands rearranging cut-out images of looted artefacts hoarded within the British Museum’s collection (including the Benin Bronzes, Parthenon Marbles, and Maqdala Cross) against a green-screen backdrop. This staging parodies the processes of abstraction first initiated by the London Missionary Society and sustained through the visual regimes of the museum complex. Interrupting the video’s frame are cuts to a video documentating two agreements signed in Colombo in 2023 between the Netherlands and Sri Lanka, which facilitated the return of six artefacts looted from the Kandyan Kingdom during the Dutch invasion of 1765 and later hoarded in the Rijksmuseum. The video’s frame zooms in on the hand gestures of Gunay Uslu (State Secretary for Culture and Media, Netherlands) and Vidura Wickramanayake (Minister of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs, Sri Lanka): resting on a wooden table, clasped in a handshake, marking their signatures, gesturing at a lectern. These formalised, rehearsed movements echo the sanitised choreography of the video’s gloved figure.

In his article, Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum published on e-flux in 2025, Achille Mbembe writes: ‘The age of brutalism is akin to the age of rubble and dust. We are surrounded by countless cities of rubble and dust: Grozny, Homs, Aleppo, Gaza... In these hallucinatory times, architecture is about rebuilding lives. It is about the restoration of livelihoods and the provision of shelter for those who, having lost everything and, having been left homeless, “can be at home only in their bodies.”’

Stone, Virus, Rubble presents close-up shots of the British flag hoisted above the British Museum colonnaded façade, paired with a declaration of technical insurgency against the institution. This coupling exposes the museum’s complicity in sustaining the colonial violence of the British state and the ongoing rubblisation of Palestinian bodies in Gaza. The same photogrammetric technologies used as part of the museum’s strategy exhibition display are integrated within the automated targeting systems of Zionist missiles directed towards Palestinian bodies. Stone colonnade, national flag, and rubble are violently and necessarily intertwined.

Echoes is a collaborative publication that follows Reverberations, the MA Research Architecture exhibition of 2025. It is an assemblage of poems, images, readings, reflections, experiences, and contradictions. A collective space to express our solidarity; to enjoy our concomitance. To be creative, reflective, and playful; a contemplation of the year spent together, remembering the before and on our way into the after. This publication is the form given to the thoughts and reflections that didn’t fit in our academic texts—quiet fragments which come together, louder.

Laura was the production manager and layout designer for the publication. 

Shuffle, squeak, ssh!, shutter, click! explores the museum as a site of coercive national power, reflecting on a specific incident which occured at the Musée d'Orsay. In December 2016, Marianne Acqua, a teacher from the Maurice Utrillo de Stains school in Seine-Saint-Dennis led a school visit to the museum in central Paris. The school is in an Education Priority Zone (ZEP), designated for additional support due to concentrated social disadvantages faced by its pupils. The trip was abruptly cut short after one of the museum's wardens told Acqua's pupils to 'shut their mouths'—a reprimand not directed to other, white, middle-class Parisian students also in attendance at the museum that day.

Like the battlefield, museums serve as nationalist rehearsal spaces where conquest is staged and palatized as spectacle. By acknowledging the museum's visual schema as one of detached observation and extractivist commoditication, we realise that photogrammetry's cultural initiation does not absolve its violent past. On the battlefield and in the museum the same tactical intent
persists: to search for traces of the Other.