The Venice Design Biennial returns, after a year of forced break, with the third edition in attendance. The program of exhibitions will open to the public from May 20 to June 27, in parallel with the first month of the Architecture Biennale, continuing to weave the relationship between the languages of contemporary design and some of the most evocative places in the city.

The curatorial theme of this edition, proposed by the curators and founders of the project, Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei, is Design As Self-Portrait. The idea is to investigate what design represents for each of us as individuals, and at the same time how we represent ourselves through it, through objects, spaces, experiences. With a great and new attention to the evolution of the self-representation techniques themselves.

This third edition presents five different projects around Venice.

The collective exhibition Design As Self-Portrait presents the works of over 20 international designers in two exhibition venues: SPARC* - Spazio Arte Contemporanea, in Campo Santo Stefano, and SPUMA - Space for the Arts, an evocative space of industrial archeology (old Dreher brewery) in Giudecca. 

The exhibition investigates the increasingly important role that design plays in what we choose to communicate our identity, in the permanent swing between use and representation, reality and virtuality. 

The exhibition Past Forward. Designers from the land of Venice at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice in Piazza San Marco is organised in collaboration with Direzione Regionale Musei Veneto – Ministero della Cultura. The works of 17 designers who live and work today in Venice and its territory are combined with the masterpieces of ancient art. 

Pretziada. A Self-Portrait in Design is the exhibition project curated by the duo Pretziada, housed in the ancient Oratorio dei Crociferi, where the magnificent late Renaissance pictorial cycle by Palma il Giovane will frame the selection of pieces created in collaboration between Sardinian workshops and international creatives. Pretziada’s work evokes a world apparently distant in time and space, a future/archaic age still very much alive in both Sardinian and Venetian material culture.

Walking on Water is the performance and installation project of the English fashion designer Jo Cope, created in collaboration with the Piedàterre brand, specialist in furlane, the original velvet shoes that from Venice have spread all over the world. The terrace of the T Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a breath-taking stage jutting out over the water of the Grand Canal, will be the place where the project comes to life, combining the choreographed movements of four dancers, the ancient gestures of a shoe craftswoman and the powerful voice of soprano Lieta Naccari. Through the action of walking and the shoe as a means of expression, the designer investigates nowadays female condition in relation to the stories and paths of the women of the past, who preceded her.

More information about the exhibitions: www.venicedesignbiennial.org