Guatemala will participate for the first year at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The theme of the exhibition “Stigma” is focused on a virtual and utopian architecture.

If the Tower of Babel was a metaphor for the crisis of languages – in fact in the biblical text the human race, because of their arrogance to touch the sky through a very high construction, was punished with an infinity of languages, dialects and idioms.The people had to suspend the construction because they could not understand their languages. In the same way, with the postmodern the crisis of great stories, of a universal narrative culture, was manifested

The pavilion has tried to provide an answer to this crisis through utopian and ephemeral projects not based on a universal functionalism but inspired by architectural archetypes. Central to the exhibition is the exact photographic reproduction of the Temple of Masks in Tikal – ancient pyramid built by the Maya in Guatemala- a city in which no architectural rule, no urban plan presided over the regulations of buildings except that religious community spirit that generated one a succession of gigantic altars.

If the general theme Freespace is “space of opportunity, a democratic space, unplanned and free for uses not yet defined” capable of linking “the archaic and the contemporary”, Guatemala studies this space proposing a sort of “Virtual City” understood as articulation of urban systems according to new modalities of a collective intelligence, according to a only language.