Ignasi Aballí straightens the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

The first Venice Biennale It was held in 1895 and it was not until 1922 when Spain built its own pavilion. It was the architect Vaquero Palacios who designed it, probably taking as a reference the street next to the Giardini Gardens. This reference caused the building to be slightly inclined in relation to neighboring Belgium and Holland. This edition of the biennial, which runs from April 23rd to November 27th, coincides with the celebration of the pavilion's first centenary and does so with Correctionproject with which Ignasi Aballí try to correct this initial error.

“From the beginning it was clear to me that I wanted to make a specific intervention for the context of the pavilion and the city,” says Aballí. Very early on, he had the idea of rebuilding the interior of a building that, in terms of plan, is crooked. Although at first it seemed like an easy project, he quickly understood that it was not and that it would require “a lot of effort, both physically and conceptually.” This correction, however, “It causes a double error and both structures cannot coexist without making concessions”adds Bea Espejo, project curator.

The concept of error is not new in Aballí's career, he has already worked with it several times and, in his own words, “I make more mistakes than I do right and I wanted to bring the error to the right”. In this way, Aballí reconstructs the interior of the building, rotating it ten degrees to align it with the adjacent buildings. However, “turning around makes us move away from our neighbors”, emphasizes Espejo.

This transformation on a 1:1 scale generates new spaces and also the loss of others, “the corners, for example, don’t fit”, says Aballí. This creates blind spots, places that fall into disuse or walls that intersect. Once the intervention, which Aballí considers almost more sculptural than architectural, was finished, he realized that it generates several antagonists: inside and outside, full and empty, temporary and permanent, new and old, original and copy.

what do you ask Correction is time, something scarce in the context of a biennale like the one in Venice in which the average visit time to each pavilion does not exceed three minutes. “In these few minutes, what you see has to seduce you and what Aballí asks the viewer is to take a pulse of time”, points out Espejo. Only with paused contemplation can the viewer perceive everything the artist is proposing with this seemingly silent intervention.

There are clues that alert the visitor that something is happening, even if it seems like they have entered an empty space. The walls of his intervention were painted a different white than the originals and the baseboards are also different. Additionally, the skylights were opened for the first time. “They have never been opened because the light that enters them can damage the works on display, but this time it generates new readings”, says Bea Espejo. The light comes in and paints the walls, so you don't get the same experience if you go to the Spanish Pavilion in the morning and in the afternoon.

Correct Venice

Ignasi Aballí's proposal has another aspect on which it is based. it's about the edition of six books plus a map that invites you to discover the city and some of its lesser-known corners. “They are a kind of guides that correct the idea of that touristy, overcrowded Venice and, again, question the idea of time”, says Espejo. What Aballí proposes is a kind of competition that runs through the city from the pavilion. The first object is collected there: an erased map of the city in which only the places where the other books are located (all free) are visible.

At the exit of the pavilion, at the first kiosk located in Giardini, you can obtain the first book. entitled horizons, brings together landscapes of seas and skies that merge with the Venetian horizon taken from newspaper clippings. Inventory proposes a visit through the streets of Venice focusing on the colors of the walls and Almost is a conceptual journey through the pavilion, the Biennale and the city that can be purchased at Editrice Filippi, a bookstore where you can only find books about Venice.

they follow him storiesa little book that brings together slides of Venice that the artist has been compiling and in which works of art, other cities and other trips are shown, Panorama look at the micro, at the details of the city, and Landscape returns to the text and alludes to other works by the artist.

“It's a secret flashback because it includes other previous works such as Correctionwork in which I covered a mirror with tipex, List of errors any time sequences”, lists Aballí. The artist believes that this project would not be accepted by an architect because “it has a hint of absurdity. What’s the point of correcting something that has already been approved?” he asks. Ultimately, Correction raises more questions than answers.

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