Assembly - Biennale Architettura 2025

In 2016 Ireland established its first Citizens’ Assembly. 99 demographically representative Irish residents are brought together to deliberate issues ranging from marriage equality to biodiversity loss, collectively producing recommendations for implementation by government. This ongoing political experiment has been promoted as an innovative form of participatory democracy, meant to bring the ordinary “citizen” closer to the processes of governance. Amidst today’s torrent of algorithmically mediated data, this format encourages the slower temporality necessary for reflection, deliberation, and consensus-building. Could Citizens’ Assemblies be realized at more local scales? Might their principles expand into the spaces of everyday life?

Assembly asks how architecture can contribute to, and learn from, this political experiment. The pavilion will present a speculative prototype for a structure to facilitate non-hierarchical communication between strangers. Its concept and structure has been informed by spatial typologies of political and social assembly from Ireland and abroad, including choir stalls, parliaments, and cattle marts. Circular, modular, and small in scale, it could be inserted into public spaces from the school to the shopping centre, transforming them into sites of civic participation.

Functionally and poetically, the pavilion reflects on assembly as a product and process of making. Harnessing age-old, renewable materials, skills and collaborative wisdom, Assembly has been hand-crafted from Irish beech trees sourced and seasoned by woodworker Alan Meredith and will feature a carpet handwoven by Ceadogán Rugmakers to welcome visitors into its interior. A chorus of soundboxes integrated within its structure will each deliver a fragment of a spatialized and polyphonic composition informed by the Venetian tradition of cori spezzati. A collaboration by Michelle Delea and David Stalling, the audio composition incorporates music, poetry, interviews with the Citizens’ Assembly’s designers and participants, and recordings that reflexively document the structure’s own fabrication.

Conceived as a resonant instrument designed to harmonise a multitude of dissonant voices, Assembly will only fully come alive when inhabited by people, adding a further, endlessly plural layer of sound. Likewise, its structure is animated by the experiences and responses of its visitors. Louise Cotter explains: “Our aim is for architecture to work in tandem with other crafts and knowledge forms—from woodwork, textiles, poetry, art and music through to the ecological and the political—so as to create a rich sensory environment that encourages awareness of ourselves and of others as embodied beings. Ultimately, Assembly is about bringing people together in a space that encourages respect for one another as individuals, each with the perspectives of their own lived histories and the potential to imagine new ways of gathering, listening and communicating.”

Assembly will be on view at the Biennale Architettura 2025 from 10 May to 23 November, 2025. After Venice, the exhibition will tour nationally through 2026. A film documenting the making of Assembly, which has been directed by Michelle Delea, shot by Felix Castaldo, with sound by David Stalling, will form an important part of the national tour.

• Exhibition: 'Assembly'
• Commissioner: Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council of Ireland
• Curator: Cotter & Naessens Architects Exhibitors: Cotter & Naessens Architects with Luke Naessens, David Stalling, Michelle Delea and Alan Meredith
• Press preview days: Thursday 8 May and Friday 9 May 2025
• Curator tour: Irish pavilion, Thursday 8 May, 15.00
• Official opening: Irish pavilion, Thursday 8 May, 17.30
• Exhibition dates: Saturday 10 May to Sunday 23 November 2025
• Location: Irish Pavilion, Artiglierie Arsenale