Terram Intelligere: INTERSTITIUM

Montenegro’s contribution to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of The Venice Biennale, titled Terram Intelligere: INTERSTITIUM (To Understand the Land: INTERSTITIUM), situates itself not as a traditional national showcase, but as a spatial and conceptual inquiry. Curated by Miljana Zeković in collaboration with Ivan Šuković, Dejan Todorović, and Emir Šehanović, the pavilion is housed in the newly inaugurated ArteNova space at Campo San Lorenzo. Rather than presenting architecture as a resolved object or fixed narrative, the project frames it as a mode of inquiry—one that seeks to understand the land not as a passive surface, but as an active archive: layered, intelligent, and in constant negotiation with human and non-human systems.

The core of the project lies in its invocation of the interstitium—a term from molecular biology describing the space between cells, where signals, fluids, and energies pass. Here, the interstitium becomes more than metaphor; it becomes a method. A site of mediation rather than resolution, where nature, technology, and architecture are not fixed categories, but porous fields of exchange. Within this framework, the Montenegrin landscape emerges not as image or territory, but as a resonant system—geological, cultural, and infrastructural—that resists being captured as surface or symbol.

This conceptual framework materialises in the form of a living laboratory: a constellation of floating polycarbonate forms suspended within the pavilion space. Each form houses microorganisms collected from soils across Montenegro. These transparent chambers function both as architectural prototypes and as dynamic habitats. Within them, bacterial cultures adapt, mutate, and produce bio-pigments in response to environmental stimuli. The lab is not a simulation of life but a site of it. Architecture here becomes a mediating tissue between species, materials, and temporalities—slow, responsive, alive.

The project is realised in collaboration with the Institute of Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering at the University of Belgrade. It draws on experimental research where soil-derived bacteria were observed developing bio-pigments in response to UV radiation—pigments later used in ecological material applications. This movement between science and architecture is grounded in a distinctly local spatial tradition: the suvomeđa. A dry-stone demarcation technique that defines land ownership without any binding material, the međa historically marks the threshold between cultivation and wilderness, self and other. Here, it is reactivated as a porous frontier—no longer a line of division, but a site of multispecies negotiation, where microorganisms, minerals and memory meet.

From this convergence emerges a proposition. In Terram Intelligere: INTERSTITIUM, architecture is not rendered as object or solution, but as an interface—a living, thinking membrane across disciplines and species. The dry stone becomes data. The microorganism becomes material. Ownership dissolves into nurturing. What is offered here is a particular perspective: one that acknowledges the intelligence embedded in soil, in tradition, in decay—and explores its entanglement with emerging forms of hybrid intelligence that span the organic and the engineered.

If the pavilion resists spectacle, it is because its energies are slow, cellular, interstitial. It does not announce itself—it cultivates. In doing so, it gestures towards a future architecture not built on domination or permanence, but on reciprocity, adaptability, and deeper listening. The land, in this reading, is not merely what we build on, but what we build with. It is through this expanded ecology of minds, both natural and artificial, that hybrid intelligence begins to take form.

This project, with its scientific rigour and poetic sensitivity, proposes architecture not as a product but as a process—one grounded in local specificity, yet oriented towards global urgencies. It calls for a shift away from habitual modes of building and thinking, towards an open, interdisciplinary practice where collective and hybrid intelligence are not metaphors, but methods. In this shared terrain, architecture becomes a form of listening—slow, situated, and alive to the challenges yet to come.

Terram Intelligere: INTERSTITIUM
Commissioner: Mirjana Đurišić / Curator: Miljana Zeković / Exhibitors: Ivan Šuković, Dejan Todorović, Emir Šehanović / Members of the creative team: Tamara Marović, Maja Radonjić / Producer: Jelena Božović / Organised by: Directorate of the Chief State Architect at the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and State Property of Montenegro.

Press contact: mirjana.djurisic [​at​] mdup.gov.me.

Text author: Miljana Zeković, curator