(Fr)Agile Systems

Anique Azhar, Sami Chohan, Salman Jawed, Bilal Kapadia, Mustafa Mehdi, Madeeha Merchant, Arsalan Rafique, Ayesha Sarfraz.

As climate change continues to disrupt landscapes, livelihoods, and ecosystems on an unprecedented scale, Pakistan continues to occupy a paradoxical and precarious position along with many other countries of the Global South. Despite contributing less than one percent to global carbon emissions, the South Asian country bears the disproportionate weight of climate-induced disasters ranging from rising temperatures to melting glaciers, intense downpours to savage floods, unusually low precipitation to severe droughts, heatwaves to wildfires. The 2022 floods alone affected over 30 million people across the country, resulting in a dramatic loss of human life, livestock, crops, infrastructure, and land, while further straining an already strained economy.

Titled (Fr)Agile Systems, the Pakistan Pavilion at Biennale Architettura not only highlights the severity of Pakistan’s vulnerability to climate-induced disasters, but also serves as a reminder of the stark inequity of the climate crisis—one that keeps weighing down hardest on regions that have historically had the least to do with causing it. In the presence of such severity and inequity, it also reiterates the imperative to rethink climate resilience as an adaptation process attuned to the asymmetries and imbalances of an interconnected world. 

At the heart of the Pavilion is rock salt—a material deeply rooted in Pakistan’s geological and cultural heritage. Concentrated in large quantities in the Northern Punjab region of the country, Pakistani rock salt embodies a temporal depth formed over hundreds of millions of years. With its rather distinct pink hue and unmatched purity, it also embodies aesthetic and spiritual values besides lending itself to other uses. Here in the ambient humidity of Venice, however, it serves a different purpose. By constantly dissolving, rehardening, and reshaping itself, it becomes a powerful metaphor, reflecting on the one hand the adaptive and enduring qualities inherent in natural elements and processes—and on the other the vulnerability of natural systems and cycles under the strain of profit-driven human activities. In other words, it reflects both agility and fragility. This phenomenon, where an indigenous material is brought into an unfamiliar environment and subjected to conditions that alter its very nature, also suggests that climate resilience does not rest in universal solutions dictated by regions primarily responsible for the climate crisis, but in localized and nature-based acts of adaptation that resist colonial and capitalist structures of extraction and exploitation.

Inside the Pavilion, a suspended structure dominates and articulates the central space, holding the rock salt in a complex system that through its asymmetry and imbalance recalls the paradoxes, precarities, and inequities of the climate crisis, while urging a more proactive, equitable, and locally-led response.

At once a reflection and a call to action, the Pavilion also envisions a future in which architecture takes a radical turn and becomes deeply re-rooted in cultural heritage and critically re-engaged with ecological realities. It is here that we invite visitors to a place we imagine—a place embedded in a mountain range that extends from a plateau to a river in Pakistan’s Punjab Province—a quiet place that speaks loudly for change in how we design and build as architects.

Organized by Coalesce Design Studio (Karachi) and MAS/Architects (Lahore) with Valeria Romagnini Solfato (Venice), the Pavilion is curated by Anique Azhar (MAS/Architects), Sami Chohan (4Pai; Navigating Noplace; GCAS-Jehan), Salman Jawed (Coalesce Design Studio), Bilal Kapadia (Coalesce Design Studio), Mustafa Mehdi (Coalesce Design Studio), Madeeha Merchant (DOT; Urban Justice League; Columbia University), Arsalan Rafique (The Urban Research Frontier; Revolving Games), and Ayesha Sarfraz (MAS/Architects; Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture). Muhammad Arif Changezi (Chairperson, Pakistan Council of Architects and Town Planners) is acting as commissioner.

The Pavilion will be housed in Spazio 996/A, a gallery space situated between the key entrances of the Biennale and will open to public view on May 10, 2025.