The session was insite and also broadcast live online on Youtube and Facebook at Casa da Arquitectura. “Representation and Diplomacy” was the theme and had the participation of Américo Rodrigues (General Director for the Arts), Isabel Carlos (art critic) and Teresa Novais (architect and university professor), moderated by Joaquim Moreno , co-curator of the exhibition “Radar Veneza – Portuguese Architects at the Biennale1975-2021 ”.
With regard to the topic under discussion, it is worth recalling the words of Joaquim Moreno and Alexandra Areia, who signed the exhibition's curatorship. “Radar Veneza makes the international echo of the work of Portuguese architects visible and questions their representativeness, competitiveness and diplomacy.
The echoes of Portuguese architects at the biennale include participation in central exhibitions and national representations, allowing for comparisons between the shorter history of official promotion, with public sponsorship, and the vast representation of national authors with the temporal depth of 45 years of the title. Combined, they allow us to look at the encounters and disagreements between national and international debates. The panorama of the great cyclical events of architectural culture oscillates between the laboratory that prospects and interrogates the present and the competition between authors or nations that apparently organizes a hierarchy of value through awards, between the collective construction of a shared horizon and the ritualization of conflict where only one can win. The return of national representations in 1991 and of the Golden and Silver Lions imported from the film festival in 1996 marked the return to the Venice Biennale of this complex dialectic. Since then, many representations have struggled with this conflict, questioning whether national pavilions are pieces of distant homelands encrusted in the Biennale Gardens or whether they are places of open and international experimentation. The Portuguese representation, nomadic and uncertain, has always explored other territories, other borders and other porosities. To interrogate the national representation is also to interrogate cultural diplomacy, and to enunciate the distinction between diplomacy and cultural promotion; such an important difference in building an international place for Portuguese architects. Diplomacy is the concert of nations, and conflict, cultural or commercial, its opposite. The diplomatic question to the borderless field of Venice radar sweep is then how to be in dialogue, how to be part of a wider and more decent world, where architecture can be as close to society as possible.”


Venice Radar Catalogue
The “Radar Veneza” Catalogue (PT/EN versions) was on sale (40 euros), autographed, on 26 and 27 June (launch weekend). This is a 400-page volume with unpublished essays by Alexandra Areia, Joaquim Moreno and Léa-Catherine Szacka and 32 transcribed interviews with the protagonists of the Portuguese participations in the Biennale between 1975 and 2021, 24 drawings of the 24 objects/large models presented in the exhibition and a timeline – space for a panoramic view of transformations, capable of communicating ideas and general contexts of each Biennale and the specific circumstances of each national representation. Making a critical analysis of the many ways in which democratic Portugal has exhibited and exhibited itself abroad, we tried to see through the eyes of others, through the invitations that the Bienal made to architects, offices and artists, the general contexts of each Bienal and the specific circumstances of each national representation. Published in partnership with the Directorate-General for the Arts (DGARTES), which deposited the collection of Portuguese representations at the Venice Architecture Biennale at the Casa da Arquitectura, this book brings together projects and contributions from some of the most renowned names in Portuguese architecture.