The scale and breadth of Venice Biennale of Art means that lovers of all artforms and media are well catered for. And while the digital has been a tool of contemporary art since the 1950s, over the last few years there has been a marked rise in digital worldbuilding and immersive environments fuelled by incredible advances in technology.

While such technology can be seen in a number of projects across Biennale, two of the best examples are those of the Swiss national pavilion and an audacious project overseen by LAS Art Foundation, both of which take the visitor into imaginary worlds conjured up by artists of the kind that would simply not have been possible to create only a few years ago.




Guerreiro do Divino Amor was the artist tasked with creating Switzerland’s offer for this 60th Biennale. Curated by Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (see 00114), the Swiss-Brazilian artist formed a fragmented, kaleidoscopic experience continuing an ongoing “Superfictional World Atlas” series of projects. Over two decades, the artist has been thinking about the relationships between various interconnected subjects: urban space, architecture, ideology, collective imagination, propaganda, and national identities.



The Venice presentation, titled Super Superior Civilizations, is the sixth and seventh chapter of the project, together forming a phantasmagorical Gesamtkunstwerk inviting exploration. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Guerreiro do Divino Amor studied a Masters in Architecture, though now he applies this knowledge and research into large-scale installations and digital, immersive worlds. Scattered around the pavilion and its garden are classical architectural motifs – columns, capitals, fountains, faux marble, and statues. These speak to lost civilisations and an assumed Western, white, superiority made into built form, here acting as decorative detritus of a mythical past for visitor to muse upon as they go on to discover a mythical future in two presentations by the artist.

One, Roma Talismano, is a floating, hologram-like figure. The artist, embodying the Capitoline wolf, sings the stories of three allegorical animals: a she-wolf, an ewe lamb, and an eagle. Each animal has been used as symbol of racial superiority and embedded into political, social, and architectural projects as a shorthand of meaning. Digital architectural models montaging utopian futures fill screens behind and float around the playfully chaotic film, collapsing ancient Rome into fascist aesthetic, merging story with truth, imaginary with reality, and hetronormativity with a queered way of reading the world.



At the other end of a long, narrow, dark corridor, is a habitable architectural model. The inside of a kind of sci-fi-infused Pantheon is turned into a semi-spherical cinema, visitors invited to relax back on timber seating and look up to the ceiling for a mystifying exploration of all things Switzerland. This isn’t as dull or documentary as perhaps expected, taking a cynical, wry, critical, and comical look at how Switzerland presents itself to the world.

“Why Swiss Boarding Schools Create Great Leaders” states a headline scrolling over a vast sketch of mountains, reminding us that the nation is a training ground for world leaders of finance and politics, including Kim Jong Un. Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s film is operatic and baroque, exploding across the screen, relentlessly pulling eyes and attention in a dance. It is poking and political, working to soften chauvinism through comical critique, queer collage, and rich architectural deconstruction.




LAS Art Foundation appear to have landed in Venice from Berlin in a giant blue spaceship, landing in the courtyard of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. The incongruous triangular tent – that shimmers in the slightest gust of wind, furthering the physical divide between it and the surrounding arched colonnades – was designed by UNA / UNLESS architecture studio. Starkly geometric, it conceals a subaquatic marinescape designed by French artist Josèfa Ntjam that fills the inside, courtesy of complex technology.

LAS are used to mounting exciting digital creative experiences, though normally fill Berlin’s historic architecture with one-off projects where artists can take ideas into unexpected territory. Most recently, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley created a two-part glitchy takeover of the Halle am Berghain as a retrospective of many of her works, including work recessed.space spoke to the artist about in FACT Liverpool (00078). Before that Lawrence Lek turned an abandoned but protected East Berlin department store into a sci-fi exploration of AI, ethics, and autonomous cars.


In Venice, Ntjam – an artist, performer, and writer who works with sculpture, photomontage, sound, and moving image – explores connections between the deep ocean and deeper space using plankton as a possible point of convergence. Sonic sculptures, one of which is a vibrating cocoon-like space to be climbed inside, glow inside the darkness of the geometric blue tent. It is all very absorbing and relaxing, not only because of the low-light and soft carpeting, but through a wraparound soundscape by Fatima al Qadiri working alongside a film playing across a wide, undulating LED wall.

On that wall, an exploration across terrain somewhere between a Martian surface and an ocean floor creates a third place of sublime possibilities. As with the Swiss offer, there appear to be relics of an ancient past littering the sandy surface, and we follow a slithering giant eel creature glowing in iridescent, changing colours, as it leads us through its world, one which seems to fluidly switch between water and space.


Science fiction has been a tool for utopian worldbuilding not only in geek culture, but also by a range of minorities who see in it a way to explore future hope, reinterpretations of today’s existence, and to twist a white-centric, heteronormative view of scientific and cultural progression while exploring ideas of alienation, inequality, society, and ecology. Afrofuturism is one such speculative fiction, encompassing musical, filmic, written, and visual arts from Sun Ra to Octavia Butler to Black Panther, Drexciya, and Rashid Johnson. It is important, too, to Josèfa Ntjam, who takes us into her world through the narration of Amma, a deity of the West African Dogon people.

As we are further taken on tour of the futurescape in which humans are long gone, but new life is emerging through political plankton, we witness species and objects the artist created through AI and digital mapping of West African statues stored in museums of the Global North. To leave the taut blue architecture and return to the Venetian dampness, with moss and salts growing up canalside walls, one wonders what future worlds are being created right now in the depths of waters and skies.