Venice Biennale 2025 - Unraveling

Pavilion of the Republic of Serbia, 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2025)

UNRAVELING: NEW SPACES is an ever-changing installation made of wool - a material rarely associated with architecture. Designed as truly circular, it begins to transform and unravel from day one through a slow, choreographed sequence. By the end of the exhibition, the structure is fully unknitted, returning to its raw state: a ball of yarn. The project invites a rethinking of architecture as impermanent, adaptable, and materially responsible.

Rooted in Serbian craft traditions, the pavilion repositions tactile making within contemporary architectural practice. Knitted segments, suspended from the ceiling, form a textile landscape without a fixed shape. Solar-powered motors pull threads gradually, allowing the structure to transform and fully unravel over time. The installation moves, relaxes, or subtly deforms, inviting visitors to engage with it from multiple perspectives.

This temporal process foregrounds energy, materiality, and continual reconfiguration. Here, digital and manual methods co-exist, unfolding in a process where form is discovered through interaction and feedback rather than imposed in advance. With every visit, the pavilion appears in a different state. After six months, it completes a full cycle - from yarn, to structure, to yarn again - leaving a spatial memory in place of a permanent form. As its shape dissolves, the message persists: a living metaphor for circular thinking in architecture.

Realised through a multidisciplinary collaboration of architects, textile designers, and kinetic engineers, Unraveling challenges how we build and what we value. Its slow deformation and ultimate disappearance offer a meditation on temporality and material scarcity. By exploring how wool behaves under controlled unravelling, the pavilion reminds us that architecture can be tactile, open-ended, and ready to evolve, and begin again.

Authors: Davor Eres, Jelena Mitrovic, Igor Pantic, Sonja Krstic, Ivana Najdanovic, Petar Lausevic

Curator: Slobodan Jovic

Commissioner: Stevan Martinovic

Exhibition Collaborators: Marko Todorovic, Louis Bouvrande, Jovana Petrovic, Haein Hutt, Dušan Medjedovic

Exhibition Video Content: Milos Jacimovic, Dragana Udovicic

Engineering Consultants: Format Engineers (UK)

Photography: ReportArch / Andrea Ferro Photography

Organised by: Museum of Applied Art, Belgrade, in collaboration with the Union of Architects of Serbia

Supported by: The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia