Every other year, La Biennale di Venezia – or the Venice Biennale as you may know it – hosts an international exhibition where countries showcase architectural thinking while touting their national brand as an export.
In recent years, the British Pavilion has questioned this traditional format, with, for example, Dancing for the Moon in 2023, which was curated by six UK diaspora artists.
Design agency Templo created the identity for this, as it did for the 2021 Pavilion. In doing so, it introduced the idea of a bespoke annual identity that would work at the event but could also be telegraphed around the world as a global campaign. Digital expressions of the brand and fly-through films have particularly helped with this, according to Templo co-founder Pali Palavathanan, who says: “The idea is that it’s particularly useful for anyone who isn’t privileged enough to get to the event.”
This year, the British Pavilion has just opened its doors on an exhibition that replaces a national conversation with one that involves Britain as part of a dialogue and, in doing so, it has put together an international team comprising Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau; the UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins; and Dr Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
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The resulting exhibition explores planetary repair through architecture, specifically along The Great Rift Valley, the geological formation that runs from Southern Turkey, through Lebanon, Palestine, The Red Sea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique. It does this through a series of installations.
“There’s a bravery there [from the British Council] as so many brands wouldn’t do that, hand over a space, so it led to us working with half of the curatorial team being in Nairobi,” says Palavathanan.
In what he thinks might have been his toughest brief yet with the British Council, he says he had to reconcile the technical constraints of the client’s own brand with the requirements of an ambitious exhibition.
“The British Council has certain parameters, like how its logo is used, its position and point size and then you’re working with really complex subjects from the academic world to capture the curator’s vision, but the constraints actually make the work better,” according to Palavathanan.
The visual language of the identity draws on several elements of the exhibition, including the form of the building which has been softened by terracotta and charcoal Masai beading.
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This idea of softening edges was a typographic starting point for Palavathanan. “We wanted to find quite a sharp, hard-edged typeface, so chose lithic, and then found structural ways to soften those hard lines and in effect mimic and reflect what the beading is doing on the front of the building,” he says.
Feeling that there was something “not quite right about it” as “it wasn’t bringing any sense of geology,” Palavathanan says his team started to reflect on The Rift Valley and came up with a further solution that is both “typographic and topographic.”
Through movement, the themes are further explored. “The expression really comes in when you start to push things apart and bring them together,” he says, adding: “It’s completely fragmented at the beginning and then it comes together to indicate repair and tell a story, while also feeling like tectonic plates merging”.
Meanwhile, the color palette references those of the Kenyan flag. In one motion, “it looks like the sun hitting the mountains,” says Palavathanan. “With a flat color, it wouldn’t have worked. It would have felt too corporate, but instead it feels emotive and earthy.”
The fly-through video, which is a major part of the campaign, features a soundtrack commissioned by producer Fred Wave. “We collaborated with him and he made this score using Massai samples, like whistling, but wove it into quite a modern soundtrack.”
As well as digital elements, the identity also informs the signage, exhibition guide, on-site graphics and merchandise.
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