With its convincing curation of intertwined installations, ‘cover me softly’ captures the imagination of KoozArch founder Federica Zambeletti. Avoiding didactic imperatives, this edition of the Beta Biennial celebrates the poetics of creative entanglement.

Walking into Timișoara’s Garrison building — home to the main exhibition of cover me softly, curated by Oana Stănescu for the Beta Biennial 2024 — one can’t help but feel as if they have trespassed into a maze, sensing, even if for a moment, an initial comforting disorientation. Even to a trained architect, the plan printed on the accompanying booklet is obscure; in part due to the sheer quantity of annotated guidance on how to navigate the biennial, and partly thanks to the porosity of the building itself, with its multiple openings and passages. Yet summoning the confidence to venture through the thirty-plus rooms that constitute the Garrison Command, an intuitive interconnectedness takes over, irrespective of any annotated directions. With each step, the tiny numbers lose their importance; the associations between over eighty presented works begin to form a constellation, twinkling in their interpretations of what it means to be covered softly.

Rather than commencing from the cover, I am compelled to begin with softly, which better alludes to the generous and open modes of practice platformed at Beta 2024. Such approaches would assert the power of the collective, where architecture is not the protagonist but one amongst many other creative practices, spanning art, cinema, fashion and literature. It follows that the first work we encounter — and which links us through the sequence of spaces of the ground floor, from the piazza through the Garrison building to the courtyard — is a textile, softly dancing in the sky. Between artwork, architectural installation and performance of the climate,Thread by Akane Moriyama’s studio, both covers the space softly while instantly setting the tone of Beta as a Biennial firmly rooted in the context of Timișoara whilst also catalysing distant winds.

Walking in, the image of a communal bed further builds upon the imaginary of softness, in which one feels an urge to snuggle under the sheets — particularly as the opening of the Biennial coincides with the first crisply autumnal day. Whilst Under covers by Karamuk Kuo builds upon iconic references like Yoko and Lennon or the idea of the bed as a space of resistance, it also alludes directly to the local tradition of communal living practices where the collective bedroom of the house encompasses a variety of activities, as a multifunctional space.

Scaling up the devices for gathering within a space, the carpeted floor and tent-like structure which shapes this room has no doors – conceived by Malkit Shoshan — has been constructed by a group of local women aged between 12–88, turning one of the rooms of the exhibition into an environment of resistance. Despite its temporary nature, and building upon the seminal work of figures which have shaped Malkit’s perspective on inhabitation modes and their politics, the tent is presented here as a demonstrative architecture in its own right. Such ideas recall the late visionary Yona Friedman, whose manuals put forth the argument that by learning how to construct a roof, one might remove the paradigm of shelter from the pursuit of neoliberalism. Within nomadic communities, the tent as legitimate architecture is primarily shaped by women, as revealed through Lebelle Prussin’s research. Elsewhere, the tent is presented as the sign of the fierce resistance embraced by nomadic communities who defy political borders — as discussed by Moussa As Assarid, the spokesperson for the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad.

It is within this tent-space that the inaugural conversation of the public programme played out, between architecture critic Oliver Wainwright and researcher and professor Malkit Shoshan. Expanding on the work exhibited at Beta, their talk became an opportunity to delve further into Shoshan’s practice and the pivotal work undertaken with the Foundation for Seamless Territory on the Gaza strip. It’s not an easy conversation, but one which Shoshan has been restlessly pursuing for more than a decade. For Shoshan, architecture is advocacy and has shaped seminal research works likeThe Atlas of the Conflict maps, through which architecture tools of analysis and representation are deployed to unravel a critical territorial analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ultimately revealing the exploitation of spatial planning as a political instrument.

The way we cover the ground can also refer to its surface and thickness, and how these have been utilised as useful through time. Ground Cover analyses how shifts in the interplay of sociocultural and legal norms are testaments to our changing relationship with nature, tracing the change from when plants were foraged remedies for ailments to their flattened production as plainly agricultural crops. Seated on piles of hay while immersed in high-fidelity digital botanical models, we are urged to consider how the practices of cultivating and documenting plants in archival and legal formats has shaped our knowledge of the natural world.

Echoing ideas around the creation and translation of knowledge, a number of video installations dotted around the space gradually cohere into something reminiscent of a lecture. Interpreting the verb cover as a tool for sampling, these reinterpretations play with and question the spoken word. One piece in particular stands out, pointing at the rigidity of architecture as compared to the agility of fashion or music: A New Lecture: Architecture’s Century-Long Quest for Novelty. Sampling lectures by famous architects like Zaha Hadid, Patrick Schumacher, Bjarke Ingels and Rem Koolhaas, among others, the remix unveils the modernist quest anew, almost a hundred years after Le Corbusier’s infamous Towards a New Architecture, ultimately begging us to question the relevance of all this novelty. Newness and the kind of aesthetic that it relies on is acutely highlighted in the gypsum paradox exposed by New Affiliates, with Drywall is forever. Reflecting on the life-cycle of materials which make up our built environment, the work undertaken by this New York studio offers an important perspective for addressing the complicity of newness in ongoing environmental degradation.

In this regard, the physical act of covering what already exists can lead to the environmental and social enhancement of a building; think of Druot, Lacaton and Vassal’s winter-gardens at Tour Bois-le-Prêtre. In a sort of Argentinian parallel, Atmos Labs has critically reframed the term cover as a means of ensuring a building’s bioclimatic conditions, swapping the winter garden for the Helios system developed by the Argentinian architect Wladimiro Acosta. Covering becomes a means through which to understand the physical and human terrain of a place.

Elsewhere, the film Warmly from Dragalina grounds us back in Romania; in this cautionary tale, we are shown how transformation of a façade — if supported by Energy Efficiency Service in Romania — could ultimately alter the behaviour of the residents themselves. This video is fittingly housed within the door of an old stove, in the corner of one of the rooms; one can only view it by sitting on a very small stool. Its intentional placement introduces a neighbouring work: the Kotatsu Table confronts wasteful Western standards and its prescriptions of uniformly heated indoor environments. Here, the work of Something Fantastic draws on the Japanese Kotatsu to explore the potential of micro climatic interventions.

Throughout the spaces, one gradually notices the ubiquitous number of tiny stools or seats; diminutive yet generous companions as one navigates each room, sitting through various films or even enjoying a conversation with a fellow visitor. Borrowed from a local museum, these milking stools prompt reflections on the relationship between leisure and labour, and on our obsession with the design of the chair. Numerous covers of this idea are presented throughout the exhibition: Home Work Chair confirms the blurring between play and work, drawing on Yrjö Kunkapuro’s near-ideal model to enable working from home, as normalised by the pandemic. Other featured chairs allude to darker histories of colonial appropriation — like the Congo Chair by Ilmari Tapiovaara — and speak to methods of production from craftsmanship to mass manufacture, as with Ikea’s production of the FROSTA stool, itself a cover of Alvar Aalto’s Stool 60. This seated meditation crosses the digital frontier with Space Popular’s installation SIT. This work reflects on the ubiquitous presence of chairs within virtual spaces, where the physical act of sitting is presumably irrelevant, yet where a simulacrum or cover of existing ways to sit forces us to acknowledge the many societal functions reflected in our physical surrounds.

Cover me softly would perhaps be incomplete without the oeuvre of an artist who outright embraced the act of covering as a respectable form of creation, namely the late Virgil Abloh. Works by the late polymath punctuated a number of the exhibition spaces with nostalgia. In his seminal lecture at Harvard, titled Personal Design Language, Abloh stated that one only needs to change something by 3% to create something new; the implementation of this thesis is shown through a number of artefacts. From the recognisable Haçienda hazard-stripes appropriated from Ben Kelly’s 1992 nightclub to the rip-off of the Glasgow airport sign originally conceived by Sir Kenneth Grange and Margaret Calvert, replayed in the logo of his firm Off White — Abloh’s oeuvre reminds us of the importance of a porous approach which recognises its existence within a broader continuum, thus directly questioning the myth of singular genius.

Maybe one of the most pointed acts of cover or copy-art, at once weaving together art, fashion and politics, is the use of the African American Flag by David Hammons — both as cover of the American flag in 1990 for the exhibition Black USA in Amsterdam as well as the basis for a high-top shoe, designed by Tremain Emory in collaboration with Converse. Replacing the red, white and blue colors of the traditional American flag with the red, green, and black of the Pan-African Universal Negro Improvement Association founded in 1914, Hammons challenged the ‘Stars and Stripes’ as an unchanging symbol of American identity. Twenty years after Hammons first denied Emory the right to release the shoe, the artist later agreed on the condition that Converse make meaningful financial contributions to organisations committed to increasing black voting. In full circle, the shoe is now being used as a means to encourage both black citizens and the general population to vote in the 2024 US election.

Bio

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.