The Other Side of the Hill
Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 curated by Carlo Ratti
Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Role: Artist
Output: Installation, Video
The Other Side of the Hill draws on the striking similarity of microbial and human populations to rethink our shared future. It confronts visitors with the vertiginous hill shaped by the exponential growth of the human population, which will reach 10 billion in a few more decades, and after which the population is projected to decline just as fast—perhaps even dropping to preindustrial levels. The other side of the hill is the unknown future of our species and the planet. Navigating it will require entirely new forms of intelligence. Microbes, our ancient companions, can be our guides.
When passing to the other side of the hill, our unknown future, visitors enter a grotto-like space inhabited by germinating mosses assisted by bacteria that also feels like a kind of laboratory where floating petri dishes present multimedia reflections on the behavior of microbial cities—biofilms—and how microbes adapt to environmental challenges. The project draws inspiration from the concept of trans-scalar, trans-species collaborative plasticity, highlighting how human architecture could evolve in response to future crises by learning from microbial systems that thrive through collaboration, adaptation, and innovation.
