From Gaza to Chile, Biennale asks: How can we live together?

In the time it has taken to prepare for the Venice Biennale, violence in the Middle East has overtaken a Palestinian family farm in Gaza featured in one of the exhibits

VENICE, Italy -- In the time it has taken to prepare for the Venice Biennale, violence in the Middle East has overtaken a Palestinian family farm in Gaza featured in one of the exhibits. It gives real-time urgency to the question posed by the Biennale curator: “How can we live together?” The 17th International Architecture Exhibition opens Saturday after a one-year pandemic delay, during which time architecture has emerged as one of the key disciplines in the global coronavirus response. One exhibit “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip,” looks at how Israeli control of the border impacts the Qudaih family farm in the Gaza village of Khuza'a. It recounts, for example, that 20 of the Qudaih family’s olive trees were bulldozed to create a buffer zone, and a greenhouse necessary to grow tomatoes has been repeatedly destroyed. Since 2014, the village had been “more or less” quiet, said curator Malkit Shoshan.