The Nordic countries' display at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is housed in Sverre Fehn's celebrated 1962 Nordic Pavilion, a landmark of architectural modernism representing Sweden, Norway, and Finland. This year, the Nordic countries present an exhibition that blends architecture, performance, and art installation, treating the built environment as a stage for the sociopolitical norms of fossil-based culture. Curated by Kaisa Karvinen for the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, the exhibition, titled Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, explores modern architecture through the lens of the trans body, featuring the work of Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona, who combines performance art, theatre, and choreography.
Created by Teo Ala-Ruona, Industry Muscle takes the trans body as a starting point for rethinking architecture's relationship with normative identities. Contrasting Fehn's modernist design with an alternative model of architectural practice centered on the trans body, the exhibition offers insights into the interplay between architecture, the body, and ecological collapse. Together with a multidisciplinary team, Ala-Ruona presents five speculative scores that act as critical prompts for reimagining architectural practice, drawing attention to the systemic preconceptions embedded in orthodox architectural thinking. Through this contrast, the Pavilion intervention raises the question of what we should do with modernism's remnants.
The built environment is largely constructed based on prevalent cultural norms. This plays a crucial role in the staging of bodies in everyday life, and in creating the ecological burden of the building industry. With my team of multidisciplinary collaborators, I want to start new conversations by exploring the possibilities of an architectural practice that contrasts sharply with the status quo. - Artist Teo Ala-Ruona
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Can Architecture Fight Intolerance?The exhibition team references Carlo Ratti's introduction to the 2025 Venice Biennale theme: "When the systems that have long guided our understanding begin to fail, new forms of thinking are needed." The five speculative scores of Industry Muscle are drawn from performance art, where they function as tasks, notations, and exercises that guide performers. The exhibition brings this conceptual framework into architecture, using themes such as the role of purity in modern design and its cultural ideals, the segregation and categorization built into everyday environments, and the influence of space on how identity and gender are performed. They also investigate how bodies might reshape themselves through architecture and consider the trans body as a site of reuse that prompts ecological imagination.
The intervention will repurpose Sverre Fehn's Pavilion into a series of stages, making visitors active participants. Each stage will enact a new architectural model, turning the visitor into a performer of everyday actions. The installation design will incorporate recycled materials throughout, including the reuse of marble from Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Hall and costumes designed specifically for the space. According to curator Kaisa Karvinen, Ala-Ruona's work treats performance as a method of research, offering insights into embodiment that can meaningfully expand architectural discourse. She emphasizes that the human body has always served as a foundational point of reference for spatial design and that performance art, with its deep engagement in bodily experience, offers powerful tools for architectural exploration.
Industry Muscle will speculate on an alternative model for architectural practice, grounded in the experience of the trans body. Conceptually, this can be as simple but as fundamental as the sensation of comfort that comes when I am in a visually complex space that places less emphasis on the silhouette of my body, a reversal of the modernist ideal expressed in the architecture of the pavilion. - Artist Teo Ala-Ruona
Industry Muscle combines installation and performance art, emphasizing marginalized perspectives, bodily experience, trans identity, collaboration, and artistic exploration. The exhibition was commissioned by a Nordic alliance composed of the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, the National Museum of Norway, and ArkDes in Sweden, with each institution taking turns leading the process. For the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, the commissioning has been led by the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki. Teo Ala-Ruona has brought together a diverse team of collaborators: architect A.L. Hu; set designer and artist Teo Paaer; sound designer Tuukka Haapakorpi; dramaturge Even Minn; visual artist Venla Helenius; fashion designer Ervin Latimer; graphic designer Kiia Beilinson; and performers Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner, and Romeo Roxman Gatt.
Other European pavilions at this edition of the Venice Biennale focus their interventions on questioning disciplinary identity and its traditional precepts. The Finnish exhibition, located in Alvar and Elissa Aalto's Pavilion of Finland and titled The Pavilion – Architecture of Stewardship, centers on the diverse forms of labor involved in constructing and maintaining architecture. The Swiss Pavilion will spotlight one of the iconic works of Lisbeth Sachs, one of the first registered female architects in Switzerland while examining historical gender dynamics. Other national representations have chosen to highlight historically excluded perspectives, such as Indigenous community knowledge in the Australian Pavilion and Uros and Aymara ancestral construction techniques in the case of Peru.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the 2025 Venice Biennale.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on April 08, 2025. It was updated on May 3, 2025, to include the exhibition performances video trailer. The video was produced by Cocoa and directed by Taito Kavata.
