Feeling the Intangible at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

This year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s leading showcase for art and architecture dares us to look beyond what’s visible. Across its pavilions, we’re invited to sense the forces that shape our lives: sounds, rituals, memories, and values flowing beneath the surface.
In this journey, we’ll tell you about four pavilions: Luxembourg, Poland, Serbia, and Egypt, that reveal a unique way to feel the intangible, but the Biennale’s greatest lesson is not just to notice what’s invisible; it’s to recognize that what can’t be seen still carries immense weight in our society.

Sonic Investigations: Listen to Luxembourg's Hidden Sounds.

Luxembourg’s Pavilion invites you not to look, but to listen, sometimes, seeing less helps us understand more! In this space, sound becomes the heart of the experience. Curators Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch, and Alice Loumeau present Sonic Investigations, a playful journey into Luxembourg’s rich soundscape, inspired by John Cage’s 4’33’’. Here, architecture, art, and cartography join forces to challenge us: set aside our usual ways of seeing and embrace the act of deep listening.
Just outside the entrance to the Pavilion, you find a suspended parabolic loudspeaker called Long Throw; by sound artist Anthea Caddy. This isn’t an ordinary speaker: it’s designed so that you only hear its sounds when you’re standing in precisely the right spot, as if you’re tuning in to a secret auditory message: a reading by philosopher Peter Szendy, marking the transition from everyday noise to an intentional, deep listening adventure.

Immersive Sound Journey

Inside the pavilion, explore sounds from Luxembourg’s forests, cities, and natural environments, from field recordings to radical ideas in acoustic ecology and sonic warfare. The artists Ludwig Berger and Peter Szendy invite us to discover “more-than-human” voices and to understand space not as something we cross but as something we listen to. Through sound, visitors uncover the invisible connections that shape our surroundings.

Atlas-of-Things: “Lares et Penates” at the Polish Pavilion

Invisible Knowledge, Tangible Impact

Here subtle values and ancestral wisdom become architecture that makes you feel secure at home. Curated by Aleksandra Kdziorek and the Zachta National Gallery of Art, the exhibition celebrates intangible cultural heritage: whispered advice, ritual acts, and old customs, all quietly influencing our built environment. From anti-radiation and birch amulets to bowls for friendly spirits, every object tells a story of protection, belonging, and comfort.

Building by Instinct

Each object carries its own story a bowl to feed the friendly spirits (and keep the mischievous ones happy!), fire sensors and evacuation signs, legendary tools like radiesthetic rods and protective fuses. A sign saying: “Build where cattle like to rest.” brings us to mind natural wisdom: animals sense energies and dangers in the land, a tradition alive in oral culture that deserves a second thought. By respecting such instincts, the pavilion urges us to reconnect with nature’s rhythms and accept that we’re part of them.

Culture as Hereditary Knowledge 

In a world ruled by codes and technology, the Polish Pavilion asks us to value a different kind of knowledge: what is felt, intuited, and passed down. Here, architecture is not just walls and roofs, but a living, evolving relationship between people, land, and tradition.

Beyond the Material - Serbia’s Unraveling: New Spaces.

A Space Woven by Time

"A team of architects, knit designers, and electrical engineers created a spatial form. By hand, then by machine, and then by hand again, tracing the visibility of the boundary between natural and artificial intelligence." This Pavilion invites us to experience architecture as immaterial, focused on time, energy, and invisible ties. Space is divided by a fabric that gently unravels as the day goes on, a metaphor for change and impermanence.

Energy You Can See, But Can’t Hold

Solar panels power the transformation, and energy travels through visible cables, making the invisible process of energy transfer something observable. Unraveling reminds us: the material world is only a vessel for all the cultural and spiritual richness of humanity.

The Richness of the Immaterial

What connects us most, knowledge, memory, hope, and the passing of time, has no weight or form, yet fills every space we call home. The Serbian Pavilion encourages us to feel, imagine, and remember, making architecture a celebration of intangible strengths.

Measuring Responsibility: The Egypt Pavilion’s Balancing Act

We would like to talk about this pavilion making a big contrast to the other three, as Let’s Grasp the Mirage, brings the intangible back to the tangible, putting actions literally on a giant suspended balance platform. Visitors place colored blocks that stand for actions: conservation or development, mindful use or waste, each shifting the balance to reflect the real, measurable impact of our choices.

Turning Ideas into Actions

What’s usually invisible becomes tangible: every gram of fuel wasted, every space unused or resource left idle contributes. The exhibition is playful, but its message is serious: our individual footprint is real. Personal choices ripple outward, impacting the community and planet.

Sensing Balance: Light, Sound, and Impact

Balanced configurations trigger ambient soundscapes, gentle breezes, bird calls, subtle water, and sand, creating a sense of serenity and harmony in the pavilion. Light shifts, too, echoing the equilibrium. The Egypt Pavilion uses sensory elements to make intangible impacts vivid and real, reminding us that how we perceive our world shapes our responsibilities.

Mapping Progress: “Calculating Empires” and the Image of Civilization

From Simplicity to Complexity

To conclude, “Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500” stretches as a massive infographic across the Arsenale. At the bottom, history is simple and easy to follow. But as you look upward, technologies accelerate, systems intertwine, and complexity soars.

Feeling Lost in Tangible Numbers

The further you go, the more you see: progress sometimes means losing track amid new and unfamiliar inventions. Calculating Empires is a visual, nearly physical portrait of humanity’s technological journey, showing how the intangible quickens and accumulates real weight on our future.

The Value Beyond the Visible

Exploring the Biennale’s intangible worlds, from hidden soundscapes and inherited wisdom to the ethics of balance and the dizzying progress of civilization, its a reminder that what we treasure most can’t always be touched. And yet, these invisible values are what give meaning to the things we choose and create.
Jewellery, much like the pavilions at the Biennale, goes far beyond basic need. It’s a symbol, a way to carry culture, express individuality, reward ourselves, and connect with heritage. The materials might be small, but the values they hold are immense: sustainability, ethics, care, and a deep respect for both our planet and the people who make and wear each piece.
What is invisible is not inconsequential. Through every pavilion, we’re asked to feel, listen, and imagine, yet also to measure and act. Progress is exhilarating, but also humbling. As we race forward, let’s tune in to the invisible connections, and never underestimate the power and value of what lies beyond the surface.