Netherlands 2025

Title: Sidelined
Commissioner: Aric Chen, Nieuwe Instituut
Curator: Amanda Pinatih
Exhibitors: Gabriel Fontana with Alice Wong and Luca Soudant

The pavilion explores how architecture can challenge exclusionary social norms to create spaces that foster diverse forms of coexistence. It presents an alternative sports bar, continuing designer Gabriel Fontana’s investigation of social dynamics through the lens of sport, conceived as an architectural system in the ways it regulates spaces, bodies, and behaviour.

Sport is reimagined as a means to a more inclusive, pluralistic and imaginative future. The exploration is extended from the playing field to architecture to examine how built spaces can be hostile or hospitable. Implementing queering theories and methodologies in the transformation of the iconic space of the sports bar, the pavilion seeks to suggest a future for architecture that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative, forming new modes of togetherness.

In the space, designed by Koos Breen and Jeannette Slütter, visitors are encouraged to participate by playing a game or watching others play, and to observe how their relationship to familiar spaces of architecture might shift.