Come-In, Spanish pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2018

Come-In was a project chosen by open competition to create an installation on the side of the Spanish pavilion for the 2018 Venice Biennale.

The winning proposal, by Ana Matos and Antonio Samaniego, was to install a large metal curtain showing the hashtags chosen by the curatorial team. Text was set in a single weight and size of Akkurat without word spaces, separating the words by using two shades of yellow.

On her website, Ana Matos writes:

The Come-In project offers a new experience that sets in parallel and joint dialogue with the Spanish Pavilion in the Biennale di Venezia 2018. It’s a project with a timely character, a fade-out and re-becoming, a constant change that suits the curatorial backbone of this edition.

Taking on account a characteristic element of the Spanish culture, and in contrast to the solid, heavy material imposed by the brick and mortar building as a massive, heavy, academic institution, we offer an alternative exit to the pavilion through the project. This seeks a fluent dialogue with todays view of “becoming” an architect. All visitants to the pavilion will have to go through this installation. (…)

It consists of a way out of the pavilion along its side through several words distributed along the time of the walkthrough, that dialogue conceptually and visually with the curatorial proposal both physical and virtual. It takes shape in a set of metallic curtains that dissolve and go back to their place with the passing of visitants. Each step through the curtains is a step through typography, word and concept as the backbone of cultural transmission. (…)

The words are written directly on the curtains, being clearly readable when still and fading out as visitors move through them. We set the individual, linear, ordered experience in contrast with a group, ephemeral one as a reference to a constant evolution.