The National Pavilion United Arab Emirates at La Biennale di Venezia in collaboration with the Curator’s Collective, launches an international open call for Design students to propose a bench design for installation in Venice during the summer of 2021. More information about the competition here.

"What I expect and what I am working on is to create discussion. To open up people’s minds, either Hungarians, people from the region or people from other parts of the world. To help them understand these problems and recognize their own problems, reflected by ours."

Architektuul's interview with Dániel Kovács, one of the Othernity's curators. Read the full article here.

“Involving foreign architects was a cornerstone for Othernity. It reaffirmed our conviction that our contemporaries, who have a similar cultural background but are not emotionally attached to specific locations, are able to come up with new, unprecedented proposals. [But] this can also be interpreted as a kind of critique of the genre of the national pavilion: we think that good solutions can only be expected by stepping beyond the usual national, political, and social boundaries.”

Read the full article of Calvert Journal here.

"Mit Hilfe des architektonischen Versuchs der „Andersheit“ wollen wir versuchen, einen kollektiven Optimismus an die Stelle der gegenwärtigen Neurose treten zu lassen. Die Idee kam auf, als wir mit ArchitektInnen aus neun verschiedenen Ländern erstmals zusammensaßen und feststellten, dass die Verständigung untereinander recht einfach war, weil wir alle einen vergleichbaren Hintergrund haben, historische und soziale Erfahrungen teilen."

Bostjan Bugaric interviewed Dániel Kovács, one of the Othernity's curators. Read the full article on taz.

"The project’s strength lies in the critical revision of architecture created behind the Iron Curtain. What are we to gain from revisiting the past? Not only can we re-discover values that need to be preserved, but also work out practices that would allow for the adaptation, modification, and revitalisation of our modernist heritage. Contemporary interpretations of past traditions are a collection of possible spatial scenarios."

Read the full article and interviews with A-A Collective and BUDCUD, two of the Othernity's participants on Architecture Snob.

KÉK - Contemporary Architecture Centre's Walking Tours have announced the new season of the program series, which invites the audience to visit the building of Othernity. The first stop is the Calvinist Church of Külső-Kelenföld which is going to recondition by Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop at La Biennale di Venezia. The languages of the events are Hungarian. For more information visit the event's site.

"The title and, at the same time, the concept, both allude to a kind of integration: we can find a common denominator for the heritage of the socialist-modernist era and the built heritage of the turn of the century or the era preceding it. We think if we started talking about this in a broader scope and exploring it from more angles, it would facilitate this process a lot."

Hype and Hyper's interview with the curators of Othernity about the past year, the background of the exhibition and the concept as well as their plans for the future. Read the full article here.

Monocle On Design interviewed Szabolcs Molnár, co-curator of Othernity at La Biennale di Venezia. Listen the podcast about the exhibition here.

Othernity, the exhibition of the Hungarian Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale opened today, in a virtual form this year. You can watch the video of the event below.

“Othernity is the first exhibition project in the history of the Hungarian Pavilion based on wide-ranging international collaboration. At the same time it is a collaborative practice, research on heritage protection and the expression of our conviction that the architecture of the future can be built on the past in order to reach due resilience, adequate sustainability and strong identity bonds.”

You can read the article of e-flux here.