Sidelined: A Space to Rethink Togetherness, the Dutch Pavilion at Biennale Architettura 2025

16 May 2025 | Venice by Venezia

As part of the Dutch Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, "SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness" explores sport as an architectural and social system that regulates spaces, bodies, and behaviors. Approached through a queer lens, the project challenges conventional norms related to gender, identity, and collective dynamics, and reimagines how we come together in public spaces.

We spoke with social designer Gabriel Fontana and curator Amanda Pinatih (Design & Contemporary Art Curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam) about their shared research into sport as a tool for inclusion, and the process behind the participatory performance held at the Pier Luigi Penzo Stadium in Venice.

Venice by Venezia: How did your collaboration start, and how did it develop into the SIDELINED project?

Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih: Our collaboration began through a shared interest in exploring how design can create spaces for critical reflection and social transformation. Amanda, as a curator, is always seeking new ways of sharing knowledge – approaches that move beyond traditional exhibition formats. What was immediately compelling in Gabriel’s work was the way he uses sport and play as tools for embodied learning. Rather than conveying ideas solely through text or image, his work not only proposes a new lens through which to see the world, but also new ways to experience it.

From there, the dialogue between us grew organically. We saw the potential to combine Gabriel’s experimental sports games – designed to question the notions of identity, community, and belonging – with a curatorial framework that could amplify their impact. This led us to develop SIDELINED as an experience-based exhibition: an immersive space where sport becomes a metaphor for the social field, and where visitors are not just spectators, but active participants in reimagining togetherness. The project developed through continuous exchange – between theory and practice, body and space, play and politics – ultimately transforming the Dutch Pavilion into a living laboratory for new modes of coexistence.

Gabriel, how did sport become central to your research on inclusivity and social cohesion? Was there a specific moment, experience, or insight that led you to see sport as an effective way to explore these themes?

Gabriel Fontana: As a queer kid, I often felt unwelcome in sports spaces. I was good at it, but those environments – often charged with hypermasculinity – never felt like places where I could truly belong. Physical education class was my first real encounter with a space, that based on my gender, prescribed exactly how to behave: how to move, how to interact, how to engage with others. It introduced me to a rigid, normative system that left little room for difference.

At home, my experience with sport was quite different. My father was a high school sports teacher, but also taught film history – an unusual and telling combination. He wasn’t the stereotypical sports guy: he never watched games or talked about them much. His way of being resisted categorization, and that quietly shaped how I learned to question expectations.

These early experiences sensitized me to how sport operates as a microcosm of society. I began to see it as a system of social reproduction – one that instills and reinforces norms, values, and hierarchies. Sport is never just about physical activity; it’s deeply cultural and political. What drives my work is exploring how these systems can be disrupted. How can sport be reimagined as a space for alternative ways of being, moving, and relating? For me, it’s about using play to envision different social possibilities.

For the performance, you chose the Pier Luigi Penzo stadium as the venue and involved the Women's team of Venezia FC. Amanda, from a curatorial perspective, in a city like Venice – characterized by campi, public squares traditionally used also as spaces for play – what led you to choose a stadium as the venue for this performance?

Amanda Pinatih: Venice’s campi are indeed beautiful, historically rich sites of play and community, but we were drawn to the stadium for its symbolic and spatial intensity. The Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo allowed us to engage directly with the architectural typology that most powerfully embodies the regulatory force of sport. It’s a space where bodies, emotions, and behaviors are collectively choreographed – and at times, polarized.

Additionally, it was important for us to root the project in the specific locality of Venice. For our event at the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo, we sought to bring together a diverse group of individuals from across the city, offering locals the opportunity to participate in this alternative form of team sport. The response to our open call was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Participants of all backgrounds – women from the local sewing collective Agris Arte, LGBTQ+ sports enthusiasts, players from the professional team Venezia FC Femminile, students from Università Iuav di Venezia, and members of the Associazione Sportiva Sant’Elena – came together to play.

The presence of the women’s team from Venezia FC was especially meaningful to us. They represent an evolving narrative around gender and representation in sport. Hosting them in the stadium allowed us to create a space where the local context of Venice could meet broader global conversations about inclusion, visibility, and transformation in athletic culture. It wasn’t about erasing the history of the stadium, but about opening it up to new possibilities – reclaiming it as a site of reimagined belonging.

What dynamics emerge from these performances? Have you noticed any recurring patterns or phenomena in how participants interact and occupy space?

Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih: Absolutely. When we strip away familiar codes – like opposing team colors or static roles – participants often enter a state of disorientation at first. But that quickly transforms into curiosity, playfulness, and vulnerability. People begin to move differently, to relate differently. They look for new forms of alignment, sometimes through intuition, sometimes through empathy. One recurring pattern is a shift from competition to collaboration – not because we force it, but because the system no longer rewards winning as a singular goal. Another is the way people start to listen to each other more attentively, using subtle cues to navigate the game. These performances reveal how deeply we’re conditioned by the systems we inhabit – and how liberating it can be to step outside of them. What emerges is not chaos, but a different kind of order – one based on mutual understanding rather than hierarchy.

Based on this research, what role can sport play in fostering inclusivity and social cohesion, and how can architecture either facilitate or hinder these processes?

Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih: Sport has an extraordinary potential to bring people together–but only if we interrogate the structures that define it. As it stands, mainstream sport often reinforces social binaries: men vs. women, winners vs. losers, us vs. them. But when we redesign the rules, the games, even the spaces in which sport takes place, we begin to unlock sport’s capacity as a tool for empathy, solidarity, and mutual recognition.

Architecture plays a parallel role. It can either promote connection or enforce separation, depending on the values and intentions embedded in its design. In SIDELINED, the Dutch Pavilion becomes such a space. By queering the sports bar, we reframe architecture not as a neutral backdrop, but as an active participant in shaping social dynamics. Together, sport and architecture can be reimagined as shared tools of social invention –systems through which we not only play, but also learn how to live together differently.


The Dutch Pavilion is open to visitors until 23 November 2025 at Giardini – more info at labiennale.org

Discover more about the project at sidelined2025.nl

Photo credit: GabrielFontana Anonymous Alleyship, photo by Giacomo Bianco