Slow Factory x Venice Biennale 2025

In the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL) presents a groundbreaking pavilion titled “The Land Remembers”, a deeply political and poetic act of resistance against environmental violence and historical erasure. As Lebanon faces the compounded effects of war, political instability, and ecological collapse, this exhibition emerges not just as art or architecture—but as a form of advocacy and memory work.

Slow Factory, as an organization rooted in systems change and climate justice, stands in solidarity with CAL’s urgent call for accountability and regeneration. “The Land Remembers” is a rallying cry for land as both witness and survivor—one that stores memory, trauma, and the possibility for healing.

Curated by CAL (Edouard Souhaid, Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer, Lynn Chamoun), the pavilion introduces a fictional yet powerfully symbolic Ministry of Land Intelligence, complete with four departments: Ecocide Reports, Counter-Mapping, Endemic Species, and Strategic Healing. These departments form the core of a living archive—an open system collecting testimonies, strategies, and policies that confront ecocide and envision futures rooted in care.

Echoing Slow Factory’s holistic and systemic approach to environmentalism, this initiative treats the land as an entity worthy of rights, memory, and reparations. The Ministry is not confined to Venice; it exists as a mobile, conceptual framework—a practice in movement, much like the displaced communities it honors. Through large-scale installations, speculative documents, and collaborations with artists, farmers, researchers, and grassroots groups (including TheOtherDada, Green Southerners, Beirut Urban Lab, and others), the pavilion draws a throughline between violence and extraction—connecting Lebanon’s past and present to global struggles for Land justice.

In 2024, the use of white phosphorus across the southern landscape of Lebanon left entire ecosystems scorched and generations displaced. “The Land Remembers” refuses to let this violence go unnoticed. It makes visible the invisible—naming the poisons, marking the fields, honoring the groves turned to ash.

This is not just an exhibition; it is a living, breathing counter-archive. It is architecture as storytelling, as ecological reparation, as collective mourning and collective dreaming.

Slow Factory invites its global community to witness, uplift, and contribute to this vital work. The land remembers—but it also needs stewards to amplify its voice.

👉 Learn more about the pavilion at Collective for Architecture Lebanon – The Land Remembers](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/664306/collective-for-architecture-lebanon-cal-the-land-remembers/)

👉 Support the pavilion on Kickstarter here