After Belonging: Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016— A Triennale In Residence, On Residence and the Ways We Stay in Transit

With a stranger sleeping on your couch; inside the boxes at the storage facility; surrounded by the information you share in the cloud; after clearing customs at the airport; where your passport allows you to reside. Being at home entails different definitions nowadays, both within domestic settings and in the spaces defined by national boundaries under contemporary regimes of circulation.

The 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale designs the objects, spaces, and territories for a transforming condition of belonging. Global circulation of people, information, and goods has destabilized what we understand by residence, questioning spatial permanence, property, and identity—a crisis of belonging. Circulation brings greater accessibility to ever—new commodities and further geographies. But, simultaneously, it promotes growing inequalities for large groups, kept in precarious transit. After Belonging examines both our attachment to places and collectivities—Where do we belong? —as well as our relation to the objects we own, share, and exchange—How do we manage our belongings?

After Belonging consisted in six main platforms: Two exhibitions—On Residence (DogA), and In Residence (Norwegian National Museum–Architecture), an International Conference, a Publication, the Academy, and the Embassy.

After Belonging: On Residence documents the spatial conditions that shape our ways of staying in transit and the redefinition of our contemporary spaces of residence, considering the aesthetic, technical, and sociopolitical implications of this redefinition. The contributions to the exhibition gravitate around five areas: Borders Elsewhere, Furnishing After Belonging, Sheltering Temporariness, Technologies for a Life in Transit, and Markets and Territories of the Global Home.

The design reflects upon the logics and forms of organization of contemporary storage spaces, a dense and floating maze where unexpected encounters between objects, evidences and speculations occur.

After Belonging: In Residence is a speculative platform focused on a selection of ten sites around the globe that encapsulate current transformations of belonging. The exhibition presents ten commissioned reports and five intervention strategies—intended as two distinct and related architectural operations to approach those sites. In addition, five intervention strategies have been selected for the sites located in Oslo and the Nordic region, through an international open call.

The exhibition design simultaneously encloses and bridges, and privileges visual encounters between spaces. It blurs traditional limits between territories, thus undermining the idea of site as defined by national boundaries and challenging the political nature of the very site it occupies: The National Museum-Architecture.