By valorizing a craft practice traditionally associated with women, Izaskun Chinchilla Architects invites visitors to reflect on the historical absence of female authors in utopian thought. The project is presented as an ephemeral meeting space, symbolizing the struggles for equality, justice, and creativity in the urban sphere, and "embroidering" the boundaries between tradition and innovation, past and future.
Using recycled materials recovered from the sea, the pavilion becomes a manifestation of protest, a vindication of memory as a collective imaginary that promotes new practices to build the future, stitch by stitch.
Lightness and denunciation: embroidery as a feminine utopia by Izaskun Chinchilla Architects. Photograph by Mikel Blasco. Image courtesy by Mugak/2025.
Project description by Izaskun Chinchilla Architects
The design revives embroidery, a tradition historically associated with care and female artisanal production, and elevates it to the status of an architectural and political tool. Its approach not only reflects on the historical absence of female authors in utopian thought, but also asserts their presence through the representation of a structure that symbolizes the struggles for equality, justice, and creativity in the urban sphere, and "embroiders" the boundaries between tradition and innovation, past and future.
The taut textile structure, with its curved and lightweight forms, can accommodate various activities. It plays with tension and transparency to create an ephemeral and symbolic meeting space. It will also employ 3D printing technology, an approach aligned with sustainability and the objectives of the Biennial.
"The project highlights utopia from a feminist perspective, making visible how traditional practices associated with women, such as embroidery, can be a means to imagine and build alternative futures."
The structure pays homage to symbols such as the Tree of Gernika, the kaikus, and the railing of La Concha, integrating frames that capture civic dreams and protests about touristification, housing, inequality, and biodiversity loss. Conceived as an open, flexible, and circular space, it allows for communal embroidery, hosting assemblies, screenings, and debates, and enabling collective childcare.
The materials are recycled: boat sails and plastics recovered from the sea. Each piece becomes a medium for memory and protest, reminding us that embroidery is about narrating and transforming. The pavilion asserts the political value of manual and participatory work over top-down discourses and technocratic solutions. It doesn't promise paradise, but invites us to build it, stitch by stitch, from the common ground. A utopia woven by many hands, where imagining other forms of city is also imagining new ways of being together in the world.
