Against Aalto : How the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale had to change into a black box for contemporary video art and how it became a symbol for artists to defeat

The Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has hosted more than 30 exhibitions since its construction in 1956. Alvar Aalto designed the space as a temporary structure to display conventional Finnish visual art, such as the work of Helene Schjerfbeck. Contemporary art exhibitions and their requirements are very different from those of the 1950s. Inevitably video art and projections require the exhibition space to become a black chamber, almost completely separated from the outside space and distorting the original spatial balance of the pavilion. This paper aims to describe how the interior space was conceived in mutual dialogue with the surroundings and how the pavilion is not an architectural object, but rather a sequential system of spatial relationships. It will aim to follow and describe all the various elements and features of the project which were pioneering at the time of the construction, and remain advanced nowadays. Three case studies will be presented in order to discuss the challenges related to the use of this precious example of Venetian and Finnish architectural heritage. This paper seeks to question what remains of Aalto beyond the symbolic content, in other words: what can we still learn from the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale?