July 2022
Down to Earth

Unified Geologic Map of the Moon, 1:5M, 2020. © United States Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute.

Two researchers of the Master in Architecture Programme, Francelle Cane and Marija Maric have been unanimously selected by the jury to design the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. Their winning project, titled "Down to Earth" critically unpacks extractive practices of space mining through the question of resources.

The competition has been organised by kultur lx—Arts Council Luxembourg, with the jury constituted of Michelle Friederici (President of the Ordre des Architectes et des Ingénieurs-conseils Luxembourg), Cécile Fries-Paiola (Architect, sociologist and lecturer at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture of Nancy), Claudine Hemmer (Advisor for visual arts and architecture, Ministry of Culture Luxembourg), Nikolaus Hirsch (Artistic Director of CIVA – Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, Brussels), Sara Noel Costa de Araujo (Araujo / Studio SNCDA – Architect and Curator of the Luxembourg Pavilion 2021), Guittou Muller (Architect and Representative of LUCA), and Hélène Doub (Representative of Kultur | lx).

Francelle Cane is an architect and a PhD candidate at the University of Luxembourg. Her practice focuses on transversal and multidisciplinary research activities tied to the question of the ruin: she advocates for a critical spatial design approach, concentrating on issues such as late capitalism, spatial policies or the man-altered landscape. She studied at the National School of Architecture of Versailles and the TU Berlin.

Marija Maric is an architect, researcher and postdoctoral research associate at the Master in Architecture programme, University of Luxembourg. In 2020, she obtained her doctoral degree from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Marija’s research is organised around the questions of architecture, real estate, media, and the production of built environment and urban imaginaries in the context of global capitalism and global flow of information.