Agency For Better Living, Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Architettura 2025, Installation view – Courtyard;
Francesca Pionati and Tommaso Arnaldi, Unexpected Homes, 2025.
Photo credit: Hertha Hurnaus.

UNEXPECTED HOMES
2K Video + AI generated video 5'28''

AI artist Vittoria Maria Dal Maso (700x100)
Music and sound design Sofia Sanseverino (Akii)
Drone operator Alejandro Cifuentes
Color correction Andrea Carbonaro
Voices Sara Moutawakil and Margit Sanseverino

Produced by Biennale Architettura 2025, Austrian Pavilion

1. The Outside: Exclusionary Urban Policies.

The first chapter focuses on how more than a century of exclusionary urban policies, combined with the accelerated capitalist proliferation of spaces dedicated to production and consumption, led to the abandonment and subsequent reappropriation of an increasingly large number of buildings in Rome by housing rights movements. AI was used to explore ways of representing the simultaneous exuberant presence of these sites and their exclusion from institutional and legal apparatuses.

2. The Threshold: A House is not a Closed System.

The second part of the film examines housing occupations in relation to their spatial surroundings. Identifying external indicators of habitation that signal the ongoing presence of residents—electric cables, drying racks, antennae, water heaters, and security boots—the work reflects on natural and social resources needed to sustain and reproduce life.

3. The inside: Resisting a Building’s Function.

Which material and symbolic interventions are necessary to make a place home? How does inhabiting an architecture not designed for living alter one’s perception of space and the world? The third chapter develops in dialogue with Sara Moutawakil, a 17-year-old resident of one of the housing occupations in Rome, who aspires to become an architect. The film reflects on the intertwining between small-scale, ephemeral modifications carried out by the occupants—architectural elements that support each other without any infrastructural support or cohesive planning—and the large-scale structural interventions that remain largely inaccessible without major capital investments.

Agency For Better Living, Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Architettura 2025, Installation view - Rome;
Francesca Pionati and Tommaso Arnaldi, Unexpected Homes, 2025.
Photo credit: Luca Capuano.