Armenian Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2025 Explores AI and Cultural Memory

· March 25, 2025

By Nour Fakharany
Arch Daily

At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025, the Republic of Armenia presents “Microarchitecture Through AI: Making New Memories with Ancient Monuments.” The pavilion brings attention to the challenges facing cultural heritage today, particularly loss through climate change, conflict, and neglect, while exploring how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may offer new methods for preservation and reinterpretation.

Curated by Marianna Karapetyan and commissioned by Svetlana Sahakyan of Armenia’s Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports, the exhibition brings together a network of collaborators across digital innovation, architecture, and cultural preservation. Key contributors include Electric Architects, the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, CALFA, and MoNumEd. Together, they examine how cultural memory can be activated and extended through a dialogue between technology and traditional materials.

At the core of the exhibition is a generative AI model trained on the Armenian Heritage Scanning Project developed by TUMO, a comprehensive archive of digitized Armenian architectural sites. Rather than simply documenting existing monuments, the AI generates new spatial compositions that reinterpret the forms, motifs, and material logic of endangered or vanished structures. These digital outputs are translated into physical form by carving them into tuff stone, a material historically embedded in Armenian architecture.

This transition from digital abstraction to physical artifact is central to the pavilion’s exploration. By using AI to reinterpret architectural heritage and returning those speculative forms to a traditional material, the exhibition challenges assumptions about authorship, preservation, and the permanence of cultural identity. It considers AI not only as a tool for replication but as a medium that can prompt variation, anomaly, and new narratives.

The Armenian Pavilion also examines the broader implications of using artificial intelligence in heritage work. It raises questions about the role of machines in shaping cultural expression and the potential for technology to offer adaptive approaches to preservation. Rather than restoring monuments to a fixed historical state, the pavilion proposes a more dynamic process, one that allows for reinterpretation and transformation over time.

Bringing together digital design, craft, and experimental practice, the Armenian Pavilion contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of preservation, the agency of technology, and how cultural memory might be sustained in an era of environmental and political uncertainty.

Many other pavilions have announced their curation for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The Lebanese Pavilion, curated by the Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL), is presenting “The Land Remembers,” an exploration of ecocide and environmental healing. Additionally, the 2025 Venice Biennale, the Japan Pavilion, curated by Jun Aoki, investigates the evolving role of artificial intelligence in architecture, focusing on the concept of the “in-between.” Finally, Bulgaria’s Pavilion presents “Pseudonature,” an installation curated by Iassen Markov that examines sustainability amid artificial intelligence and human intervention.