Sleeping Beauty
Reinventing Frei Otto´s Multihalle

In the Occasion of the 16th Biennale Venice
2018

We all have images of the strangely beautiful grid shell amoebae of Otto`s Multihalle in our head. But coming to terms with the project in the context of the exhibition design to us implied diving into the process of its invention, design, construction, publication and reception as well as its continuing life today instead. We wondered: Would it be possible to stage the process instead of the object? Could we resuscitate the aesthetics of that process instead of limiting ourselves to those of the building itself? We identified a series of elements from this process, which seemed like actors in the narrative of the Multihalle and re-animated these actors for the purpose of the current exhibition. What emerges through the exhibition design is a sense of the experimentation that lies at the heart of Frei Otto`s work.