The Fundació Mies van der Rohe with the artist Katarzyna Krakowiak and curators Marcin Szczelina and Ivan Blasi present “It Begins With One Word.Choose your own”, a new structure, both architectural and linguistic, on view at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion from 23 July to 23 August. This intervention initially intended as this year’s SonarMies proposal, moves to a new schedule and finds a new motivation from the circumstances arised by the pandemic.
Emerging out of the recent lockdown, Katarzyna Krakowiak brings forward this innovative experiment at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion that adopts the form of a sound composition as a voice of our life lived together, a question about the current state and future survival of our community, its openness, freedom and creativity.
Poster
A call for hope. Resulting from an open call that brought contributions from hundreds of people from all over the world, this constantly expanding sound piece comprises words in a wide array of languages sent in during the recent weeks. Words that the participants want to make last.
Words that they want to take responsibility for and contribute with to the life we all live together. “We wanted to find a new language, a new narrative about design and architecture through sound. I like the idea of talking about it not as a sound installation but a sound sculpture.”
Marcin Szczelina, curator.
Photo © annamas 
Photo © annamas 
Photo © annamas
The artist’s initiative transforms the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion into a site of enquiry, into a new language of architecture and architecture of language. Katarzyna Krakowiak composes an architecture that speaks – not only with words, but also with the spaces between them that open up a territory of critical enquiry on architecture, language,
our current and future community; a site of diversity and difference.
Presented at the Pavilion, the polyphonic composition is a collection of words – submitted by participants used in search of a new common language. More than 300 words have been purposely sent for this intervention in 14 different languages from around the world: Polish, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Vietnamese, English, Catalan, Italian, Russian… among others.They all form the final piece. Source and photos Courtesy of Fundació Mies van der Rohe.