The Light Footprint. Diriyah Art Futures / Schiattarella Associati

The desert teaches us to renounce every adjective. Then, architecture becomes almost natural, accessible to everyone, to those who know the city and to those who don’t.

At the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venic,e the exhibition on the Diriyah Art Futures curated by Marta Francocci, the first contemporary hub for digital art and new media in Saudi Arabia, designed by the Italian firm Schiattarella Associati.

Commissioned by the Saudi Ministry of Culture and inaugurated last November in Riyadh, this space for research, exhibitions, and international artist residencies is part of a constantly expanding creative ecosystem, where contemporary art and architecture have become strategic under the transformative impetus of Vision 2030.

The exhibition will occupy the extraordinary ground floor wing, designed in the early 1960s by architect Carlo Scarpa. Through models, sketches, videos, drawings, photographs, and objects, the exhibition space will narrate both the building and a broader architectural vision.

At the center of the main hall, on a large table, lies the footprint of the building constructed north of the Saudi capital, in the desert region of Mena. The volumes are golden, an allusion to the architecture built in Riyadh stone and to the earth itself – both sensitive to the blinding, dry light that casts shadows as powerful as volumes. The desert becomes a metaphor for a reset – for an architecture that, like traditional Saudi architecture, renounces what cannot engage in a dialogue with the “intelligence” of the place, with the layered history it holds. The solidified desert sand, the mud, the wind, the shade: in the Diriyah Art Futures, all of this becomes contemporary matter, capable of connecting the human and digital dimensions, the rigor of geometry with the randomness and unrepeatability of nature.

For the Schiattarella architects, dialogue is crucial. If the physical building takes center stage in the middle of the room, on the walls and in the adjacent room it’s the nebulous web of ideas that shaped it which takes over – a long conversation that seems to carry on autonomously between matter and light, void and mass, memory and future, built space and nature.

The exhibition also features the presence of an extraordinary photographer. In 2023, Paolo Pellegrin, one of the most awarded photographers in the world, was in Riyadh, inside the “small universe” of the Diriyah Art Futures construction site. Like the architects, Pellegrin focuses on the thresholds where light and shadow reveal the dynamism of the building, constantly shifting, where matter becomes “deep.” “I like to feel the gesture of the architect digging,” he says. The exhibition presents a series of his compositions, capturing buildings still under construction, men at work, the wadi – all part of a “potentially endless conversation.”

The Diriyah Art Futures is among the projects invited to the 2025 Venice Biennale (Corderie dell’Arsenale), as part of the group exhibition Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. curated by Carlo Ratti.