Tag Archives: Architecture

Echoes of Deep Time at the Venice Biennale

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Out of the Cave overlays past and present to rethink how we face an imminent climatic future

The work Out of the Cave is born from the crossroads of paleoart and science to build a direct bridge between knowledge of our past and the decisions made today that will define our future. The centerpiece — an illustration that fuses past and present — was created by paleoartist Gabriela Amorós Seller, paleobiologist José S. Carrión, science-content specialist Federica Crivellaro and prehistoric historian Ana B. Marín-Arroyo. It is currently on display at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale and has just been published by invitation of editor Camilla Imarisio in the prestigious journal iScience. More than a reconstruction, the work blurs the boundary between art and science to awaken a collective awareness about the planet’s future.

That intent to break boundaries is the Biennale’s driving pulse: to see architecture not as mere shelter but as a transdisciplinary act of adjustment. The capacity to adapt is inscribed in us from our origins — human resilience in European Prehistory, the focus of the ERC project SUBSILIENCE — and the findings of that project serve as the foundation and inspiration for the installation.

The cave, past and present

Imagine a Cantabrian cave at the end of the Pleistocene: two women occupy the same space, separated by 35,000 years, joining everyday gestures — gathering, studying, observing — in a scene that transcends the walls of time and questions our concept of progress. That design recovers the symbolic power of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: the cave suggests how the shadows of the past and the projections of the present can confuse our perception of “progress” and conceal more sustainable ways of living. The installation invites viewers to “leave the modern cave”: to recognize that disconnection from the environment is not synonymous with improvement, and that looking back can offer useful solutions for contemporary climate decisions.

Biodiversity in detail

Beyond the symbolism, Out of the Cave functions as a scientific exercise in which every detail matters. It is a piece of paleoart: based on data such as pollen and other fossil evidence recovered from archaeological sediments, the team reconstructs landscapes and scenes with rigor and fidelity to the available evidence. The piece eschews the centrality of megafauna and presents biodiversity as a fabric of interdependent nodes — plants, fungi, insects, amphibians, birds and small- and medium-sized mammals — whose functional roles sustain interactive networks, ecological processes and human ways of life.

Emphasizing the “small,” sometimes invisible to the human eye, is not anecdotal: it is an ethical stance on how we represent nature. The fascination with the spectacular has hidden key agents of ecological resilience; the loss of those subtle webs can trigger silent collapses until they become irreversible. Out of the Cave restores visibility to those invisible pieces of the ecological puzzle and turns them into pedagogical and aesthetic evidence. At the same time, the work recovers the alimentary dimension as a vector of adaptation: an omnivorous diet and the selective use of plant and fungal resources are presented as drivers of health, cultural innovation and survival in the face of environmental changes and pathogens.

Interdisciplinarity for evolution

Framed and funded by the European project SUBSILIENCE and the projects HOMEDSCAPE (Spanish State Research Agency) and Pleistocene Paleovegetation of the Iberian Peninsula (Séneca Foundation), Out of the Cave not only draws on their scientific results but inherits the collaboration between paleoart, paleobiology, history and archaeology, demonstrating that breaking down disciplinary boundaries — and communicating science with clear, emotive aesthetic resources — is a powerful way to engage diverse audiences and generate policies and practices more informed and sensitive to ecological context.

“If looking back allows us to see trajectories that work, then knowledge of the past is a tool to choose how we face the future,” says Ana B. Marín-Arroyo, Director of the EvoAdapta Group and principal investigator of SUBSILIENCE. Out of the Cave is, therefore, an urgent invitation: to leave the modern cave — the one in which disconnection from the environment is confused with progress — and rebuild a collective responsibility toward the life we share on the planet.

Link to the article: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)01653-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2589004225016530%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Prehistory at the Service of the Architecture of the Future

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A proposal developed by the EvoAdapta group at the University of Cantabria advocates at the Venice Biennale grounding the architecture of the future in the knowledge of past human groups.

A team of researchers in Prehistory, paleoart and science communication bursts onto the international stage at the Venice Biennale 2025 with Out of the Cave, a project that connects ancestral knowledge with the challenges of contemporary architecture. United by the European project SUBSILIENCE, carried out within the EvoAdapta Group at the University of Cantabria, these experts reflect on how the housing strategies of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens in the face of climatic and environmental change can inspire sustainable solutions for the future of architecture.

Paleoartist Dr. Gabriela Amorós (University of Murcia) and science-communication specialist Dr. Federica Crivellaro (Italy) join Dr. Ana B. Marín-Arroyo — principal investigator of the ERC project SUBSILIENCE — to offer, through a series of images, a look into the past and into the living places of early humans, with a particular nod to the Aitzbitarte III cave in Rentería, Gipuzkoa. This site, excavated as part of the European project, has revealed occupation by Neanderthal groups and an extensive, rich record of early Homo sapiens in the northern area of the Iberian Peninsula.

Out of the Cave fuses science, art and memory to design urgent adaptation strategies and to rethink our relationship with nature from the very origins of our evolutionary history. “Taking part in the Venice Biennale is a unique opportunity to show that Prehistory can also be part of the global dialogue on sustainability and resilience. Our aim is to bring a scientific, but also deeply human, perspective on how we have inhabited and transformed our environment throughout our history on this planet,” emphasizes Dr. Ana B. Marín-Arroyo.

VENICE BIENNALE 2025


From 10 May to 23 November, Venice will host the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale, one of the world’s most influential cultural events. Under the motto “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” and curated by architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, this edition invites a rethinking of how we build and inhabit the planet in the context of the climate crisis. In times of adaptation, Ratti argues that architecture must rise to meet the new climatic, technological and social challenges already underway. It is about applying intelligence, empathy and our capacity to thrive amid uncertainty.

The exhibition will bring together professionals from multiple disciplines to explore architectural solutions that are not only technologically innovative but also deeply human and sustainable. Architecture can no longer be conceived in isolation: it must draw on all forms of intelligence — natural, artificial and collective — and open a dialogue across generations and fields of knowledge, from the exact sciences to the arts. The 2025 Biennale thus shapes up as a space for collective reflection, where the past, present and future intertwine to imagine better ways of living in a world that demands an urgent course correction.

OUT OF THE CAVE

Out of the Cave, selected from more than a thousand international proposals for the Venice Biennale 2025 — and one of the few Spanish entries — is an interdisciplinary project that invites a look to the past as a source of solutions to the climate crisis. “Our proposal seeks to build bridges between knowledge of Prehistory and contemporary challenges,” explains Dr. Ana B. Marín-Arroyo, project director and Professor of Prehistory at the University of Cantabria. Inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave, the work shows how archaeological remains left by human groups in caves — bones, tools, fossilized pollen and ancient DNA — make it possible to reconstruct vanished ecosystems and reveal how early humans diversified their diets and ways of life to survive under extreme conditions. “Out of the Cave explores how food, culture, the environment and sustainability have always been deeply interconnected,” adds Marín-Arroyo, stressing that current industrial systems have distanced us from nature and threaten biodiversity.