The effect was maximal, but in this show on the periphery of the Biennale, it was accomplished with economy.
“We had no one funding this project, and no institution behind us,” said Octave Perrault, a Paris-based architect and one of the curators of the Cruising Pavilion. “It was just friends helping out and funds from our own pockets.”
Mr. Perrault and the pavilion’s other curators — Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup and Charles Teyssou — landed on the idea for the show based on their shared experiences with cruising and curating. It seemed right, they said, at a time when L.G.B.T. people face enduring violence and oppression around the world, not to mention difficulties getting a gay wedding cake made in the United States.
“Cruising was a common subject for us, but we noticed there wasn’t a culture of exhibitions devoted to the topic,” Mr. Mateos, a Paris-based curator, said. “There wasn’t much interest from institutions, especially architectural ones, so we wanted to confront this subculture through architecture.”
Yet even in a Biennale inspired by the theme “Freespace,” the Cruising Pavilion stands out as an event with skin in the game.
In a manifesto that served as a guiding light for the exhibitors, the Biennale’s organizers, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, partners in the Dublin-based firm Grafton Architects, described their portmanteau as a “space for opportunity, a democratic space, unprogrammed and free for uses not yet conceived.”
That theme has a political edge, but few exhibitions go as far as the Cruising Pavilion.
The team found the venue, a former warehouse called Spazio Punch on Giudecca, away from the pressing crowds of the city’s tourist hot spots. Getting there involves a trip by vaporetto and a stroll among buildings that once comprised one of Venice’s industrial centers.
As visitors step through the entryway, they are greeted by a shadowy atmosphere evoking archetypal cruising sites. Two wood-framed towers — each three stories high and accessible by internal stairs — flank the expansive interior at the architectural and artistic heart of the pavilion.
“We didn’t want this to necessarily look like an exhibition,” Mr. Perrault said. “We wanted to get our hands dirty, to show projects and artworks, but also to work with the space directly.”
The exhibition captures some of the thrill of its subject matter. On the opening night, poppers — inhalants sometimes huffed during sex for a quick high — were passed around like hors d’oeuvres, and a D.J. played heavy beats for a fashionably-dressed crowd dancing in the balmy air.
In foregrounding the history of this overlooked place on the sidelines of the Biennale, the exhibit made a point of reclaiming queer history and made a case for its place as a topic in contemporary architecture. Still, the pavilion predominantly focuses on cruising between gay men, though other members of the L.G.B.T. community are represented, too.
But the concept for the exhibition is, by its nature, limited. The curators — who began planning the show in February, a relatively short lead time — wanted to demonstrate the balance between historical ideas of cruising and its modern forms found in hookup apps like Grindr.
For the Spanish architect Andrés Jaque, director of the Office for Political Innovation and a professor at Columbia University, who designed one of the exhibits in the Cruising Pavilion, Grindr is key to understanding how social media allows “users to create another reality that is not necessarily following the existing rules of offline space,” he said.
Mr. Jaque (pronounced HA-kay) recreated a domestic scene inside one of the towers. An inflatable mattress is installed on the plywood floor, accompanied by a MacBook laptop that screens films by his architecture firm. The videos illustrate Grindr’s use as more than a technical expedient to hooking up.
