A Biennale Without a Centre

Yuki Morimoto spent eleven days this autumn moving between a converted rice warehouse outside Chiang Mai, a shipping terminal in Rotterdam repurposed for a single weekend, and a black-box theatre in Nairobi that hosted three days of talks streamed to the other two sites. There was no opening gala, no single ribbon to cut, no city she could point to and call the biennale's home. That was the point.

Design without an address

The event, organised under the banner Terrain, split its programme across four continents deliberately, arguing that the traditional biennale model — a flagship city, a headline pavilion system, a jury awarding a single grand prize — has become a monument to travel budgets rather than to ideas. Curator Ama Boateng, who led the Nairobi leg, told Morimoto that centralising a global design conversation in one city inevitably centres one set of assumptions about what counts as design. "You cannot talk seriously about climate-adaptive housing," Boateng said, "if the only people in the room flew in from wherever the biennale happened to land this year."

The decentralised model produced real friction. Time zones meant the Rotterdam and Chiang Mai sessions overlapped awkwardly with Nairobi's, and at least two panels ran with half the intended participants after visa delays kept designers from Lagos and Manila from making their connecting flights — a problem the organisers had built the model to solve but could not fully escape. Bandwidth dropped out twice during the streamed keynote from Chiang Mai, a reminder that decentralisation trades one kind of inequality for another.

What actually got shown

Despite the friction, the work on display argued for itself. A modular flood-response housing unit developed by a studio in Ho Chi Minh City sat alongside a Rotterdam team's water-retention plaza design and a Nairobi collective's low-cost cooling material made from recycled ceramic waste — three responses to climate stress developed with no knowledge of each other, arriving independently at similar material logic. Morimoto found that convergence more persuasive than any curatorial statement: separate cities under separate pressures were solving adjacent problems in adjacent ways, without a biennale telling them to.

A biennale without a centre stops being a showcase and starts being a comparison.

The financial case for the model is also blunt. Terrain's total production cost, spread across four modest venues instead of one flagship site, ran at roughly a third of what a single-city biennale of comparable scale typically requires, according to organisers who shared budget figures with Morimoto on the condition that specific sponsor names stay off the record. That difference freed money for translation services and travel grants for designers from smaller studios who would otherwise never appear on a biennale programme.

The unresolved question

Whether Terrain becomes a template or a one-off experiment depends on whether its funders — a mix of design foundations and two city cultural offices — see the fragmented format as manageable in future editions. The model asks more of attendees, who must choose a site or follow a patchwork stream rather than simply showing up. It asks more of organisers, who lose the simplicity of a single logistics operation. What it offers in return is a design conversation that does not default to wherever the plane tickets are cheapest from Europe. Morimoto left Nairobi convinced the format's flaws were the ordinary flaws of anything genuinely trying to redistribute attention rather than just relocate it — imperfect, uneven, but pointed at the right problem.