The desert teaches to give up every adjective. Then architecture becomes almost natural, accessible to everyone, to those who know the city and to those who do not know it.

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

Commissioned by the Saudi Ministry of Culture, inaugurated last November in Riyadh, this space for research, exhibition, and residence of international artists is part of a creative ecosystem in continuous expansion in which contemporary art and architecture have become strategic under the impetus of the transformations envisaged by Vision 2030.

The exhibition occupies the extraordinary ground floor wing, designed in the early 1960s by architect Carlo Scarpa. Through models, sketches, videos, drawings, photographs, objects, the space will tell the story of the building and at the same time a vision of architecture.

In the central hall, on a large floor, the imprint 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, both sensitive to the blinding and dry light that casts powerful shadows as volumes. The desert becomes a metaphor for resetting, for an architecture capable of renouncing, like traditional Saudi architecture, what is unable to interact with the "intelligence" of the place, with the history that has accumulated there. The solidified desert sand, mud, wind, shadow, everything in Diriyah Art Futures becomes contemporary material, capable of bridging the human and the digital dimension, the rigor of geometry with chance and the uniqueness of nature.