dutch pavilion’s ‘sidelined’ at venice architecture biennale 2025
The Dutch Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, commissioned by Nieuwe Instituut, reimagines the typology of national representation as an experimental sports bar. Curated by art historian Amanda Pinatih and driven by the radical sports-based research of designer Gabriel Fontana, SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness uses the universal language of sport to challenge social norms and binary thinking. Transformed by artists Koos Breen and Jeannette Slütter into a hexagonal field of fluid interaction, the pavilion becomes a speculative arena, where identity, belonging, and power dynamics are up for play. Fontana’s alternative games, Multiform, Fluid Field, and Anonymous Allyship, reject traditional team structures, uniforms, and rules, turning competition into collaboration.
‘Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer phenomenology, we have intentionally queered this space – transforming it into a sports bar that serves as a model for new modes of togetherness,’ Amanda Pinatih tells designboom in an exclusive interview. ‘This is a welcoming space where fluidity and experimentation can lead to a sense of empowerment for visitors. At our sports bar, sports is a tool for bridging diverse communities.’ Players wear shifting jerseys, compete without defined teams, and interact in fields that morph in real time. The goal? Not victory—but connection. ‘By deconstructing the spaces, uniforms, and tools of sport, we can question the conservative values that these elements reproduce and challenge their role in shaping identity,’ explains Gabriel Fontana. ‘Rather than seeing design as merely functional in sports, we will explore how it can be used to radically rethink the values and norms we want to promote on and off the field.’ Amanda Pinatih and Gabriel Fontana explain their approach in depth—keep reading for the full conversation.
all images by Cristiano Corte, unless stated otherwise
queering the rules of play inside a sports bar
Set inside a sports bar filled with queer gym memorabilia, unconventional foosball tables, and screen recordings from Venice’s Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo, the pavilion challenges how we socialize, cheer, and identify with others.
‘We see the sports bar as a place where people can feel welcome or not. As a site of both social production and identity formation, sports bars unite diverse communities around shared experiences, fostering a sense of belonging,’ explains curator Amanda Pinatih. ‘They bridge social gaps by bringing together a wide variety of people, cutting across social, economic, and cultural divides.’ With contributions from artists like Luca Soudant and Alice Wong, the exhibition becomes a living archive of voices, sports bar owners, architects, and community builders, offering a nuanced take on what inclusive design can mean.
Responding to the Biennale’s 2025 theme Intelligens, SIDELINED proposes that architecture isn’t just about buildings—it’s about behavior. ‘Rather than positioning queerness solely as an identity, I treat it as a method—one that challenges norms and creates space for different ways of being, relating, and cooperating,’ designer Gabriel Fontana shares with designboom. ‘These games remove fixed roles and visible groupings, disrupting the standard logics of competition and hierarchy.’ As cheers echo through this queered bar, the Netherlands Pavilion proves that even the most familiar arenas—like sport—can become experimental grounds for empathy, solidarity, and social transformation. Dive into our full interview to hear how architecture meets activism on the field.
the Netherlands Pavilion hosts the electric buzz of a reimagined sports bar | image by Temet.studio
interview with gabriel fontana and amanda pinatih
designboom (DB): What inspired you to frame the pavilion as a queered sports bar, and how does this unconventional setting challenge or expand conventional notions of community and belonging?
Amanda Pinatih (AP): Sport is a universal language. It’s deeply relatable, emotionally charged, and widely accessible. Regardless of your background, most people have some connection to sport, whether through education, participation, fandom, or cultural exposure. This makes it a powerful medium to engage diverse audiences. For the Biennale, Gabriel and I translated his research on sports and society into the field of architecture. While he already treats sport as an architectural system, we felt that the sports bar was an ideal socio-political space for exploring the social dynamics of sport and a great place to watch his alternative team sports Multiform, Fluid Field and Anonymous Allyship.
We see the sports bar as a place where people can feel welcome or not. As a site of both social production and identity formation, sports bars unite diverse communities around shared experiences, fostering a sense of belonging. They bridge social gaps by bringing together a wide variety of people, cutting across social, economic, and cultural divides.
However, this sense of belonging can come at the expense of promoting polarisation. Sports bars can indeed be seen as a microcosm of exclusionary dynamics, reflecting how group identities, rivalry, and opposition can lead to social division. This phenomenon is particularly visible during sporting events, where fans align themselves with specific teams, creating a sense of ‘us vs. them’ that mirrors broader societal polarisations, often encouraging strong in-group loyalty among supporters of the same team while simultaneously promoting out-group opposition to rival fans. By examining how sports bars facilitate interactions among diverse groups—while simultaneously fostering divisions—we can gain insights into the architectural and spatial strategies necessary for creating inclusive public spaces.
curated by Amanda Pinatih and driven by the radical sports-based research of Gabriel Fontana
DB: Your games, Multiform, Anonymous Allyship, and Fluid Field, disrupt the traditional structures of competition. What specific social patterns were you aiming to unlearn or rebuild through these designs?
Gabriel Fontana (GF): Multiform reinvents sports as a form of queer pedagogy by challenging fixed categories and showing us how we can experience the world in a nonbinary way. Transformable uniforms are at the heart of Multiform, disrupting the traditional assumption of a stable team. These uniforms and a three-sided sports field function as tools for disorientation and reorientation, giving players a direct way of experiencing the impact of prevailing norms of identity, community and inclusion. By allowing players to take on fluid identities, Multiform challenges how we conceive of the ‘other’, opening up possibilities for new relations and connections.
Anonymous Allyship explores how belonging influences feelings, behaviour and performance in a group. The goal is to provide a tangible experience of both inclusion and exclusion, revealing the impact of social connection or alienation on individuals and society. In Anonymous Allyship, players come from different generations and communities without traditional visual cues to distinguish their teammates. Everyone wears the same jersey, creating an outside appearance of a single, unified team. However, hidden clues discreetly given players individually create a new dynamic. The first moments of play are filled with uncertainty: To whom do I pass the ball? Who are my teammates? By noticing and remembering how others attack or defend, the players start to understand which team they belong to. From there, patterns start to form.
Fluid Field challenges the binary standards that sporting fields place upon the body: male or female, adult or child, as able-bodied or experiencing limitations. In response, the game takes place on a playing area that is constantly changing shape and dimensions. Projected onto the ground, the pitch shrinks and grows into a myriad of shapes, challenging players’ ability to adapt to a situation in constant flux. The players thus find themselves taking part in a form of social choreography, questioning whether it’s the field that is shaping the players’ actions—or if it’s they who are pushing the space’s boundaries.