This year, Sharon Lam attended the Venice Architecture Biennale. There’s only one thing she knew she wouldn’t see: an entry from Aotearoa. Have we given up on attending these events too easily?

On a Friday morning in the Floating City, two cappuccinos and four cream-centric pasticcinis down, I was flying with my buttcheeks clenched, high on caffeine and the adrenaline from risking such levels of dairy consumption. Destination: the Giardini. After five years of studying and four years of working in the field, my very first Venice Architecture Biennale experience awaited. 

Not only was it my first Venice Architecture Biennale, it was also my first Vernissage. “Vernissage,” of course, being French for “varnishing,” a term going back to the salon days where friends and VIPs would watch exhibiting painters varnish their hung works before formally opening to plebians.

I felt special to be one of the privileged fume sniffers until I realised that, as with all exclusive events, there is an even more exclusive event, which in this case was a pre-Vernissage Vernissage. The design It girls and nepo journo boys were already running around Venice whispering sweet terminological nothings to one another – “extraction” this and “entanglement” that – days before I was set to arrive.

This year’s biennale, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish academic, architect, and chick-lit novelist Lesley Lokko, is titled The Laboratory of the Future, heralding a thematic diptych of decarbonisation and decolonisation. This year’s participants are of an equal gender balance, over half are from the African continent and diaspora, and the average age is 43 (a dribbling baby in architect years). This makes 2023 the youngest, most diverse, and least white the Venice Architecture Biennale has ever been.

I had avoided looking at sneak preview photos, I wanted to see everything unspoiled. There was only one thing I knew I definitely wouldn’t see: an entry from Aotearoa.

At first I thought, perhaps we weren’t invited? Unlike countries such as Australia, Japan, and France, New Zealand doesn’t have a permanent pavilion in the Giardini, the historic centre of the Biennale. For the pavilion-less countries, renting and arranging a space takes a bit more admin, and much more intention. Last year, at the art edition of the biennale, New Zealand did contribute and shared a space with Albania in the Arsenale, a long stretch of former armoury buildings. This year, Albania was in the same spot, happily filling up New Zealand’s space of yesteryear with piles of scene-setting gravel. 

However, participation in Venice is largely an open invite (except for Russia), and there were no invite-snubbing barriers behind Aotearoa’s absence. To apply to be in it, there are just two prerequisites: government recognition of the entry, and enough money. And there doesn’t seem to be much money going around.

This month, Creative New Zealand (CNZ) axed funding of the Venice Art Biennale for 2024, even though the current funding only amounts to 1% of CNZ’s annual budget. CNZ contributed $455k in 2016, $780k in 2014, and an undisclosed portion of a $1.2 million International Programme fund in 2022. Next year will be the first time in two decades that New Zealand hasn’t had a national entry at the Art Biennale.

Even if CNZ had more cash to go around, the Architecture Biennale does not qualify for CNZ funding due to its architectural rather than artistic categorisation. In 2016, which was New Zealand’s last appearance at the Architecture Biennale, there was an undisclosed amount provided by the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE), and the rest came from a mix of institutional and corporate sponsors like AUT, the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) and Resene. 

Should the taxpayer cough up for Aotearoa to attend? Neither MBIE nor the NZIA provided any comment on how much the Architecture Biennale cost in previous years. If we use the previous Arts Biennale budgets for rough comparison, we could say that one architectural exhibition at Venice has a public cost of $700k. There is always the question of where public funding for the arts, culture and education should be spent, and education is currently being hit hard. Victoria University alone is facing a $33m deficit, with jobs and courses set to be cut as a result.

That $700k may not be a huge contribution to tertiary-scaled budgets, but that amount of funding could support students through smaller but direct schemes: architecture scholarships, software subsidies, or open-call ventures like the Brick Bay Folly. Arguably, that’s better than sending a select few to galavant around Italy.

But then there is the counter-argument that, since $700k does not go far anyway, spending that money on keeping up appearances internationally may be worth it. It might even attract some of the media’s perpetually faceless, perpetually lucrative, “foreign fee-paying students”. And for local, fee-dodging students, consistent funding would make the Biennale something to aspire to, knowing that there is a seat at the international table. Aotearoa doesn’t have a reputation for architecture like Sweden or Japan, and having nothing to show at what the New Zealand Institute of Architects describes as “the world’s leading architecture event” doesn’t help.

After three aperol-spritzed days of the Biennale, I could no longer read and no longer see the tote bag as anything other than a natural appendage of a human body. To see Africa at the forefront of the event, and to be introduced to, and in awe of, so many was electric: the unmatched brand of Olalekan Jeyifous’ Afrofuturism, Serge Atuukwei Clottey’s self-described “Afrogallonism,” Ibraham Mahama’s salvaged histories, to name a very small few. There were chilling exhibits, like Killing Architects’ unbelievably in-depth study and documentation of Xinjiang internment camps, and there were chill exhibits, like Latvia’s supermarket of Biennales past.

There were also the decolonial heavy-hitters. Brazil (the winner of the Golden Lion, the top prize for national pavilions) spoke earthily about decolonisation, with touch-me dirt surfaces and a film that hovered above footsteps set to forest-laden songs. Canada took an activist approach, using the aesthetics of protest to attract visitors inside, and proposing practical, no-nonsense tactics within: Land Back, mutual aid housing, gentrification tax. Australia took a more enigmatic approach with wordless video and ghostly sculpture, toying with the concept of the many Queenstowns across the world. There is a Queenstown on every continent, and each is a mark of colonial erasure. 

It was after experiencing these decolonisation-forward pavilions in a year that was celebrating them, and feeling how each country took time and care to craft such successful expressions of their own dealings with their pasts, that it really cut that Aotearoa wasn’t there to do the same. 

When you are a country with the GDP of New Zealand, spending public funds on something as decently wanky as the Venice Architecture Biennale will always be a bit problematic. The benefits, namely niche international clout, are hard to measure; soft cultural diplomacy to an audience of 300,000 at best. Perhaps the local repercussions hurt more: what does it mean to pursue a field in a country that has no representation outside itself?  

There is no news yet about whether New Zealand will be in the next Architecture Biennale. There have been examples in the past where countries have banded together to share the costs of exhibiting, like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan and Uzbekistan in 2013, and the permanent Nordic pavilion is shared by Finland, Norway and Sweden. Would Australia ever share with us? Do we even want to share with them? Could Aotearoa instead share with Fiji, Sāmoa, the Cook Islands? 

There have also been instances where a singular, highly ambitious and highly rich individual spearheaded an entire national campaign. Peter Jackson, are you reading this? Would you like to fund some Weta animatronics for Venice? Maybe some human-sized wētā riding in gondolas as a comment on how human apathy and disgust of entomological species is a gateway stance, leading to further apathy towards other humans? 

In the report leading up to CNZ’s cancellation of next year’s participation, it is stated that “while Māori artists have represented Aotearoa New Zealand at Venice, Western knowledge, artforms and institutions have historically been promoted and valued more”. This year’s Biennale celebrated the complete reversal of that sentiment. Hopefully this is an irreversible move for all future Biennales, both art and architecture. And even more hopefully, Aotearoa will get to chime in again too.

I saw Neil as soon as I was allowed. He was sitting alone on the step of his bach, roll-your-own cigarettes in yellow-stained fingers, flagon of beer nearby. Were his hands shaking, or does my imagination add that detail?

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Gavin Mouldey.

This essay discusses addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and wartime conflict. Please take care.

A bit under 70 years ago, my Uncle Neil came home from Malaya.

There are three untruths in that sentence. Not the name “Malaya”: that’s what it was called until independence in 1963. But his name wasn’t Neil; he was my uncle only in the honorary sense sometimes applied to close neighbours in the 1950s; and what he came back to wasn’t home any longer. You might add a fourth falsehood: it wasn’t really he who came back.

Neil was a regular soldier in the New Zealand Army. He’d enlisted because the local cop warned him that if he didn’t straighten himself up, he was bound for jail. He was too young to fight in the mess that was Korea, but just the right age to see off the communists who were supposedly threatening an outpost of the British Empire, and therefore the whole Free World.

The second world war had seemed such a morally pure and simple conflict. There was evil, and our boys fought against it. Now our boys were supposed to be shooting some of the Malayan Chinese who had helped them combat part of that evil, but who were now reduced to a label: Communist Terrorist, CT. The cold war was underway, and anything labelled “communist” was automatically a threat to lives in Tirau and Temuka.

By the time Neil got there, the CTs had been knocked around by better-armed Commonwealth forces, and had mostly retreated into the jungle, with the stated aim of avoiding confrontation until Malaya became independent, and they could morph into a political party.

Not good enough. Special forces were sent in to find and destroy them. Our own just-formed SAS featured; some of their commanders kept a scoreboard on which they chalked up the running total of CTs they’d killed. “The New Zealanders reached peak performance,” one report enthused. That was the climate into which Uncle Neil moved.

I don’t imagine he was fussed at first by the political nuances. I was a kid, a decade-plus younger than him, but I recall his excitement during training; his eagerness to be posted overseas. You have to remember how exotic any sort of OE seemed in the 1950s. And I recall the other young men and women who would share the front steps of his little bach behind his mother’s house during his army leaves, drinking beer, smoking, laughing, even singing. At the age of nine, I couldn’t imagine a better life.

Away he sailed, with the rest of the 1st Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, after a parade through Wellington streets. He was almost two years in Malaya: no home leave, but the bars and possibly the brothels of Kuala Lumpur and other cities. He wrote to his mother, and she read the letters to my parents. “I’m right as rain … I’m hunky-dory … I’m a box of birds.” The phrases that let her sigh and keep hoping.

There were other things in the letters. There must have been, in spite of military censorship. Because when we heard that Neil was suddenly coming home, that he’d even more suddenly arrived, my father made me wait a day before I was allowed to rush over. He went, for half an hour only, and said little when he returned. That night, I heard him and Mum murmuring behind their closed bedroom door until I fell asleep.

I saw Neil as soon as I was allowed. He was a disappointment, sitting alone on the step of his bach, roll-your-own cigarettes in yellow-stained fingers, flagon of beer nearby. He grunted a greeting, said hardly anything unless I asked a question, filled and refilled his glass. Were his hands shaking, or does my imagination add that detail? 

I do know that when I finally asked the question I’d been aching to – “Uncle Neil, did you ever kill anyone?”  – he grunted, “Don’t be so fucking silly.” I didn’t feel rebuffed; I was secretly thrilled to be party to such an adult word.

I noticed something else and told my mother about it when I got home. “Uncle Neil smells, like he’s spewed up or something.” She wheeled on me, so suddenly that I flinched. “It’s none of your business!”

Over the next weeks, we’d hear Neil talking, mumbling to himself. I couldn’t make out the words. Dad called me away from the fence where I was eavesdropping and told me I’d feel the back of his hand if I tried that again. 

Neil’s friends came a couple of times, but there was no singing. Figures from the RSA visited and that seemed to help, for a little while, anyway. I’d glimpse a hand resting briefly on the young man’s shoulder, hear a voice murmur, “You take it easy, pal”. Male tenderness, I realised, decades later.

Another month or so, and he’d begun talking to himself in the night as well, out on the bach step. Sometimes his mumbling erupted into a choked shout. My father or mother would come into my bedroom, check I was OK, tell me that Uncle Neil was taking a while to get over things.

Then after three, four months, he was gone. The windows of his bach closed, the front step empty. “He’s got a job with the rabbit board,” his mother told mine. “A really good job.”

A month later, Dad and I drove out to see him, in our little Austin A30. Maybe I nagged till my father gave in. Maybe he thought my presence might soften Neil. I remember an interminable, twisting, climbing shingle road that became a track, our car grinding over stones till the rabbiter’s fibrolite hut appeared.

A clothesline stood beside it, rabbit carcasses dangling from the wire. Neil was there, a knife in one hand, a pile of furry bodies on the ground beside him. Dad got out of the car, told me to stay where I was. As he walked towards Neil, the younger man picked up a dead rabbit. His knife moved, something spilled from the carcass, then Neil was pinning it up on the wire with the others.

My father and Neil shook hands, began talking. After ten minutes, I got out of the car, stood kicking stones across the scanty dry grass, making it clear how bored I was. More minutes, then Dad came back to me. “There’s a creek over there, son.” He pointed past the tankstand. “Go and find something to do.” I stared in protest, and he lifted a hand. “Just do it, please.”

I set off, kicking at more stones. I stopped and called out, “G’day, Uncle Neil!” I don’t think he replied. I don’t think he looked at me. 

The creek was a couple of mud holes. I dropped chunks of clay on tadpoles, practised saying “fucking” under my breath. When my father called me, he was by the car again, and Neil had gone. We bucked and scraped back down the track, and Dad didn’t say a word. 

Neil died half a dozen years later, when I was at high school. I’d lost interest in him by then. He died before his mother, and I sensed that some sort of shame of moral failure came with that fact. I don’t recall a funeral. I do recall Dad telling Mum how the rabbit board had to get a digger in to bury the hundreds of beer and whiskey bottles. 

These days, we have the words and some comprehension of what happened to Neil and others like him, in a campaign where the guerrillas they killed included teenage girls and where bombing raids on CT camps sometimes left shredded baby items among the smouldering wreckage. We eschew judgements of inadequacy or weak moral fibre now. We make some attempt to understand, to heal young men and women who’ve faced violent death and moral ambivalence. 

A 2020 survey of over 1800 past or present New Zealand military personnel suggested that at least 30 per cent suffered from stress, and probably one-third of that number are or have been afflicted by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Steps have been taken to provide financial and counselling support, under The Veterans’ Protection Act. Health providers are urged to check whether patients have a relevant military background. We try to help.

There was no help like that for my Uncle Neil. A little while back, in the aftermath of the hearings that so severely compromised Aussie Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith, I read fellow Australian Vietnam veteran Dave Morgan’s book, The Invisible Trauma: Coping With PTSD.  In Morgan’s narrative of anxiety, the inability to trust or love, bodies shaking, nightmares, flashbacks and addiction, I recognised our broken young neighbour straight away. 

I’m sorry we – I – couldn’t do anything for you, Neil. You deserved so much better.