Art

Industry Muscle Reimagines Architecture Through Trans Embodiment

Teo Ala-Ruona’s Industry Muscle brings performance, identity, and architectural critique to the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

Por: Angela Leon Cervera April 29, 2025

Industry Muscle Venice Biennale 2025 — Nordic Countries Pavilion. Åke E son Lindman

At the Nordic Countries Pavilion of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona presents Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture—a groundbreaking project that reframes architecture through the lens of trans embodiment.

The exhibition, curated by Kaisa Karvinen for the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, unfolds from 10 May to 23 November 2025, introducing a deeply somatic, speculative approach to spatial design.

Set against the canonical backdrop of Sverre Fehn’s 1962 pavilion, a touchstone of Nordic modernism, Industry Muscle stages a critical dialogue between modernist ideals and the lived experiences of bodies historically excluded from architectural narratives.

What Are the Five Scores, and How Do They Function?

Rooted in the language of performance art, Ala-Ruona’s “scores” function as speculative instructions for future architecture. They are not built forms, but conceptual prompts:

Impurity – interrogating the modernist fetish for clarity and cleanliness
Decategorisation – resisting spatial binaries and structural segregation
Performance – revealing how architecture choreographs gendered and normative behavior
Techno-body – empowering self-modification and autonomy through design
Reuse – proposing the trans body as a metaphor for circular, ecological thinking

These scores invite viewers to reconsider space as a stage for social performance, where the built environment both reflects and enforces cultural values.

How Does the Exhibition Engage the Body and Environment?

Industry Muscle incorporates performance, installation, film, and collaborative design, transforming the pavilion into an immersive scenography. Visitors are invited not just to observe, but to inhabit and disrupt the spatial scripts encoded in architecture.

The exhibition posits the trans body as an architectural tool—an entity that pushes against rigid definitions, reclaims presence, and unveils the fossil-based ideologies embedded in the built environment.

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Who Are the Collaborators Behind the Project?

Ala-Ruona works with an international, multidisciplinary team that includes:

A.L. Hu (dialogue architect)
Teo Paaer (spatial design)
Tuukka Haapakorpi (sound)
Venla Helenius (visual artist and film director)
Ervin Latimer (fashion design)
Even Minn (dramaturgy)
Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner, and Romeo Roxman Gatt (performance)

This collective approach emphasizes co-creation and challenges the hierarchy often found in architecture.

Industry Muscle at Venice Biennale 2025

Where is the exhibition located? At the Nordic Countries Pavilion, Giardini, Venice.
What are the exhibition dates? From 10 May to 23 November 2025.
Who is the lead artist? Teo Ala-Ruona, a Helsinki-based performance artist working at the intersection of ecology, somatics, and power structures.
What is the concept of “scores” in this context? Scores are instructions derived from performance art, used here as speculative frameworks for rethinking architectural practice.
Why is Sverre Fehn’s pavilion significant? It’s a modernist icon, and this exhibition reinterprets it through a radically different, embodied perspective.

Industry Muscle offers a rare synthesis of theory, activism, and architecture, placing the trans body not just as subject, but as method and medium. It is both a critique and an invitation—to rethink how we build, who we build for, and what new possibilities might emerge when architecture listens to the body.