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During the opening days of the Venice Biennale, Golden Goose opened the doors of HAUS Venice in Marghera with an installation conceived alongside Playlab Inc. — an evolving space where participation, material dialogue and collective imagination took shape in real time.
BY BARBARA SPINELLI | HAPPENINGS | 12 MAY 2026
During the opening days of the Biennale, Venice becomes a suspended landscape where disciplines, gestures and ideas dissolve into one another. It was within this electric atmosphere that Golden Goose opened the doors of HAUS in Marghera for an interactive installation conceived with Playlab Inc., transforming the industrial space into a living environment shaped by participation, movement and collective imagination.
A panel discussion moderated by Cabana Magazine was a natural extension of the installation itself: not as a search for conclusions, but as an open reflection on process, memory and transformation. Joining the discussion were Antonio Monfreda, Soledad Twombly, Lola Schnabel, and Playlab Inc. founders Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin; all voices working across photography, textiles, painting, ceramics and spatial practice.
What emerged throughout the conversation was a shared sensibility: the idea that art, craft and culture are never separate languages, but overlapping worlds constantly informing one another. At the center of the discussion was the concept of fragments becoming form.
For Playlab Inc., whose work often transforms individual participation into collective experience, the installation functioned as an evolving organism rather than a finished object. Visitors were invited to contribute through small gestures that, once layered together, gradually generated a larger shared landscape. Meaning emerged not through singular authorship, but through accumulation and interaction.
This notion of collective construction resonated deeply with photographer Antonio Monfreda’s reflections on framing and perspective. Photography traditionally suggests a singular gaze, yet within this context the image became porous: shaped by multiple hands and multiple viewpoints. The conversation moved toward a broader question: whether identity exists independently, or only through relationships and dialogue with what surrounds it.
For designer and collector Soledad Twombly, the focus shifted toward textiles and material memory. Her practice has long explored fabrics as vessels of geography, time and cultural inheritance, fragments of art history carrying traces of collective knowledge. Textiles, like craft itself, are born from the hand, yet rooted in centuries of shared techniques and imaginaries. Within the installation’s logic, this tension felt particularly resonant. Every larger vision begins with something tactile, personal and incomplete.
Alberto Magri
Oxana Bondarenko
Cory Juneau
Golden Goose at HAUS Venice
Maximilian Magnus
Barbara Spinelli, Soledad Twombly, Antonio Monfreda
Silvio Campara
Golden Goose at HAUS Venice
Yukako Yamashita & Marius Yo
Arjun Kapoor
Artist Lola Schnabel introduced another dimension to the conversation through her reflections on rhythm and unpredictability. Speaking about her former life in New York, and now in Sicily, she described how certain places allow for a slower, more instinctive way of making — increasingly rare within a culture dominated by acceleration and digital immediacy. Her ceramic practice embraces uncertainty and transformation, allowing materials themselves to dictate part of the final form. Like the installation at HAUS, her work resists rigid boundaries, remaining open to accident, intuition and change.
Across all voices, one idea remained constant: culture today is increasingly shaped not by fixed categories, but by fluid processes and intersections. The installation at HAUS embodied precisely this condition. Through participation, layering and collective attention, fragments became form, not static, but continuously evolving.
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