What ?

SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness is the official Dutch contribution to Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Developed by Gabriel Fontana and curator Amanda Pinatih, the exhibition transformed the Dutch Pavilion into an alternative sports bar — a playful yet critical space that questions the rules and rituals of social interaction. Expanding on Fontana’s ongoing research, SIDELINED uses sport as a lens to expose and rethink the often-invisible dynamics of exclusion embedded in everyday spaces.

Why ?

Rather than focusing on the stadium — the traditional spectacle of sport — SIDELINED turns to the more intimate setting of the sports bar: a site of both social production and identity formation. These spaces offer belonging and connection, bringing various people together around a shared experience. Yet they can also reinforce polarising dynamics — where rivalry, group identity, and competition can lead to social division.

How ?

In response, SIDELINED presents a series of alternative sports developed by Fontana: Multiform, Anonymous Allyship, and Fluid Field. Visitors are invited to activate the space — for instance, by playing at a fluid foosball table that subverts binary thinking. The bar features “anti-trophies” celebrating values like solidarity and vulnerability, alongside video and sound works by Luca Soudant and Alice Wong, which explore how built environments and sport function as sites for political negotiation. Here, sport and architecture are reimagined as shared tools for social invention — systems through which we not only play, but learn how to live together, otherwise.