Project
R—S003
Client
Better Shelter
Where
Partners and donors · Biennale Gift Shop, Venice
When
December 2024 · Venice 2025
003
R—S003
The exhibition, small enough to take home.
When the exhibition came down, What Makes a Home became something you could hold: Better Shelter’s holiday greeting to the partners and donors who fund the shelters.
The box takes its cue from the cartons the shelters themselves arrive in — raw, unbleached board, stapled at the corners, nothing on the lid but the title, recessed and foiled in blue. Inside: a letter, an essay, a book and a building.
The book holds thirteen of the exhibition’s photographs, from Syria, Chad, Türkiye, Brazil and India, and six of its stories on a smaller pamphlet of pale blue paper, sewn into the same spine.
One of the stories is that of nineteen-year-old Mohammad, who turned his shelter into a cinema for the camp’s children. The miniature shelter, laser-cut into the wood panel, is his, satellite dish and all.
The final piece is an essay written for the box: Home, by Marwa al-Sabouni, writer and architect in Homs, Syria. It is the box’s conscience: a shelter, however well designed, is not a home — “home must be permanent, it cannot be temporary.”
The box was sent out to Better Shelter’s partners in December, and sold in the Biennale Gift Shop in Venice from the day the Biennale opened, 10 May 2025.
One of the six
Mohammad’s television
“19-year old Mohammad pulls out a generator from his shelter and drags it through the sand across the courtyard. He briefly disappears, then returns with an extension cord which lets him move the generator even further away, so the engine’s sound won’t drown out the TV. After checking the diesel level, he gives the generator’s pull cord a forceful tug, and its distinctive rumbling starts. Within seconds, children start appearing through an opening in the grass fence surrounding the courtyard—they all know that the sound of the generator means that a movie is about to start.” — Farchana, Chad. From the booklet
Credits
Creative director & copywriter
Carl Ewald Jannerfeldt
Essay
Marwa al-Sabouni
Photographs
Björn Wallander, Ci Demi, Ali Haj Suleiman
Box photography
Viktor Sjödin
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R—S004