A temporary pavilion will occupy The Spit — a small public green between a new housing development and a council waste disposal centre on the south bank of the Thames. Responding to this year’s theme Belonging, the pavilion approaches belonging not only as a social condition but also as a material practice. Conceived as a processing station, it holds discarded objects in a moment of suspension: between attachment and release, prompting reflection on how meanings, materials and urban life become entangled, and how the things we keep, use, and discard shape our experiences of place and community.

A weeklong programme of processions, talks, workshops, performances, screenings and participatory activities transform the pavilion into a temporary site for unexpected encounters and collective exploration of belonging/s as something constantly in motion and negotiated through material practices and flows.

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Day 2:

14:00 – 15:00: Held together - Workshop & performance by Adam Kaasa
Voice is not merely expression: as a social and spatial force, it produces belonging, alignment, and collective affect. Moving between performance, vocal composition, and unstable acoustic situations, Adam Kaasa explores how bodies attune to one another through rhythm, harmony, and listening — and how cohesion can emerge before it is consciously agreed upon. Can singing in sync or dissonance open new ways of thinking about transient collectivities and empathy in urban space?

15:00 – 16:00: Eels on Cocaine: Molecular Biopolitics of Mass Toxicity - Talk with Georgia Perkins
Environmental concentrations of illicit and pharmaceutical drugs are permeating aquatic bodies in the river Thames. Toxic substances move through water systems, linking urban environments, human activity and aquatic life. Addressing material cycles, toxicity and ecological entanglement, the talk situates the pavilion site within debates on environmental politics and urban life.

16:00 – 17:00: The Table of Unlearnings – A Shared Meal for Reordering - Workshop with Eleonora Antoniadou
This performative workshop turns the shared meal into a method for collective reflection, exchange, and ‘unlearning’. Working with food and temporarily displayed things, participants explore unstable material states — between care and waste, attachment and disposal, memory and utility. Through dining, conversation, and collective re-sorting, the workshop opens a sensual space to reconsider how things are valued, handled, and categorized in material and emotional routines of everyday life. The Table of Unlearnings provides a situated experience for unsettling familiar distinctions.

17:00 – 19:00: Material Afterlives - Screening and conversations with Thale Blix Fastvold & Carmen Mariscal, moderated by Sohaila Baluch
As evening sets in, the pavilion shifts into a temporary screening space for moving-image reflections on destruction, memory, ecological transformation, and material afterlives. Bringing together works by Norwegian artist and filmmaker Thale Blix Fastvold, Mexican artist and filmmaker Carmen Mariscal, and British artist Michael Landy, the programme explores how objects, bodies, and environments remain entangled in unstable cycles of accumulation, destruction, revaluation, breakdown, regeneration, and return.

The video documentation of Michael Landy’s work Break Down (2001) transforms inventory and self-erasure into a public act of systematic devaluation, while Carmen Mariscal’s (Re)membering the Ruins of Novopan (2023) approaches remains, discarded materials, and fragmented architectures through embodied forms of memory and spatial research. In I am Hydra (2021), Thale Blix Fastvold extends these questions into fluid ecologies shaped by toxicity and interspecies entanglements. Together, the films resonate with the pavilion’s own evolving material life — suspended between preservation, transformation, and release.
Following the screening Thale and Carmen will be joined by Sohaila for informal conversations and encounters in the pavilion space.