Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh will design the 2023 Serpentine Pavilion, the London gallery has announced, with a ‘celebratory’ concept that encourages visitors to gather ‘around the same table’.
The concept for the mostly timber pavilion, dubbed À table, riffs on the French call to eat together and the toguna huts of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, which are spaces for community members to talk. The pavilion will feature a suspended pleated roof supported by ‘sustainably sourced timber ribs’.
Ghotmeh explains: ‘À table is an invitation to dwell together, in the same space and around the same table. It is an encouragement to enter into a dialogue, to convene and to think about how we could reinstate and re-establish our relationship to nature and the earth.’
Its interior will be furnished with tables that look like a ‘skeleton’, while the structure itself will be built with sustainable materials and a ‘re-mountable’ design.
Ghotmeh was born in Lebanon and works in Paris. This will be her first UK project, and ‘A Table’ will be the 22nd edition of the annual commission, launched by the Serpentine Galleries in 2000 with a pavilion by Zaha Hadid.
Social artist Theaster Gates designed the 2022 pavilion, dubbed Black Chapel, as a space for reflection and ecstasy. Read more about Gates’ remarkable space.
