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Sit Happens: Blueprints of Co-Existence is Piknik Works’ curatorial and spatial proposal for the Pavilion of Türkiye at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. The project begins with sitting as both an ordinary bodily act and a powerful spatial practice: a way of gathering, waiting, resting, conversing and sharing time. It proposes an inhabitable archive of the everyday gestures through which architecture happens.

Rather than seeking a universal model of togetherness, the proposal brings different cultures of sitting and gathering into a shared spatial field. Thresholds, steps, low tables, raised platforms, reclining surfaces and collective seating are abstracted into architectural fragments. These elements reconstruct the physical conditions of encounter, allowing visitors to experience how distance, orientation, posture and proximity shape co-existence.

An intense blue landscape marked with white diagrams and behavioural notations recalls the blueprint language of architectural documentation. Instead of measuring an ideal body or prescribing a standard, these drawings register bodies in relation. Visitors enter, climb, lean, sit and make room for one another, learning the installation through use. Its spatial arrangement responds to the specific qualities of the Pavilion of Türkiye in the Arsenale.

The research draws on a broad repertoire of spatial cultures, from the ancient exedra and anatomical theatre to tatami, engawa, langar, charpai and Ottoman coffee gatherings. In dialogue with architectural manuals such as Neufert’s Architects’ Data and Le Corbusier’s Modulor, the project asks which forms of embodied knowledge remain outside drawings and archives. Here, information is understood as something in formation: knowledge shaped by bodies, contact and context.

Talks, performances, workshops, gatherings and an accompanying publication are proposed as extensions of the installation. A modular, demountable aluminium framework would allow its elements to be reconfigured and reused beyond the Biennale, in Venice, Istanbul and other contexts. Prepared for the open call in June 2026, the project presents an initial spatial framework under development, rather than a finalised or realised exhibition.