About Foreign Pavilion

Foreign Pavilion is a para-institutional initiative operated through children’s languages.

Working between architecture, digital culture, and institutional critique, the project infiltrates biennales, museums, and cities through unofficial happenings, games, meme interventions, impossible conversations, avatars, and civic rituals created with children and teenagers.

Rather than treating children as audiences or participants, Foreign Pavilion explores how young people already shape contemporary space through their own communication systems, digital behaviors, rituals, and collective imaginaries.

The project operates through temporary interventions, educational experiments, spatial occupations, and media actions developed around major cultural events and institutions.

Foreign Pavilion was initiated by the Architectural Thinking School for Children, an experimental educational platform founded in 2016 by architect Alexander Novikov and art critic Elena Karpilova.

Originally established in Belarus and now based in Lisbon, Portugal, the School uses architectural thinking as a tool for understanding the contemporary world and developing interdisciplinary ways of thinking.

Working across architecture, art, design, and education, the School develops long-term programs, workshops, research, and public projects with children and teenagers.

In 2022, the School was recognized as Best International Organisation by the Thornton Education Trust in London (Inspire Future Generations Awards).

Alexander Novikov — architect, educator, and co-founder of the Architectural Thinking School for Children.

Elena Karpilova — art critic, curator, educator, and co-founder of the Architectural Thinking School for Children.

Together they develop projects operating between architecture, contemporary art, digital culture, and experimental pedagogy.