Daniele Belleri-Jaforte

Daniele Belleri-Jaforte is an editor, curator, and strategist based in Helsinki, with an interest in the connections between architecture and urbanism with geopolitics and technology. In 2024-25, he led the curatorial team of the main exhibition of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. He has been a partner at the design firm CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati for almost a decade. He serves on the board of directors of Paimion Parantola Oy, the company overseeing the renovation of Alvar and Aino Aalto's Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, and he is an academic visitor at the School of Architecture at Aalto University.
His career has unfolded between Europe, Asia, and the US. He trained in political science and contemporary history and began his career as a journalist in Milan’s Reuters newsroom at the peak of the eurozone crisis, while later serving as design correspondent for Wired Italia magazine. He studied urbanism at Rem Koolhaas’ now-defunct experimental research centre in Moscow, the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design, where he investigated the impact of Russia’s growing nationalism on the infrastructure of global trade.
Between 2015 and 2019, he lived and worked in China at intervals. There, he co-curated UABB Shenzhen, Asia’s leading architecture biennial, developing a critical exhibition on the use of facial recognition in cities. In 2021, he developed the award-winning urban study of Prishtina, Kosovo, for the Manifesta 14 arts biennial, linking history, geopolitics, and future urban developments.
He has contributed to publications including The Ideas Letter, Noema, Monocle, Wired UK, Corriere della Sera, Domus, Reuters, Architectural Design, Volume-Archis. He edited books for Yale University Press, Hatje Cantz, Einaudi, and Park Books. He advised organisations from the World Economic Forum to the Manifesta Foundation and NABA University.
He presented his work at institutions including Aalto University, Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, LSE Generate, and Moscow State University.

Learning Architectural Curatorship Amid Geopolitical Vertigo

What does it mean to look at Finnish architecture with a geopolitical lens? And what does it mean for architects, urbanists, curators, editors, and artists to position themselves in this context?

The world is entering an era marked by war, ecological instability, and the return of great-power competition, often mediated through technological infrastructures and resource supply dependencies. These transformations will inevitably reshape the built environment, demanding new forms of engagement from those who interpret and inhabit it.

For more than a century, Finnish architecture has functioned as an instrument of collective care. Despite its manifest limits and contradictions, it has supported public health, education, social cohesion, and a relationship with nature that is in tune with today’s most progressive political ecology. From welfare-state infrastructure to contemporary approaches to preparedness, architecture has operated not only as a technical practice but also as a civic project. Today, these traditions acquire renewed significance as Europe searches for new forms of supranational autonomy and solidarity, for which a single blueprint simply does not exist.

Drawing on curatorial experiences in geopolitically tense contexts—from Moscow, Shenzhen, and Prishtina, to the main exhibition of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and today’s Helsinki— this presentation asks whether and how Finnish architectural culture could contribute to advancing an anti-imperial vision of Europe grounded in mutual support, ecological responsibility, resistance to technological dehumanization, and the protection of common goods.