The Best Hipster Bags – Venice Biennale 2008!

Upon arriving in Venice for this year’s 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Dysturb.Net team was so sick that we didn’t know what to do. But when we began to see this year’s freebie-hipster-cotton-bags that have become a standard give-away from the pavilions, we started to feel better. These bags are the absolute best way to self-promote the individual pavilions, other than offering free drinks, which we also support. On top of this, they can be beautiful, and a great reminder from year-to-year of the best pavilions and their graphic design campaigns. So we said to ourselves, let’s collect them and vote for the best bags…. what a great way to go “beyond building“! To all you future curators of your country’s pavilions, take note = give away some wickedly designed hipster bags and everyone will come!

Click on the photos for a complete high-res shot!

Please comment on which bag you think is the best, and if you have more to submit we would be happy to post them.

The official catalogue came at a price though, 50 Euros for press, 70 for visitors. We hope someone builds a Pavilion out of these plastic shells holding the books together.

This neon-orange-glow bag was handed out at the opening ceremony – we missed to get this one while sick at home. We photographed this dude on the 2G Vaporetto Party – he’s lucky we didn’t jump him for it!

This is only the Australian back-up bag, the larger one was already out of stock. The nice booklet with an overview of all the exhibited models was a separate purchase.

The cliché stays true, black is the most common color.

The Danish bag was one of the most spotted ones – due to its size, and the nice handle.

We received this bag of the easy-to-miss Portugese Pavillion, which is worth a visit due to Souto de Moura’s mirror installation. The bag came with a really nice book on the piece.

Spin the bag fast enough and you get the Swiss flag.