Lavaforming is a technique that envisions harnessing lava flows to generate sustainable building materials, capable of providing enough to construct an entire city without harmful extraction of the planet’s natural resources or dependence on non-renewable energy sources. In this short film, accompanied by an exhibition, conceived by a team of architects (in collaboration with a renowned writer and a music composer) as Iceland’s first national contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025, we travel one hundred years into the future to visit the imaginary city of Eldborg, built from these volcanic materials. Through the retrospective accounts of its inhabitants, we discover how the development of this technique has transformed ways of living, building, and inhabiting. These speculative perspectives show how lava, long seen as a threat, becomes the driving force of an architectural paradigm that roots societal evolution in its natural environment.

The Forum d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture is pleased, for its eighth consecutive participation in OVNi since 2018, to offer the public a film work and an exhibition unprecedented in France, which echo in their own way — to borrow the words of the OVNi 2026 artistic project —  » the way we speak about human beings and the living world, as well as the sociocultural and political dimensions that seem to define it « .