The Venice Architecture Biennale is the most influential architecture event that explores the transformative power of contemporary architecture to find solutions and build an environmentally friendly future…
“Africa is the laboratory of the future,” explains Ghanain-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko, curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale (May until November 2023).
“We are the world’s youngest continent, with an average age half that of Europe and the United States, and a decade younger than Asia.
We are the world’s fastest urbanising continent, growing at a rate of almost 4 percent per year.
This rapid and largely unplanned growth is generally at the expense of local environment and ecosystems, which put us at the coal face of climate change at both a regional and planetary level.
We remain the most under-vaccinated continent at just 15 percent, yet recorded the fewest deaths and infections by a significant margin that the scientific community still can’t quite explain. So often on the wrong side of hope and history, the resilience, self-reliance and a long, long history of grass-roots community health care suddenly tipped the balance in our favour.
Racial equity and climate justice
The long and traumatic history of forced migration through the trans-Atlantic slave trade is ground on which successive struggles for civil rights and a more civil society are being fought all over the world today.
In all the talk of decarbonisation, it is easy to forget that black bodies were the first units of labour to fuel European imperial expansion that shaped the modern world.
Racial equity and climate justice are two sides of the same coin.
But hope is a powerful currency. To be hopeful is to be human. At a deeply personal level, I owe my presence at this table today to the tireless demands for a more just, more inclusive and more equitable world fought for by generations before me.
The vision of a modern, diverse, and inclusive society is seductive and persuasive, but as long as it remains an image, it is a mirage. Something more than representation is needed, and architects historically are key players in translating images into reality.
A laboratory of the future
The Venice Biennale itself is also a kind of laboratory of the future, a time and space in which speculations about the discipline’s relevance to this world—and the world to come—take place.
Today, the word ‘laboratory’ is more generally associated with scientific experimentation and conjures up images of a specific kind of room or building.
But Richard Sennett’s examination of the word ‘workshop’, from which the word ‘laboratory’ stems, deepens the concept of collaborative endeavours in a different way.
In the ancient world, in both China and Greece, the workshop was the most important institution anchoring civic life.
In the aftermath of the American civil war, Booker T. Washington, an ex-slave, conceived a project in which freed slaves recovering from slavery would leave home, train at two model institutions, the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and return to their home communities.
Importantly, during this temporary relocation, cooperation would be forged by direct experience and daily contact with one another as equals.
We envisage our exhibition as a kind of workshop, a laboratory where architects and practitioners across an expanded field of creative disciplines draw out examples from their contemporary practices that chart a path for the audience—participants and visitors alike—to weave through, imagining for themselves what the future can hold.
Africa’s Unique Context
The show will focus on Africa, but we are not only talking about Africa – we use it as a place in order to try and understand everything everywhere.
After all, the Biennale itself is a workshop for the future.
Africa’s unique context, which is both richly challenging and richly creative, means it’s a powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century – climate change, societal change, demographic change, new forms of governance, explosive urbanity.”
Cultural and Racial Identity
Lokko is the first person of African descent to have curated a Biennale, which began in 1980. Cultural and racial identity is an important theme in much of her work.
By putting Africa at the fore, she aims to boost diversity at the event, which is the most significant in architecture. This year, more than half the biennale’s 89 participants hail from Africa or the African diaspora.
Challenge of Diversity
Until now, the Biennale has been consistently Eurocentric. In 2021, just one-third of participants were from outside of Europe and the USA, prompting calls for greater diversity. “Without equal access to resources, it’s challenging”.
Among the participants at the main 2023 exhibition are Pritzker Architecture Prize winner and Burkinabé-German architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, South African architect Sumayya Vally, Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye and Kenyan architecture studio Cave_Bureau.
However, achieving this drastic improvement in diversity has been a challenge. “Diversity also comes at a cost,” she reflected. “Without equal access to resources, it’s challenging to come to the party.
A huge amount of effort, energy and passion went into securing support, which is largely unseen and unrecognised,” she explained.
Focus on Unpredictability
The curator, also an academic and novelist, is only the third woman to have taken up the role. According to Lokko, her aim for the 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale is to reflect on the “unpredictability” of the turbulent era in which we are living and share solutions for it.
“All futures are uncertain. We do our best to anticipate the future.
It’s in that sense that I call this exhibition a ‘laboratory’ — not the place of scientific, precise experimentation, but the messy, passionate, argumentative space of deeply human enquiry,” she said.
We say ”viva!”.
Acknowledgement: Archipanic; Lizzie Crook – Dezeen; Venice Architecture Biennale 2023
Image credit:Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Lesley Lokko in Venice – Portrait by Jacopo Salvi, photo is courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
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