The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and novelist Lesley Lokko – who is also Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) based in Accra, Ghana – officially opened to the public on May 20th and is now on view through Nov. 26. Entitled The Laboratory of the Future, this year's Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time highlights the African continent as a leading force in shaping the world to come and Lokko's curatorial mission prompts entries to question traditional notions of what the future can hold and what architecture looks like.
Featuring 63 National Pavilions, 89 participants, and 9 collateral events in the city, the exhibition invited practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds to explore these new possibilities. Running alongside the National Pavilions, the story of Africa and its history as well as future within the architectural discipline is told in large part by the participants and unfolds strategically across Venice's Giardini and Arsenale areas.
The Laboratory of the Future begins in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, where 16 practices who represent a distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered. It moves to the Arsenale complex, where participants in the Dangerous Liaisons section – also represented in Forte Marghera in Mestre – rub shoulders with the Curator’s Special Projects, for the first time a category that is as large as the others. Threaded through and amongst the works in both venues are young African and Diasporan practitioners, our Guests from the Future, whose work engages directly with the twin themes of this exhibition, decolonization and decarbonization, providing a snapshot, a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world. – Curator Lesley Lokko
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Emerging Themes at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale: Highlights from the National PavilionsMore than half of this year's exhibition participants are from Africa or the African diaspora and half are female – another first in the biennale's history. Their average age is 43, fitting for one of the fastest-growing continents in the world. For Lokko, this spotlight on emerging practices as well as previously unheard voices was a tool to tell "not a single story, but multiple stories that reflect the vexing, gorgeous kaleidoscope of ideas, contexts, aspirations, and meanings that is every voice responding to the issues of its time." As the curator further explains in a conversation with ArchDaily during the exhibition's opening, her hope is that "the audience takes from it a kind of openness where previously, there might have been a closeness, or an unwillingness to engage with the other, not on our terms, but on their terms."
While these terms are communicated differently by each participant, there are a number of recurring concepts and themes that specifically tackle the issue of representation of the African continent and the important questions a storytelling approach to architecture poses for the discipline's global future. Read on to explore a number of these common threads across different installations at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Celebrating Local Communities and Investigating Heritage
Much like the National Pavilions, the participants of this year's Biennale emphasize a celebration of local narratives, fates, and histories, posing important questions about identity in the face of colonialism and displacement. By sharing individual and site-specific narratives, a number of installations distill architectural theory to its core values and reexamine the heritage and future of the discipline within a more complex – and complicated – context. Through an investigation of small-scale communities not just across the African continent itself, but within other environments around the globe, this methodology highlights worldwide diaspora and engages with ongoing and urgent questions around integration and marginalization for underrepresented populations more generally.
Dr. Thandi Loewenson and her Uhuru Catalogues were awarded a special mention and tell the story of entangled local sights of African liberation through a series of composite graphite panels and an accompanying film. The installation uses graphite as a conduit that aims to energize a consciousness of the conjoined terrains of earth and air in movements for climate justice and equitable futures for all, on the continent and beyond. For his contribution to Giardini's Central Pavilion, Brooklyn-based Olalekan Jeyifous also hones in on local intervention. By creating a colorful airport terminal lounge tableau as a representation for the 'All-Africa Protoport' project – entitled ACE/ACP and an evolution of what is currently known as the African Conservation Effort – Jeyifous imagines a central space for a development that holds significant implications for continent-wide socio-economic and environmental cooperation, as well as diasporic solidarity, also winning him a special mention with this year's jury.
In another part of the force majeure selection, Nairobi-based Cave_bureau celebrates cultural custodians and generational history through an Oral Archive by presenting conversations with members of several African cave-dwelling communities, like some Maasai who live in caves in Mount Suswa, in Kenya’s Rift Valley through a film and audio installation. The oral histories are combined with drawings, maps, photos, three-dimensional scans and natural sounds to create an immersive experience that illuminates the impact of modernity on the delicate local ecosystem of human and nature. Across the way at Arsenale, Estudio A0's contribution to Dangerous Liaisons highlights the fate of another marginalized community with a strong tradition of knowledge passed down through oral histories: the peoples of the Amazon River basin. By centralizing evidence of their highly sophisticated approach to city building across millennia, Surfacing — The Civilised Agroecological Forests of Amazonia repositions this traditional knowledge not as exotic urbanism, but as a brilliant, working example of urban ecology that may lead our way into a reconciliation of the city, its foods systems, and its hinterlands.
Showcasing Color, Fabric, and Handcrafted Artistry
A physical, manifest representation of Africa is perhaps most immediately visible in the use of color, fabrics, and handcrafted artistry for both indoor and outdoor installations at this year's exhibition. Referencing the color palette of building materials and natural flora and fauna from the continent, many installations make use of earthy tones along with bright pops of fabric to create an immersive and celebratory visual experience for visitors. In addition, rather than relying on automated construction techniques or the assistance of industrial tools, the strong presence of handmade artistry underlines the importance of individual skill and passed-down vernacular knowledge.
One example of this is the contribution of 2022 Pritzker Prize recipient Francis Kéré. By highlighting West Africa's way of building before the Status Quo and inviting visitors to linger in a brightly colored structure made from local materials at Giardini's Central Pavilion, the studio's contribution Counteract creates a deliberate moment of pause to reflect on commonplace architectural practice today and how it could be improved through the inclusion of more embedded knowledge. Mariam Issoufou Kamara of atelier masōmī takes a similar approach with Process by bringing local narratives to the fore and translating dispossessed identities and history into architectural form. Hand-drawn chalk plans on the earth-colored walls of the installation represent a return to simplicity as well as a respect for nature and a vision for an architecture of thoughtfulness.
More handcrafted, colorful artistry that relies heavily on fabric for effect comes in the form of AD-WO's installation Ghebbi. A mobile set of monumental tapestries is hung from Arsenale's ceiling to create an enclosed territory evocative of the Amharic word 'Ghebbi', which signifies a space surrounded by a fence or a wall. The pieces act not as just a physically imposing reminder of artistic skill, but also a manifestation of the inherent and necessary variability of architecture. Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey makes equally powerful statements with indoor and outdoor iterations of his 'Afrogallonism' project at the Arsenale grounds. Collectively titled Time and Change, the works are made from yellow gallon plastic containers and stand in effective contrast to their more muted Venetian backgrounds, asking pertinent questions about personal and political narratives rooted in histories of trade and migration.
Engaging Touch & Feel and Appealing to Multiple Senses
Closely connected to this visual appeal is an emphasis on physical interaction with installations that is particularly apparent at Arsenale's vast grounds. By removing traditional exhibition boundaries and inviting visitors to engage a multitude of senses when presented with a work, practitioners extend ideas of border erasure to the present moment – a moment that redefines itself with every individual and their juxtaposition within installations. Addressing primary senses in this way also leads to a more honest and direct discourse between hitherto unheard voices from the African continent and diaspora and the broader public, breaking down obtrusive language barriers to build a connective tissue among cultures and questioning and redefining architecture's history within a truly global context.
Occupying one of the most prominent outdoor spaces at Arsenale, Adjaye Associates invites visitors to explore Kwaeε, or 'forest' in Twi, one of Ghana’s main languages. A space for both reflection and educational programming, the tall, dark, triangular prism is simultaneously daunting and welcoming, bidding to be touched and walked in — and once inside, the individual timber blocks combine to form a comfortable, enveloping whole in stark contrast to the imposing exterior. Echoing this guiding principle of interaction and education is Sweet Water Foundation's contribution chaord which encompasses an outdoor meeting house at Forte Marghera as well as a laboratory and workshop designed as a multiscalar framework inside Arsenale. Addressing additional senses with a multimedia, didactic collage which displays a series of photographs, materials, and diagrams, the installation contextualizes the foundation's practice of Regenerative Neighbourhood Development at the Commonwealth on the South Side of Chicago.
Fortified in its multimedial effect by an indoor location, The Nebelivka Hypothesis created by Eyal Weizman and David Wengrow uses laser ground displays, video, and audio installations to unearth a geophysical survey of 6,000-year-old settlements below agricultural fields in Ukraine that existed without an apparent hierarchy or ruling class. Extending this hypothesis across contemporary urbanism and aligning with this Biennale's overall goal of creating connective tissue across much of the exhibition, the project calls for a reevaluation of our concept of ‘the city’ as rooted in a history of extraction and predation. Finally, Twenty Nine Studio's Sammy Baloji also combines a multitude of channels and haptics to create a collage for Aequare: the Future that Never Was – employing archival footage as well as travel notes, models and film projections to investigate the displacement of precolonial society during Belgium’s colonial possession of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
