The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Lesley Lokko, is set to open in just one month's time with a focus on "The Laboratory of the Future", casting the African continent as a leading force in shaping the world to come, and challenging conventional notions of what the future can hold and what a laboratory can be. Featuring 63 National Pavilions, 89 Participants, and 9 collateral events in the city, the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale invites practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds to explore new possibilities.
Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) based in Accra, Ghana, Lesley Lokko, is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and novelist. With a career that spans Johannesburg, London, Accra, and Edinburgh, she has held several teaching positions and is widely recognized in her field. Professor Lokko was appointed as the curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in December 2021, after serving as a jury member for the Golden Lions Awards for the previous edition of the Venice Biennale. In her first interview with ArchDaily, after she was appointed curator of the 2023 Architecture Biennale, Lesley Lokko shares insights about the preparations, the theme, and this 18th edition.
Read on to discover more about the awaited event, which will open on the 20th of May 2023, and will run until the 26th of November, 2023, in the Giardini, at the Arsenale, and at various sites around Venice, and check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
ArchDaily (Christele Harrouk): The 2023 Venice Biennale will open on the 20th of May 2023. How are the preparations so far?
Lesley Lokko: We’re right in the middle of the most intense period, which is the installation period. So far, so good!
AD: How would you describe the process of working with the participants, and how did you help them to “put forward ambitious and creative ideas that help us imagine a more equitable and optimistic future in common”?
LL: First, it would have been impossible without the assistance of my team. Working with close to 100 participants across all the various parts of the exhibition is an enormous logistical task, which comes with emotional, conceptual, financial, and managerial responsibilities. I imagine every Curator says this, but it genuinely is a collaborative process. I don’t know if I would describe our conversations as ‘helpful’: rather, I tried to make sure that curatorial statements were as clear as possible, free of jargon and the kind of convoluted language that architects often love so that participants could respond with clarity and conceptual precision.
AD: This year’s theme “The Laboratory of the Future”, is inviting architects to consider the African continent as the protagonist of the future. How did you put together this idea, and what do you aspire for, what are you seeking from this approach?
I’ve always considered my home continent as an intense laboratory — full of questions about how we want to live, how we ought to live, how we don’t want to live — so it was less a case of putting together an idea, than of always having had the idea.
LL: At a very pragmatic level, the Biennale has been an opportunity to ‘come clean’ about those interests, which have been center stage for so many of us for so long yet have been considered marginal or peripheral to architectural culture, at least until the pandemic and Black Lives Matter propelled the subjects to the fore.
AD: “At an anthropological level, we are all African […] And what happens in Africa happens to us all”, you explained in the official statement of the Biennale. Are you looking for solutions for Africa, or is Africa a metaphor?
I’m not looking for solutions, but rather for intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions that might contain solutions, but also further questions, further investigations, further and deeper narratives.
LL: Africa is so intertwined with the rest of the world, in so many ways, certainly not only biologically — but it takes courage and imagination to think beyond the convenient and lazy stereotypes to interrogate what the word (or name) really means. It’s so often a shortcut, a metaphor — but it’s neither. It’s a real place, with real people, real lives, real problems, real opportunities, real dreams — no more, no less than anywhere else.
AD: Moreover, you brought back the very scientific word “laboratory” to the architectural field. What do you hope to achieve by putting these two realms together?
LL: In the statement, I explained why I chose the word ‘laboratory’, not to replicate the scientific, rather clinical, and neutral ‘space’ of enquiry, which is the way we often think of laboratories, but in the older, messier, more collaborative sense of a ‘workshop’, a place where participants and audience come together to jointly explore and experience the search for meaning and purpose collectively.
AD: The theme has been announced on the 31st of May 2022. How have the participants and the global audience reacted so far to this topic?
LL: I don’t know how the global audience has reacted! I try not to read reviews. I know how the participants have reacted: with ambition, joy, relief, passion, courage . . .
AD: A lot of “first timers” and “novice choices” for this biennale: from the selection of curator to the selection of the theme, the 2023 edition is showing, in your words, “bold and brave choices”. What do you think the organizing committee is looking for? And how are these choices aligned with the needs of the world of today?
LL: I can truthfully only speak to my ambition, which was to make as much space as possible for voices that historically haven’t been heard in global exhibitions of this scale, alongside voices that have. I’ve always understood the Biennale to be a conversation, not a soliloquy. It’s hard to have a conversation with yourself!
It’s important (at least to me) that it’s a mix of voices, some new, some experienced; some African, some not.
AD: On your appointment as curator, President Roberto Cicutto stated that “I believe that this immersion, in reality, is the best way to dialogue with the questions raised by the 2021 Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis”. How connected is this biennale to the previous one? And in your opinion, are Venice biennales in general intertwined in some sort?
LL: All exhibitions, especially on this scale, take sustenance from those that came before. In a very practical way, we built on the skeleton of the exhibition left by Cecilia Alemani rather than tear it down and rebuild. This was as much to do with approaching the question of resources as sensitively and sustainably as we could and homage to an outstanding skeleton that we inherited. If I look back at the dozen or so Architecture Exhibitions over the past twenty years, each one has contributed in some way to the discourse of the next.
AD: As the world goes back to “normal” after a couple of years of pandemic and lockdowns, and with the resurgence of physical events, how relevant are architectural exhibitions nowadays? Especially the Biennale di Venezia? And how do you perceive the future of architecture exhibitions?
LL: Exhibitions are hugely important, not just as physical events where we get to meet one another and see things outside our immediate context(s), but as records and thermometers of the zeitgeist. Seeing things differently, seeing the world through the eyes of others — all of that has a huge impact. In all the conversations around sustainability and the intelligent use of resources, we rarely speak about impact.
What impact will this Biennale have? What impact does it hope to have? I hope it resonates, that it provokes the audience to think differently and perhaps more empathetically about those parts of the world that appear, at first glance, to have little to do with them, that it provides moments of joy, surprise, and curiosity — not that differently to any Biennale, I imagine.
AD: Finally, you speak of “imagining what the future can hold”, I am intrigued to know how Lesley Lokko imagines it.
LL: With hope.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
