AFRICA - Journey into "The Laboratory of the Future" at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice

Lesley Lokko, Curator &
Demas Nwoko, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award
Photo: Cat Bauer

(Venice, Italy) Blue. The color blue is the first thing you see when you enter "The Laboratory of the Future," La Biennale's 18th International Architecture Exhibition set at Arsenale, where Venice once built her ships. 

Blue — and these words:

The Blue Hour. A period of time just before sunrise or sunset when the sun casts a diffuse light from below the horizon and the sky takes on a vivid blue tone. The landscape is wrapped in a muffled and suspended atmosphere. It only lasts a few minutes, half an hour at most, but it represents a rare chromatic beauty. In photography, it represents the ideal condition to highlight colour contrasts that would otherwise be invisible. The Blue Hour is sometimes marked by a subtle melancholy or a moment between dream and awakening. It is also considered a moment of hope.

Lesley Lokko
Curator of the
18th International
Architecture
Exhibition

Lesley Lokko, the Curator of Venice's International Architecture Exhibition, was born in Dundee, Scotland about 60 years ago. Her father was from Ghana and her mother was from Scotland. Lokko grew up in both countries. In addition to being an architect, she is a university professor and best-selling novelist -- she took 14 years off from architecture to write. There are touches of her wise words sprinkled throughout the exhibition. 

Those With Walls for Windows - Rhael "Lionheart" Cape
A meditation & exploration into the 'laws of freedom'
Photo: Cat Bauer
Lesley Lokko: "In South Africa -- where fierce battles
over language, custom, ritual, and memory are still being
fought -- a unique opportunity exists for architects, and
architecture, to play a different role, using different tactics
and tools to stitch together conflicting accounts,
possibly even to resolve them."

Lokko has put Africa firmly in the center of the show. Africa is the youngest continent in the world in terms of age; the average citizen is 20-years-old. "The Laboratory of the Future" includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The exhibition focuses on the mighty themes of "decarbonisation" and "decolonisation." Instead of featuring the usual wooden models, it aims for a light touch, incorporating other mediums like digital, performance, and drawings, and re-using the infrastructure of last year’s Art Biennale. 

Architects are pragmatic artists, capturing an idea and interpreting it with physical nuts and bolts — different, than, say, a musician. Here, instead of their practical side, we see their artistic inspiration -- the essence of the structure made visible….the invisible spirit of architecture expressed by the installations. We get a glimpse of the core of Africa.

Lokko said something that made me think: "The Black body, the African body was Europe's first unit of energy. The first unit of labor." It is as if that ethereal energy has finally been revealed.

From Lesley Lokko's statement:

    "For the first time ever, the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe. What do we wish to say? How will what we say change anything? And, perhaps most importantly of all, how will what we say interact with and infuse what ‘others’ say, so that the exhibition is 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?

        It is often said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. Whilst it is true, what is missing in the statement is any acknowledgement of who the ‘we’ in question is.

        In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only.

        The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter."

Lesley Lokko's mission is to be an agent of change. She feels architectural schools have been too rigid to allow for really new knowledge to emerge and hopes that more renegade schools spring up.

During the press conference, Lokko attributed a quote to Oprah Winfrey. I checked, and it was actually Oprah Winfrey quoting Maya Angelou, although it seems no one is really sure who said it first. In any event, it's a good quote: "Nobody remembers what you said or what you did. People only remember how you made them feel."

How did Lesley Lokko's architecture exhibition make me feel? As I moved through the installations, I heard new voices I'd never heard before and saw things I'd never seen. I felt deeply moved and intrigued, as if I had been given the opportunity to pull back the curtain and see ancient knowledge that was new to me, but part of the very fabric of the earth.  

Not only does Lokko offer us a new way of looking at the world with her singular African-Scottish perspective, she is a woman in a profession overwhelmingly dominated by men -- she is only the fourth female curator of the architecture exhibition. It felt like Lokko took a huge chunk of material that has been missing from architecture -- missing from the world -- and added it to the foundation.

Like any good novelist, she has rewritten the story and improved the ending.

Biennale Architettura 2023 - The 18th International Architecture Exhibition opened to the public on May 20 and runs to November 26, 2023. Click for more information and tickets.

Ciao from Venezia,
Cat Bauer
Venetian Cat - The Venice Blog