On December 14, 2021, the La Biennale di Venezia announced The Board of La Biennale di Venezia appointment of Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko as Curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The Biennale Architecture will be held from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 26 November 2023 (pre-opening May 18 and 19) in the Giardini, at the Arsenale, and at various sites around Venice.
They revealed the 18th International Architecture Exhibition title, “The Laboratory of the Future” in May. Announced by the President of La Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Cicutto, and the Curator, the theme and title of this edition will consider the African continent as the protagonist of the future.
Lesley Lokko uniquely described the theme with words that make it clear that this “laboratory” goes beyond the mere scientific workshop. It is actually a much broader concept with enough space for several interpretations, while pressing on global issues beyond our control, yet affecting the vast majority.
The 18th International Architecture Exhibition will also feature, as usual, the National Participations, with each country presenting its own exhibition in the Pavilions of the Giardini and the Arsenale, and in the historic centre of Venice. This edition will once again include a selection of Collateral Events organized by international institutions, which will hold their own shows and initiatives in Venice.
About Lesley Lokko
Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic, and best-selling novelist. She was previously the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and will be stepping down as dean of The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York in January 2021. She is currently engaged in setting up an independent school of architecture in Accra, Ghana, the African Futures Institute. Born in Scotland, Lesley grew up in Ghana. She received her first architecture degree at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and earned her doctorate in architecture from the University of London in 2007.
Whilst still a student, Lesley began an edited anthology that has come to define her interests across both her academic career and her fiction writing: ‘race’ and its relationship to the built environment, although that initial interest has expanded considerably to encompass a broader interest in identity politics, culture and urbanism. White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space & Architecture was published in 2000, some six years after its inception. It remains one of the few anthologies dedicated specifically to the study of ‘race’ as a meaningful category of enquiry within architectural canon.
For thirteen years, Lesley wrote fiction full-time, publishing eleven best-selling novels but continued to keep a peripheral interest and foot in architectural discourse, returning to academia full-time in 2014. She continues to write fiction: her newest novel, Soul Sisters, will be published by PanMacmillan in summer 2021.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT BY LESLEY LOKKO
(obtained from La Biennale di Venezia)
“Firstly, Africa is the laboratory of the future. 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% 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%, 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. 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.
Secondly, La Biennale di Venezia 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”.
