Architecture Biennale 2023 : Africa, laboratory of the future

By the editorial staff

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, titled The Laboratory of the Future, is open to the public from Saturday May 20 to Sunday November 26, 2023 at the Giardini and the Arsenale, and at Forte Marghera; it is curated by Lesley Lokko and organised by La Biennale di Venezia.

“ Africa is a place where all issues of equity, resources, race, hope and fear converge and merge”

“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?, said the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, university lecturer and bestselling novelist, Lesley Lokko. “Africa is a place where all issues of equity, resources, race, hope and fear converge and merge. At an anthropological level, we are all Africans. And what happens in Africa happens to all of us”.

The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition in six parts. It includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is 50/50, and the average age of all participants is 43, dropping to 37 in the Curator’s Special Projects, where the youngest is 24. 46% of participants count education as a form of practice, and, for the first time ever, nearly half of participants are from sole or individual practices of five people or less. Across all the parts of The Laboratory of the Future, over 70% of exhibits are by practices run by an individual or a very small team. (…)”

“A distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered”

“Central to all the projects is the primacy and potency of one tool : the imagination – Lokko said. It is impossible to build a better world if one cannot first imagine it. 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, decolonisation and decarbonisation, providing a snapshot, a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world. (…) We have deliberately chosen to frame participants as ‘practitioners’ – the Curator stated – and not ‘architects’ and/or ‘urbanists’, ‘designers’, ‘landscape architects’, ‘engineers’ or ‘academics’ because it is our contention that the rich, complex conditions of both Africa and a rapidly hybridising world call for a different and broader understanding of the term ‘architect’.

To go :

BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2023: THE LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE

Curated by Lesley Lokko. Giardini and Arsenale, May 20th > November 26th, 2023.