The 18th international architecture exhibition curated by Lesley Lokko will have Africa as its protagonist, seen as a great opportunity to formulate concrete solutions for our contemporaneity.

The President of La Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Cicutto, and the Curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, Lesley Lokko announced the title and theme of the Biennale Architettura 2023: "The Laboratory of the Future", which will be held from May 20th to November 26th 2023 (pre-opening May 18th and 19th) in the Giardini, at the Arsenale, and at various sites around Venice.
Lesley Lokko, with a long career as a researcher, proposes a reflection characterized by concreteness, in a contemporary world in constant transformation. If in some past editions of the Biennale I raised themes that are blurred or hardly applicable to architecture, the theme on this occasion seems to gain strength with the passage of time: Africa is the protagonist of the exhibition, offering itself to everything as a specific place from which to observe the rest of the world.

Statement by Lesley Lokko,

Explaining her choice Lesley Lokko said that the title operates on several levels:
 
“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 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”.

More information

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Curator Comisaria
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Lesley Lokko.
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Venue / Localitation Lugar / Localización
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18th International Architecture Exhibition. Venice, Italy.

XVIII Exposición Internacional de Arquitectura. Venecia, Italia.
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Dates Fechas
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The Exhibition will be held from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 26 November, 2023 (pre-opening May 18 and 19).
La Exposición se llevará a cabo desde el sábado 20 de mayo hasta el domingo 26 de noviembre de 2023 (pre-inauguración 18 y 19 de mayo).
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Lesley Lokko. Born in Dundee, United Kingdom, in 1964, is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist. Trained at the Bartlett School of Architecture and with a PhD in Architecture from the University of London where Lokko’s knowledge base and capability as an educator was built, her academic career was initially honed at Kingston University, University of East London, London Metropolitan University, University of Greenwich, the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and later at the University of Westminster. These experiences were followed by a number of visiting professorships in North-American and African higher education institutions.

Throughout her career thus far, Lokko has established a durable and international legacy in terms of her voice and the courses to which she has contributed, most notably between 2014 and 2019, as the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture of the University of Johannesburg, a school which – in its independence and ambition – has been transforming not just the content but the narrative of architectural education in South Africa and the continental region.

She has pioneered for, and cultivated, critical debate about identity in architecture. The innovation and passion in her teaching is matched by an unfaltering commitment to ensuring that architectural education and research run in parallel with the contemporary anthropological, artistic, technological and literary public debates. In tandem with this approach, she questions, defines and enhances the role the architect plays in shaping contemporary global and local communities. This professional stance not only makes her a most deserving winner of this award but also confirms that we are to expect many forms of achievement and of well-deserved recognition in her future career steps.
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Published on: June 7, 2022
Cite: "From Africa to Venice, the 2023 Architecture Biennale will be the laboratory of the future" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/africa-venice-2023-architecture-biennale-will-be-laboratory-future> ISSN 1139-6415
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