The 2023 Biennale is “The Laboratory of the Future”: a workshop of ideas helping us redefine the future through a youthful and cohesive vision
The Venice Biennale is a vital contemporary laboratory, a space for dialogue and discussion on how the Arts define the present and the future. Following the conclusion of the 59th International Art Exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani, work has already begun on the next edition of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition — open from May 20 to November 26, 2023, with a pre-opening on May 18 and 19, directed by Lesley Lokko — titled, in a way more relevant than ever to Venice, The Laboratory of the Future.
As is customary, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition features national participations with exhibitions and meetings in their own Pavilions at the Giardini and the Arsenale, as well as throughout Venice, alongside many collateral events proposed by international organizations and institutions.
The curator explains her title
“Africa is the laboratory of the future. — explains Lesley Lokko — 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 fastest-urbanizing continent in the world, with a growth rate of nearly 4% per year. This rapid and largely unplanned growth generally occurs at the expense of the local environment and ecosystems, which confronts us with climate change at both regional and planetary levels.
In detail, Lokko states: “Today, the word ‘laboratory’ is more generally associated with scientific experimentation and evokes images of a certain type of room or building. But Richard Sennett’s analysis of the term ‘workshop’, which shares the same etymological root of work as the word ‘laboratory’, explores the concept of collaboration from a different perspective.
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In the ancient world, in both China and Greece, the workshop was the most important institution for civic life.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Booker T. Washington, a former slave, devised a project in which freed slaves and those emerging from slavery would leave their homes, train at two model institutions, the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and then return to their home communities. It is important to note that during this temporary relocation, cooperation would be forged through direct experience and daily contact with others, as equals.
We think of the exhibition as a kind of workshop, a laboratory where architects and professionals from a wide range of creative disciplines map a path made of examples drawn from their contemporary activities that the public, composed of participants and visitors, can navigate while imagining for themselves what the future may hold.”
The peripheral center starts from Africa
“The world has always been traversed by cultural misunderstandings: until the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe judged African art as barbaric and incomprehensible, and it took the provocation of the artistic avant-gardes to force Europeans to look at a Bantu mask with different eyes; only the educated elite knew what the Easter Island statues were; common people in Europe, and perhaps in China, judged the erotic sculptures on Indian temples as delusional and immodest when they happened to see a photo of them; Christians were scandalized because followers of other religions represented their deity in animal form, forgetting that the Christian West has for centuries represented the third person of the Holy Trinity in the form of a dove.”
Connecting to the Lectio Magistralis given by Umberto Eco to the Ministers of Culture during the inauguration of Expo Milano 2015, President Roberto Cicutto states: “There is a place where all questions of equity, resources, race, hope, and fear converge and merge. Africa. On an anthropological level, we are all African. And what happens in Africa happens to us all.”
An observation and analysis of contemporary reality that starts from the center-periphery paradigm, where new cores and new perspectives can be found from the margins.
It is an attempt at a reinterpretation that is necessarily non-unidirectional, an opportunity to position oneself and observe everything from another point of view, starting from the side of history often overshadowed and creating new and hybrid possible personal and cultural identities, going beyond the flattening and apparent balance of globalization and celebrating diversity and the unconventional to investigate unprecedented circumstances.
“The vision of a modern, diverse, and inclusive society is seductive and persuasive — explains the curator — but as long as it remains an image, it is only a mirage. Something more than a representation is needed, and architects, historically, are key actors in translating images into reality.”
Who is Lesley Lokko
Lokko’s curriculum ranges from Hebrew and Arabic studies at Cambridge to the directorship of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana.
The role of literature and writing is fundamental; Lokko is the founder and director of FOLIO – Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, as well as a prolific novelist.
In 2004, she published her first novel Sundowners, which was followed by 11 other titles. Her latest, The Lonely Hour, will be released in 2024 by Pan Macmillan.
18th International Architecture Exhibition 2023
From May 20 to November 26, 2023 (pre-opening May 18 and 19)
The Laboratory of the Future
Curated by Lesley Lokko
Website labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023
Official hashtags: #BiennaleArchitettura2023 #IlLaboratorioDelFuturo #TheLaboratoryOfTheFuture
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Photos courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia (Jacopo Salvi, Jackson Davis, and Lesley Lokko).
