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The laboratory of the feature - Biennale 2023
29/05/2023

The laboratory of the feature - Biennale 2023

Lesley Lokko grew up in Africa and studied in the United States and England. She graduated in Architecture and taught at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Currently, she divides her time between Accra and London, where she spreads her art and architecture across Africa, Europe (mainly England and France), and America.
Having achieved considerable success, she was appointed as the curator of the International Architecture Exhibition titled "The Laboratory of the Future," organized by the Venice Biennale, which has taken place on May 18 and 19, with the award ceremony and inauguration occurring on May 20th, 2023. In recent months, through numerous conversations, messages, video calls, and meetings, Lesley Lokko has repeatedly questioned what it means to change the artistic landscape, seeking to understand whether exhibitions of this kind, both in terms of carbon emissions and costs, can be justified. In May 2022, the artist mentioned the exhibition as a narrative that expands in space, but her vision has since completely changed, becoming a true process. Lokko borrows the structure and format from art exhibitions but stands out for critical aspects that are often ignored or minimized. In addition to the desire to narrate a story, the problems related to production, resources, and representation are central to how an architectural exhibition comes into being, yet they are seldom recognized and discussed. The Laboratory of the Future, for this reason, represents "change". As the artist emphasizes: "for the first time, the spotlight is on Africa and its diasporas, on that fluid culture of people of African origin that now embraces the world."


But how does the exhibition work?
The exhibition is divided into six parts and includes 89 participants, over half of whom come from Africa or the African diasporas. The focus is on gender balance, which is equal, and the average age of participants is 43 years old, decreasing to 37 years old in the "Special Projects of the Curator" section, where the youngest artist is just 24 years old. Nearly half of the participants consider education as a genuine professional activity, and for the first time ever, the majority of architects come from individually run studios or teams of up to five people. In all sections of the exhibition, over 70% of the exhibited works have been designed by studios managed by a single individual or a very small team.
As Lokko highlights, "At the heart of every project lies the principal and decisive tool: imagination. It is impossible to build a better world if we do not imagine it first." The exhibition starts at the Central Pavilion in the Gardens, where 16 studios have been brought together, representing a mix of "Force Majeure" in African and diasporic architectural production. The exhibition then moves to the Arsenale complex, with the section "Dangerous Liaisons," alongside the "Special Projects" section of the Curator, which, for the first time, is displayed according to the artist's criteria and occupies the same spaces as the other exhibitions. In both areas, additional works by young African and diasporic artists are presented, directly engaging with the two themes of the Exhibition: decolonization and decarbonization.

Editorial Online Staff

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