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Venice Architecture Biennale

Review

Striking displays of unequal power: Venice

Architecture Biennale review
The 2023 event focuses on marginalised voices for the first time, with more than
half of participants from Africa or the African diaspora

Robert Bevan
19 May 2023
Adjaye Associates' exhibition in the main pavilion shows the practice "in its deserved pomp". They also created a wooden
pavilion in the Arsenale named Kwaeε after the Twi word for "forest".
Photo: Andrea Avezzù, Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

James Baldwin observed that some people wish to colonise the moon while others “dance
before it as an ancient friend”.

His words were a specific inspiration for the British Pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture
Biennale but could be seen as informing the whole of this year’s event. The overall theme is
the Laboratory of the Future, with sub-themes of decarbonisation and decolonisation set by the
architect, educator and novelist Lesley Lokko.
Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale
Photo: Andrea Avezzu. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia

Of Scottish-Ghanaian heritage, Lokko is the first person of African descent to have curated
the event and she has centred architecture’s marginalised voices in the Biennale sections she
directly curates – the central pavilion and the Arsenale. More than half of the participants
here are from Africa or the African diaspora, there is an equal gender balance, and the
average age is far younger than usual with most from small or solo outfits. The architectural
narrative is incomplete without these people and their work, argues Lokko. “Africa,” she
notes, is the continent “with the world’s youngest population, the fastest urbanisation…
often at the expense of local ecosystems—so we are at the forefront of climate change too.”
Olalekan Jeyifous’s joyous Afrofuturist fantasies in the main pavilion
Photo courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia

Highlights of the central pavilion include: Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts, a reprise
of his 2019 Manchester International Festival installation that excavates colonial detritus,
using plastic seating and cupboards to build a debating chamber; Theaster Gates moving and
uplifting documentary that tracks 10 years of the Black Artists Retreat in Chicago; and
Olalekan Jeyifous’s joyously imagined 1970s floodplain transport hub—all Afros and
monorails.

Those looking for a conventional architectural show of models, drawings, and full-sized mock
ups will be disappointed. David Adjaye’s room of large beautiful models for projects ranging
from a national cathedral for Ghana and a museum for a slave burial site in Barbados is an
exception and show the world’s most successful Black-led practice in its deserved pomp.

Across the sites, though, there is heavily reliance on film which, while in some cases
absolutely the right medium, in others is too often a substitute for experiential materiality in
the present—the effect can be to distance and flatten.
A contender for the Golden Lion? Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library by Joar Nango and collaborators at the
Nordic Countries Pavilion.
Photo/ Laurian Ghinițoiu (2023). CC BY-SA 4.0

There are honourable exceptions to this. A Golden Lion contender is surely the Nordic
Pavilion’s exploration of nomadic Sámi culture across the arctic lands of Norway, Sweden and
Finland. Led by artist-architect Joar Nango’s Girjegumpi (a compound word conjuring a library
and a mobile hut on sledges), it is both a literal library, a social space and an archive of crafts
and techniques: stitching, painting, carpentry, reindeer and seal hides, shelters held
together without the benefit of nails. It is a friendly cultural lumber room, a fluid, highly
collaborative sculpture full of the scents of cut timber and leather. Germany's pavilion too
has turned archive, becoming a salvage yard for recycled building materials from previous
Biennales.

The British Pavilion shows crafted objects that challenge the building’s classical form – of a
type re-exported across the empire. The British Council appointed a curatorial team made up
of young Britons with various heritages who have in turn appointed artists celebrating
diverse communities and the UK's cosmopolitan and syncretic cultures. Visitors are greeted
with two long pans hanging from the pavilion’s columned loggia—one a Trinidadian-style
steel pan that can be played, the other a Cypriot cooking vessel—encapsulating curator
Jayden Ali’s personal heritage. Inside, objects include Mac Collins’s exuberant, oversized and
abstracted piece celebrating British Caribbean pub dominos with what looks like a giant
ebonised-ash Pokémon figure. The concept, says co-curator Joseph Henry, is playful and
“additive rather than erasure".

British Pavilion curators and British Council commissioner - Meneesha Kellay, Joseph Henry, Jayden Ali, Sumitra Upham
and Sevra Davis - taken at Black Rootz community garden in North London
© British Council

Notably absent are architecture’s big beasts—the wealthy architectural practices that
dominate the Biennale in some editions. This brings welcome opportunities to those without
access to such privileged circles and their commensurate resources. It also means that some
displays feel somewhat more under-powered or sparsely presented than previously (hence
the reliance on film rather than costly physical installations?). But this should be seen as its
own commentary on power rather than a critique. Most participants don’t have the funding
of Europe’s commercial office builders backing them up.

These imbalances were made explicit in the Italian government’s ugly decision to deny visas
to three of Lokko’s Ghanaian team members on the unsubstantiated grounds that they might
overstay: "Not all teams are equal," Lokko remarked in her opening press conference.

Among the most powerful displays were three dealing with evidence: Alison Killing’s
architectural investigation of concentration camps in Xinjiang, China, capable of holding 1
million minority inmates at once; Paulo Tavares’s tracing of the ethnically cleansed
Indigenous village sites in Brazil in the 1960s; and The Nebelivka Project, Forensic Architecture
and David Wengrow’s installation that analyses the archaeological record of a 6,000-year-old
Ukrainian city. It builds on Wengrow and David Graeber’s 2021 hit book The Dawn of
Everything, to demonstrate that the evolution of human civilisation from hunter-gatherer to
farmer to urbanite does not inevitably mean racism, hierarchies, exploitation and autocratic
governments. The material evidence shows that there have been lived alternatives. And there
are again.

The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale runs until 26 November

Venice Architecture Biennale Architecture Venice

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