Africa will be at the center of the 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale which will kick off on Saturday in the Veneto capital (with pre-opening on 18 and 19 May). This year, in fact, for the first time, the event will present sustainable projects by architects from Africa and the African diaspora.
Titled “Guests of the Future,” the exhibition is themed around decolonization and decarbonization and will highlight projects that have found architectural solutions to issues ranging from sustainable materials to housing issues and erased histories, the Ford Foundation said in a statement. together with Bloomberg Philanthropies, it is supporting the international journey of architects to participate in the event.
“As is the case with many elite gatherings and institutions, access has been high and has allowed a diverse group of talents to showcase their expertise, and we hope this will help open doors for other architecture innovators and of design from all backgrounds for the future,” the Ford Foundation said in a statement.
This year’s Biennale, which runs until 26 November, is curated by Ghanaian-born Scottish architect, architecture lecturer and writer Lesley Lokko, who commented: “We architects have a unique opportunity to come up with ambitious ideas and creative ideas that help us imagine a more equitable and optimistic future together”.
“New technologies appear and disappear all the time, giving us unfiltered glimpses of life in parts of the world we will probably never visit, much less understand,” Lokko said in a statement posted on the event’s website. “In Europe we talk about minorities and diversity, but the truth is that Western minorities are the global majority; diversity is our norm. There is a place on this planet where all these issues of fairness and race and hope and fear converge and merge. Africa,” she added.
For the 2023 Biennale, more than 20 projects have been selected from across the African continent and from locations ranging from France to Fez, Morocco, most of which, according to the organizers, were developed by an individual or a team of five people or less.
Among these is Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, a Senegalese architect who worked for three years with the Adjaye Associates studio. He is now collaborating with Elementerre, a construction company specializing in local and 100% recyclable building materials, such as raw earth and plants, which require less energy to create and are more suitable for warm climates.
Or the Riff studio, owned by a woman and based in New York. Her three-person team combines experiences outside of traditional design practice: construction, historical research, and architectural pedagogy, respectively. According to the studio’s website, “our designs are riffs produced by the dialogue between these distinct realms, as we contemplate the future of housing.”
There is also MOE + Art Architecture: a Nigerian studio “that is emerging as one of the leading design houses in Africa for its work of redefining African modernism”, and Cartografia Negra, “a collective based in Brazil that is working to relocate sites in São Paulo that were used for the execution, sale, torture and execution of enslaved people,” according to the Ford Foundation.
In 2020 Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, a graduate school in architecture and a platform for public events. In 2015 you founded the Graduate School of Architecture in Johannesburg. You have taught in the United States, Europe, Australia and Africa. She has received numerous awards for her contribution to the teaching of architecture. [Da Redazione InfoAfrica]
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