The tickets sold were 285 thousand, the pre-opening attendance 14,150: even looking only at the numbers, which thus exceed 300 thousand visitors, the Architecture Biennale 2023 which has just closed in Venice, curated by Lesley Lokko and titled The Laboratory of the Futureit was a success, or rather a challenge won.
Lesley Lokko: “Architecture, your future is Africa”
by Lara Crinò
Because for the first time the focus of the great showcase of world architecture, the event that tells us more than any other state of the art of the discipline, was explicitly aimed at a continent, theAfricaand its diaspora around the world, and more generally to an architectural practice which, without necessarily wanting to destroy its canon, emphasized the need to rethink its practices to face the dramatic contingencies of modernity.
Biennale, Africa and young people will save architecture
by our correspondent Lara Crinò
The strong themes of the exhibition, decolonization e decarbonisation, attracted the new generations: young people made up 38% of the total visitors, and group visits aimed at students and university students also increased. One of the Biennale’s initiatives, the College, allowed around fifty junior architects to study and design with 15 tutors from all continents.
The aim of the curator – writer as well as architect, a curriculum of life and experiences divided between Europe and the African continent and the direction ofAfrican Futures Institute in Ghana – was to show how Africa, the young continent par excellence, is truly a laboratory, a place in which to learn from the mistakes of the past to redesign a more equitable future no longer based on the intensive exploitation of resources.
A theme expressed by this Biennial in many ways. Starting from the awarding of the Golden Lions. The Career Award was attributed to the Nigerian architect Demas Nwokodoyen of African architecture, the Golden Lion for the best national participation went to Brazil, the one for the best participation to the Italian-Palestinian duo DAAR (Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal), who have been working on the concept of decolonization for a long time.
[[(gele.Finegil.StandardArticle2014v1) R]]
The projects exhibited in the 64 national pavilions and the works of the 53 participants, exhibited between the Gardens and the Arsenale, proposed a “Creole” approach to architecture. THE pratictioneras Lokko prefers to call the architects, to underline a vocation to be in the world and to deal with reality, without lowering projects from above, they have indeed exhibited models, but also installations and photographs that tell corners of the world and urban environments and very different rural areas.
The purpose, recalled the president of the Biennale Roberto Cicutto, was also to bring attention “to many critical issues arising from more recent history. The themes of decolonization and decarbonization have spread to many aspects of civil society, even in those countries that seemed to be “sheltered” or less exposed to them.”
An aspect that the same Lesley Lokko he wanted to underline when speaking about the balance of his curatorship: “The test of this exhibition, or of any exhibition, is not just the number of tickets sold, articles, reviews or comments on social media. It is in the small threads, sometimes unnoticed, which are collected, amplified, stitched together and presented months, years, even decades later I like to think – and only time will tell if this is a reasonable hypothesis – that this exhibition was rich in threads, if not. even tapestries, and that his legacy is the impulse to continue to make, sew, mend, say, formulate new ideas about our profession, about its place and its importance in the world of thoughts and things, enriching the conversations where can, replacing where it should, repairing where it’s needed, and supporting and defending what’s valuable. It’s a legacy that I’m incredibly proud of. I come away from this experience recognizing that, on the one hand, I had probably one of the smallest teams of any other curator so far, and on the other, the greatest. Everyone whose hands, hearts and minds have touched any aspect of this exhibition are part of that team, and will always be part of it.”
A reference, probably, also to the news story that took center stage in May, right at the opening of the event: some of Lokko’s young collaborators, coming from Ghana, did not obtain a visa to be able to be in Venice.
#thousand #Venice #boom #visitors #Architecture #Biennale #dedicated #Africa
– 2024-05-07 13:06:38
