Venice Architecture Biennale and its long-overdue celebration of Africa

“ACE/AAP” by Olalekan Jeyifous, who was awarded the Silver Lion for a promising young participant / Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

By Park Han-sol

• Published May 25, 2023 4:41 PM KST
• Updated May 26, 2023 3:38 PM KST

Running alongside International Architecture Exhibition, Korean Pavilion asks how choices may shape our climate future

By Park Han-sol

VENICE, Italy ― Conventionally, architecture exhibitions are associated with imposing structures, polished conceptual models, sketches and prototypes that can offer a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes working methods of the architects. And the players who would steal the global spotlight have long and often been white men.

Venice Biennale's flagship International Architecture Exhibition, launched in 1980 as a counterpart to its older art biennial, hasn't really been an exception in this sense, experts say.

“The 'story' of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete,” writes Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko.

The Biennale's 2023 edition, curated by Lokko, has brought a seismic change to the prestigious event's history in more ways than one.

The show, which occupies the Italian city's former shipyard and armory known as the Arsenale and parkland Giardini, invites 89 participants, more than half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora, for the first time ever. And it decidedly lacks buildings and other structures from the language of architecture, for the most part.

Such a bold yet long-overdue curatorial recalibration unfolds under the theme, “The Laboratory of the Future.”

The title has several layers, but one of its main goals is to throw light on “the vexing, gorgeous kaleidoscope of ideas, contexts, aspirations and meanings” emerging from Africa, the youngest and the fastest-urbanizing continent in the world, the curator noted.

Accordingly, a great number of rising practitioners, studios and artists from the region fill the exhibition.

The Nigerian-born artist Olalekan Jeyifous, who was awarded the Silver Lion for a promising young participant, presents eye-popping Afrofuturist visions of a decolonized and decarbonized future through an imaginary All-Africa Protoport (AAP) lounge. The whole room is like a fantastical mix of the retro sci-fi aesthetics and pointedly pan-African utopia.

The Penn State University's SOFTLAB brings dreadlocks ― a hairstyle, associated mainly with Black people, with a fraught political and historical legacy especially in the United States ― into focus in its digital and physical installations.

The braiding and locking hair technique, an important symbol of Black identity, can be translated into computational codes and turned into building materials capable of changing existing architectural spaces.

And for Felicia Davis, the director of SOFTLAB, hair is intricately connected to the idea of space, particularly in the age of bioscanning.

“More and more thresholds will be designed like that in the future, where you don't have to use a key. All they require will be your bio data, including your hair, and they will either allow you access into the space or not (based on the input),” she told The Korea Times.

An immersive installation of light and sound titled “unknown, unknown: A Space of Memory,” by Mabel O. Wilson, J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Howeler, becomes an ethereal memorial hall for hundreds of unnamed members of the enslaved community in the 19th century at the University of Virginia.

A creative trio of Brazilian-Paraguayan architect Gloria Cabral, Congolese artist Sammy Baloji and Martiniquais-born art historian Cecile Fromont puts forth a powerful work on the “debris” of colonial empires. On view is a monumental partition made up of construction waste from Brussels, Belgium, which committed atrocities in its former colony of the Congo. Its patterns recall the architectural textiles of the historical Kingdom of Kongo as well as Brazilian Indigenous communities.

National pavilion shows

Running alongside the central International Architecture Exhibition are 63 national pavilion shows organized by their home countries.

Like the central exhibition, the Korean Pavilion's “2086: Together How?,” commissioned by Arts Council Korea (ARKO), utilizes a wide range of mediums ― photographs, videos, paintings and even interactive games ― that go beyond the traditional language of architecture.

“Architecture is not just about the hardware. It's something that is intricately connected with our political, economic and cultural issues and identities,” said Jung So-ik and Park Kyong, co-artistic directors of the show. “So, there's no need for us to be confined to conceptual models and blueprints to convey our message ― as long as we can provide a certain spatial experience.”

The show asks viewers to reexamine humankind's centuries of fixation with progress and material growth in order to search for a new sustainable paradigm of living ― by transporting them to three different locations in Korea.

Incheon, the third-largest city in Korea, is presented as a fierce battlefront between urban redevelopment projects and community activists fighting for the land's preservation.

Architecture studio Urban Terrains Lab and activist group Space Beam shed light on the historic neighborhood of Baedari in eastern Incheon that has, for the last two decades, been subject to threats of destruction due to ongoing talks of constructing an urban expressway.

The depopulation issue plaguing Gunsan in North Jeolla Province is addressed by Society of Architecture (SoA) and local community group Udangtangtang through their D.I.T. (Do It Together) workshops launched to demolish an abandoned house in the city through eco-friendly means.

“The number of abandoned houses in rural areas like Gunsan is growing day by day, and is becoming an administrative and financial headache for local governments. The so-called D.I.T. workshops were our attempt to collectively intervene in the situation and turn the man-made structure into an object in harmony with nature," Kang Ye-rin of SoA noted.

A number of villages and cities scattered throughout Gyeonggi Province, which are home to increasing numbers of migrant workers and "marriage migrants," are another focus of the show.

Artist Kim Wol-sik presents a street map of Ansan that has certain paths marked in red.

"These red marks, drawn by an Indonesian worker, are supposed to indicate 'the path of sunlight.' To these laborers who are from the hot, humid Southeast Asian country, the winters of Korea are unbearably cold," he said. "I thought this map that informs them of the well-lit spots around the neighborhood was a stark reminder of the reality faced by those away from their homeland.”

Meanwhile, based on its extensive survey with foreign workers hailing from around the globe, New York-based architecture studio NHDM has visualized in drawings both their current substandard living situations ― vinyl greenhouses and container houses tucked away in factories, among others ― and their imagined homes of the future that are more sustainable and inclusive.

After witnessing the three case studies, viewers are then encouraged to participate in the interactive quiz show-like "The Game of Together How" and make their own choices when faced with both real and hypothetical ecocultural settings. The game will keep a tally of all the participants' decisions and convert them into immediately recognizable ecological data such as sea level and carbon footprint.

Many other pavilions at the Biennale similarly focus on expanding the definition and boundaries of architecture, viewing it as a gateway to explore themes of climate crisis, sustainability and long-neglected cultural narratives.

After all, as Jung and Park noted, architecture is more than just about designing physically functional spaces.

The Brazilian Pavilion, which earned this year's Golden Lion for Best National Participation, has covered its entire flooring and pedestals with soil, turning the space into an imagined “Terra” of sorts.

Within its earth-filled room, the exhibition highlights the notion of soil as a source of historical memory, thus bringing to light the ancestral territorial practices of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities. It also attempts to reexamine the canonical narrative surrounding the formation of the Latin American country's modernist capital, Brasilia.

The Belgian Pavilion experiments with the possibility of “making an alliance with mushrooms” as a living construction material. In “In Vivo,” mycelium, or the root-like network of fungus, is fashioned into bricks and leather fabric. The building's central room is occupied by the gigantic, fungus-walled structure with an earthy odor ― the future of housing, perhaps?

By contrast, the German entry, “Open for Maintenance,” is all about “non-building.” There is no physical structure in sight; what fills the entire pavilion are heaps and mounds of construction waste ― concrete bricks, fabrics, plywood panels, tiles, pipes and fur ― produced by over 40 national pavilions and exhibitions during the 2022 Venice Art Biennale.

These found materials are used to organically transform each of the building's rooms into a workshop, a meeting space, a kitchenette and an ecological bathroom.

Meanwhile, the quirky Finnish Pavilion calls for “the death of the flushing toilet” in an effort to reassess the unsustainable sanitation infrastructure of today. As much as 30 percent of freshwater is being used in urban areas to flush human waste, it notes.

What is its proposed solution, you ask? A composting dry toilet called “huussi!”

The 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale runs through Nov. 26.