Architecture? It’s a laboratory of the future

“What does it mean to be ‘an agent of change’? The question has shadowed the gestation period of The Laboratory of the Future, acting as both counterfoil and lifeforce to the exhibition as it has unfolded in the mind’s eye, where it now hovers, almost at the moment of its birth. Over the past nine months, in hundreds of conversations, text messages, Zoom calls and meetings, the question of whether exhibitions of this scale — both in terms of carbon and cost — are justified, has surfaced time and again. In May last year, I referred to the exhibition several times as ‘a story’, a narrative unfolding in space. Today, my understanding has changed. An architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process. It borrows its structure and format from art exhibitions, but it differs from art in critical ways which often go unnoticed. Aside from the desire to tell a story, questions of production, resources and representation are central to the way an architecture exhibition comes into the world, yet are rarely acknowledged or discussed.

From the outset, it was clear that the essential gesture of The Laboratory of the Future would be ‘change’. In those same discussions that sought to justify the exhibition’s existence were difficult and often emotional conversations to do with resources, rights, and risk. For the first time ever, the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe. What do we wish to say? How will what we say change anything? And, perhaps most importantly of all, how will what we say interact with and infuse what ‘others’ say, so that the exhibition is not a single story, but multiple stories that reflect the vexing, gorgeous kaleidoscope of ideas, contexts, aspirations, and meanings that is every voice responding to the issues of its time?”.

What Lesley Lokko proposes when presenting, as Director, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 edition, are not answers, but a series of questions on the needs of humanity, on climate change, on the role of narratives that have so far been kept on the sidelines of the official discourse. And the “laboratory of the future” that the Biennale will propose from 20 May to 26 November is a space within which the 89 participants are called to give answers, half coming from Africa or its diaspora and with an average age aged 43. The voices and history of the Continent as the vanguard of the social and cultural problems that are now reaching the West, but, at the same time, you want to create a new laboratory of possibilities, also to renew the idea of architecture.

Lesley Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute, established in Accra, Ghana, in 2020 as a postgraduate school of architecture, research centre and public events platform. In 2015 she founded the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Lokko is the founder and editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space and Architecture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 2000) and she is currently a founding member of the Council on Urban Initiatives, co-founded by LES Cities, UN Habitat and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

Lokko adds: “Culture is often defined as the complex of stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. While true, what escapes this statement is the awareness of who represents the “we” in question. In architecture in particular, the dominant voice has historically been a singular and exclusive voice, whose reach and power have ignored vast swathes of humanity, financially, creatively and conceptually, as if listening and speaking in a single language. The “history” of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete.” Here is the idea, for the 2023 Biennale: to give space to ignored stories, to complete the picture and broaden the scope of the discipline”.

“It is often said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves”, explains the director: “Whilst it is true, what is missing in the statement is any acknowledgement of who the ‘we’ in question is. In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only. The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter. They are a unique moment in which to augment, change, or re-tell a story, whose audience and impact is felt far beyond the physical walls and spaces that hold it.

What we say publicly matters because it is the ground on which change is built, in tiny increments as well as giant leaps. Central to all the projects is the primacy and potency of one tool: the imagination. It is impossible to build a better world if one cannot first imagine it. Like Hemingway, who famously ended each day’s work mid-sentence, The Laboratory of the Future closes with an open-ended question: what next? The Archive of the Future is a visual account of the processes, drawings, discussions, ideas, conversations, old arguments, propositions and new understandings that collectively brought this exhibition to life. The Laboratory of the Future is not didactic. It does not confirm directions, offer solutions, or deliver lessons. Instead, it is intended as a kind of rupture, an agent of change, where the exchange between participant, exhibit and visitor is not passive or predetermined. The exchange is intended as reciprocal, a form of glorious, unpredictable exchange, each transformed by the encounter, each emboldened to go forward into another future”.