The Laboratory of the Future: this is the ambitious topic at the centre of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition organised by La Biennale di Venezia, which will be open to the public from Saturday 20th May to Sunday 26th November 2023 at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and at Forte Marghera.
This year it will be curated by the Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko, who has worked on an eco-friendly model with the aim of turning the exhibition into a real agent of change:
“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. Besides the desire to tell a story, the issues concerning production, resources and representation are central as regards the way an architecture exhibition comes into the world, but they are rarely acknowledged or discussed. From the outset, it was clear that the essential gesture of The Laboratory of the Future would be ‘change’. For the first time ever, the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and intertwined culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe.”
The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition in six parts. It includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is 50/50, and the average age of all participants is 43.
The exhibition begins in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, where 16 projects that represent a distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered. It moves to the Arsenale complex, where participants in the Dangerous Liaisons section – also represented in Forte Marghera in Mestre – rub shoulders with the Curator’s Special Projects, for the first time a category that is as large as the others. Threaded through and amongst the works in both venues are young African and Diasporic practitioners, our Guests from the Future, whose work engages directly with the twin themes of this exhibition, decolonisation and decarbonisation, providing a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world.
The Laboratory of the Future programme is enriched by Carnival, a six-month-long cycle of events, lectures, panel discussions, films, and performances that explore the themes of the Biennale Architettura 2023.
Moreover, among the several collateral events, La Biennale di Venezia and the Victoria and Albert Museum present for the seventh consecutive year the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project titled Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa, while La Biennale dedicates the Biennale Sessions project to Universities, Academies of Fine Arts, and other Institutes of Higher Learning, strengthening its educational engagement.
Once again, The Biennale Architettura of Venice turns out to be the not-to-be-missed event to broaden our horizon on what the future holds for us, with the aim of designing new forms of life, culture and society. The Lagoon is waiting for you!
