VENICE — The 18th International Architecture Exhibition which opened to the public in Venice last week and runs until November 26 differs from previous iterations of the biennale in significant ways, but perhaps most notably in its emphasis on reusing and recycling materials . This year, participants were asked to leave as light a carbon footprint as possible, encouraged to use screens, projections and digital resources “instead of models and artifacts”.
These features are in line with one of the two guiding principles of Ghanaian-Scottish curator Lesley Lokko’s vision: ‘decarbonisation’. The other, “decolonization,” is reflected in the geographic focus of the show. For the first time, more than half of the participants of the Biennale are either African or from the African diaspora.
For all the Biennale’s focus on decolonizing and empowering African architects and artists, the refusal of visas to three Ghanaian members of the Lokko team, allegedly for fear of extending their stay, tarnished the host country’s hospitality credentials. At the inaugural press conference, Lokko read a statement from the Italian Embassy in Ghana saying it was “at the forefront of policies to promote African cultural heritage”. The visa denials, Lokko added, “were not the forefront of politics” but “the ugly rear end”.
This incident, Lokko said, should not define the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, which comes with so many firsts. The look and feel of the Biennale defies our traditional expectations of a spectacle of architecture and a stroll through the main venues – the sprawling Giardini Park, with pavilions that include works by Carlo Scarpa and Alvar Aalto , among other renowned architects; and the Arsenale, the old shipyard in Venice — confirms the accuracy of the title of the show: The laboratory of the future. The idea that architecture should transcend the realm of construction and respond to people’s needs, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, is central to this exhibition.
In the Arsenale, a triangular wooden tower entitled “Kwaeε” (“forest” in Twi, one of the languages spoken in Ghana) by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye stands out for its monumentality while blending into its Venetian decor. The interior of the tower is a sculpted ovoid described in the Biennale brochure as reminiscent of a cave, but its sensory effect conveys a sense of the sacred, aided by two oculi near the top, one opening onto a disused crane and the other on the clear sky.
Another outstanding work from Africa also comes from Ghana. Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey has created a massive quilt from scraps of recycled plastic jerry cans that are repurposed as water containers. Known locally as ‘Kufuor Gallon’ or ‘the Gallon’, they are ubiquitous in Ghana’s capital, Accra, which suffers from a chronic water shortage. The containers are named after John Kufuor, president of Ghana from 2001 to 2009, a period when the country experienced a series of water crises.
Plastic is also the central theme of the United States pavilion. Venturing outside his usual medium, Chicago-based designer Norman Teague recycled plastic to reinterpret traditional Bolga baskets from a district in Ghana known for its craftsmanship and Agaseke baskets from Rwanda. The presentation is intended as a critique of Western exploitation — “extractive practices” — whereby resources extracted in developing countries return to their source as waste. The pavilion highlights the overwhelming presence of plastic in everyday life in the United States.
“We’re looking at this reality of plastic and how reduce-reuse-recycle has been a very tired trope, and that puts the blame on the individual and not the companies who are really responsible for our global crisis,” said Tizziana Baldenebro, co-curator of the American pavilion with Lauren Leving.
According to Baldenebro, our individual relationships to the plastic have become “abstract and obscure”. His project aims to engage viewers and users of plastic through works of art created with what is now one of the worst pollutants in the world.
Also in the American pavilion, Simon Anton from Detroit grafted plastic onto metal sculptures to recreate hypothetical future remnants of a catastrophic past. The effect of the colorful shards on the crowd control barriers or twisted window gratings of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York evoke an ancient shipwreck covered in seashells.
“The plastic flakes show how communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by plastic waste,” Anton said. “It’s a kind of environmental violence.”
As exciting as it is, a lab may not be for everyone. As in every experiment, we only see isolated bits of a larger object or process that is still incomplete or difficult for an outsider to imagine in its final form – or that could turn out to be a total failure. Lokko recognizes this aspect.
“A journalist commented that the exhibit ‘seems to stop before the architecture,'” Lokko said. “While I appreciate and understand the commentary, for me the opposite is true: it’s our conventional understanding of architecture that stops dead in its tracks.”
The invitation to recycle and to refrain from erecting massive structures has led to a predictable recourse to the audiovisual medium, but the abundance of images and photographs and the increasingly rich range of options offered by digital resources cannot compensate for a sense of volume, even when allowing for a larger design of architecture. The aquatic themes explored extensively in the Greek and Danish pavilions feel entirely appropriate in Venice, a city barely above the waterline, criss-crossed by 150 canals. But like many others — including the richly illustrated exhibits of the Peruvian Pavilion and the Brazilian Pavilion Earthwhich won the Golden Lion, with their critical introspection on wealth and inequality in the vastness of the Amazon – these presentations most often relegate the visitor to a passive role.
However, some participants have achieved remarkable resource saving experiences. The Korean Pavilion 2086: Together How? brings together architects, community leaders and artists to explore how people can face environmental crises together until 2086, when the world’s population is expected to peak. It includes an addictive video game in which participants sit in stands similar to game shows and have 20 seconds to answer a series of questions that border on the impossible or the absurd. The prompts convey a sense of urgency about the state of the planet. Has AI taken over our lives? What would you do if rising sea levels forced you to leave your home?
Deceptive in its starkness, Poland’s pavilion features four sets of interlocking frames that represent the spatial dimensions and shapes of homes in four countries or territories: Poland, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Malawi. Visitors can walk through them to get an idea of the living spaces, the measurements of which are based on average data. Although the installation faithfully reflects this information, it does not correspond to the reality of living in any of the four regions. The pavilion is titled Data, a neologism supposed to mean “the establishment of data”. In the job description, the Polish team – made up of artist Anna Barlik, architect Marcin Strzata and curator Jacek Sosnowski – warns of the “staggering” amount of data generated daily that the human mind can no longer process, resulting in “seemingly chaotic and absurd structures.”
The Romania pavilion features a collection of singular futuristic objects dating back to the early 20th century through the late 1960s, with the star attraction being the Persu, a narrow and oddly elongated prototype automobile built in 1922- 23 with extraordinary aerodynamic perfection. it is remarkable even today, even though it was never mass-produced. This pavilion also presents the Flying Backpack, the futuristic device par excellence invented by the Romanian engineer Justin Capră in 1956.
For those looking for a more traditional experience, the Uzbekistan Pavilion can be rewarding. Deconstructing together: archaism against modernitythe project organized by KO Studio, reproduces in its sublime austerity the qalas, ancient fortresses of Karakalpakstan. The focus is on the most basic building unit, the brick. As an exquisite detail, some bricks are glazed by Uzbek artist Abdulvahid Bukhoriy, one of the few craftsmen to master the almost extinct technique of Bukhara blue ceramics.
You don’t have to look any further than Chile to find a perfect summary of what a vision for the future of architecture can be. Ecologies in motion features an almost oval or circular perimeter described as an “Experimental Field”, with glass spheres that hold 250 different seeds. This expanse of transparent spheres atop long sticks – think of a large flower bed with tall stems – is divided into five different sections, depending on the properties of the seeds (species capable of colonizing highly degraded urban soils; species capable of clean up soils; those that help restore after natural disasters, and others). The installation encapsulates the words of curator Gonzalo Carrasco Purull, which perhaps contain a larger lesson in the essence of all man-made structures: “It is not architecture that dictates how we must live, but the Earth.”
