The Architecture Biennale creates the future by looking at Africa

Humanity, "with a short-sighted look", presumed that the planet was entirely at its service and for this reason "many crucial resources have been exhausted. Why has the Earth been considered so limited?" This is what Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian, one of the greatest theorists of postcolonialism, asks.
The phrase appears in the path of "The Laboratory of the Future", the 18. International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko, which through a privileged look at Africa and its diaspora places central problems such as decarbonization, environmental sustainability, decolonization at the center of its being, its questioning and seeking answers.
"If you want to build a better world you have to imagine it," says the curator, conversing with journalists next to President Roberto Cicutto. To do this, in the field of architecture, it is necessary to get out of the schemes of cultural "hegemonies", of disciplinary particularities, of all-encompassing design and construction solutions. It is useless to look for the projects of cry, the structures that have value for their very being more than for specific function. The Biennial of Lokko, Anglo-Ghanaian architect and writer, offers other perspectives because it is necessary to listen to different voices, to activate agents of change. "In architecture, in particular, the dominant voice has historically been a singular and exclusive voice, whose scope and power - he recalls - have ignored vast swathes of humanity, financially, creatively and conceptually".
In the process of rewriting the "history" of architecture - "not wrong, but incomplete" she underlines - the curator presents an exhibition divided into six parts, divided between the Giardini, Arsenale and Forte Marghera, where more than half of the 89 participants come from Africa or the African diaspora, with a gender balance and an average age of 43, which drops to 37 in the Special Projects section of the Curator, in which the youngest is 24 years old. More than the age, to give the sign of an exhibition that seems to address fundamental issues for human survival through "microstories" and flexible solutions, it should be considered that over 70% of the exhibited works were designed by studios managed by a very small person or work group.
The variety of proposals, working hypotheses, interventions along the path of the six parts signed by Lokko is very wide, giving life to a magmatic exhibition where videos, models, fabrics, maps, music, installations meet, which give a clear sign of the fall of the boundaries between the arts.
On the lexical level, the curator introduces a novelty, defining the participants not with the term "architect" but "practitioner", while on the operational front she has created "Carnival", a cycle of meetings, round tables, films and performances during the six months of the exhibition, "which wants to be a practical form of architecture that tries to bridge the gap between architects and the public".
Most of the 64 national pavilions - also present Ukraine and the Holy See - responded positively to the requests of the curator of the Biennale and addressed issues such as the impact on the environment and humanity deriving from the enormity of plastic waste (United States) or the concept of repairing the existing (Germany) or the awakening of the desire for utopias (France). "Spatial: Everyone belongs to all the others" is the title of the exhibition at the Italian Pavilion, curated by the collective Fosbury Architecture and promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.