The Future is Ancestral

I've just finished my first visit to the Venice Architecture Biennale, an intense experience which overwhelms you with visual, sensory and conceptual impressions.?

The Biennale is a vast international exhibition which runs from May to November, and the overall theme this year is 'Laboratory of the Future'. It's curated this year by Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko, who has pulled together a central exhibit of staggering diversity and depth. Reaching into her unique intellectual, professional and cultural hinterland, her imprint is indelible and yet she succeeds in elevating and centring other artists and architects – a majority from Africa, and many of whom one feels might never have otherwise found their way to Biennale. This fresh relevance was welcome, and you get the sense that Lokko’s intervention has come at an important time.

At the conceptual level, the exhibit links architecture firmly to themes of social and natural crisis. The materials that make up our built environment are enmeshed in global structures of economic and social iniquity and environmental destruction, even as buildings and urban spaces themselves reinforce those walls. The relationships between invisible structures and physical structures came through strongly to me, and if there is a ‘laboratory of the future’ it exists in the possibility of altering them.

Of the two individual exhibits I loved most, the first is Alison Killing and team’s Pulitzer-prize winning work uncovering China’s network of Uighur ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang, a phenomenal feat of investigation inventing a whole new category of ‘architectural journalism’.?The other is the V&A’s brilliant but too hidden-away exhibit on tropical modernism in Ghana, looking at how an architectural style bound up with colonialism was adopted by independence movements, and even offers inspiration for a new African futurism.?

The national pavilions are a mixed bag, some more visual, others more conceptual, and some a bit abstract. Many have only a passing connection to architecture, but that doesn’t really matter. Most powerful is the ‘Terra’ exhibit at the Brazil Pavilion, rightful winner of the Golden Lion on Saturday. The exhibit explores indigenous connection to land and stories of resistance to the control and destruction of land encoded in the modern state – a process epitomised by the (albeit elegant) architecture of the capital Brasilia. A voice in the extraordinary exhibit video (which I can't find online) declares that "the future is ancestral", hopeful that there is a way to repair this relationship.

Other standouts include the sculpture-inflected Dancing with the Moon exhibit at the British Pavilion, and the Netherlands' attempt to re-plumb the global money system.?Finland’s beautifully simple exhibit of a compost toilet also got everyone talking. While it really shouldn’t be such a revolutionary concept to this crowd, its universality and practicality made it a deserving favourite.

While exhilarating, overall the Biennale feels like an event slightly encumbered with its own history, hesitating between possible futures. One as a sort of creative Davos – exclusive, inaccessible, self-regarding – or another as something porous, outward looking and willing to challenge and disrupt. This year’s intervention was important – Biennale needs Africa more than Africa needs Biennale. In terms of which future it chooses, Lokko and the incredible creators showcased have put their fingers firmly on the scales.