The Venice Biennale, a grand exhibition that concentrates on art and architecture in alternate years, has been until now a Eurovision of the visual. It is held partly in a series of national pavilions in specially dedicated gardens, originally laid out before the first world war, that reflect the evolving world order of the 20th century. Britain, France and Germany are in pride of place, the United States off to one side, other European countries also prominent, plus some representation from Latin America and south-east Asia. Another part of the biennale is held in a relic of an older power structure – the Corderie, the 16th-century rope works of the city’s Arsenale, which served the fleet of what was then a dominant maritime empire.
The architecture and architects celebrated by the biennale have also been predominantly European, with some contributions from Asia and the Americas. This year’s event, called “The Laboratory of the Future”, curated by the Ghanaian-Scottish academic and novelist Lesley Lokko, sets out to give space to those previously under-represented, in particular (but not only) Africa and the African diaspora. In so doing she aims to present ways of doing architecture that are differentiation of natural resources and expropriation of the wealth of others. (If you want an example, you need look no further than the famous St Mark’s Basilica, which is laden with loot seized from Constantinople in the fourth crusade in 1204.)
This general ambition includes “decarbonisation” and “decolonisation”, ways of building that are less exploitative of people and nature than in the past, or may not even involve much construction. Lokko stretches the definitions of what is usually considered architecture to include art, performance, games, activism and other ways of dwelling in physical space that are available to those deprived of the power and resources to build large permanent structures.
So you are greeted, soon after entering the Corderie, by a large screen featuring the poet Rhael “Lionheart” Cape, proclaiming that “if architecture doesn’t serve feelings it serves a psychosis”. Later on there’s a film by the London-based Gbolade Design Studio on the popularity of dominoes among the Windrush generation in south London – “dominoes people are happy people,” says one elderly devotee, the point being that you need minimal infrastructure or money, just a network of places where you can play the game.
There’s not all that much by way of conventional architectural projects, apart from a room full of assured models by David Adjaye’s practice, including the future national cathedral of Ghana and the proposed home, in Nigeria, for the repatriated Benin bronzes. Norman Foster’s prototype for emergency housing, sponsored by the construction materials company Holcim and on show outside the biennale proper, is an outlier of the prevailing spirit of youth and local knowledge.
There’s an emphasis on ways of making shelter that don’t rely on heavy construction, such as weaving or building with earth, or that make best use of existing structures. There’s a rich and intriguing room containing the work of the Catalan architects Flores and Prats, whose Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona is a virtuoso remodelling of an old building. One of the more engaging pieces, because it is beautifully wrought, is Bengali Song, an intricate woven triptych depicting a flood-proof home, made by artisans from a collective in Bengal, in collaboration with Arinjoy Sen, a young, not-yet-qualified architect, Kolkata-born and based in London.
The national pavilions, while not directly curated by Lokko, are encouraged to follow her themes. The Nordic countries pavilion has been taken over by a collection of artefacts relating to the Sámi people – a riot of timber, reindeer hide and colour assembled by the architect and artist Joar Nango. The British pavilion, curated by Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham, presents a rewarding film compilation of the lives and rituals of minorities in Britain, using recent and archival footage: a Sikh new year celebration, a hair salon in Streatham, more dominoes, 1980s anti-police protests in Bradford, Asian BMW enthusiasts in Southall. It also contains a series of more-or-less mysterious installations, including a representation in blue soap, by the Angolan artist Sandra Poulson, of everyday objects in Luanda (a cement tank, ornamental balustrades, a traditional dress). For reasons I can’t pin down, it’s arresting.
It doesn’t all come off. In places this biennale feels thin and under-resourced, which probably reflects the fact that previous iterations have had more projects by big practices, which tend to bring along additional funding. If you hoped for a burst of energy and celebration, you don’t quite get it. It suffers, as have previous biennales, from exhibits that are wilfully hard to understand, unilluminated by wordy and opaque captions – in a kind of language that architectural academe for some reason loves. In shows this big, you shouldn’t have to work so much to get to the meaning of the displays.
There’s a vague and inconclusive optimism, something that this edition also shares with previous biennales. The Latvian pavilion, actually a room in the depths of the Arsenale, offers a diverting corrective: it mocks up a convenience store where the products take the form of packets inscribed with the pious and little-changing intentions of biennale exhibits going back 20 years. They proclaim “the need to change our perception of nature and recognise that we are connected to it” or “collective examples of architecture that foster connections and understanding”. Yes, fine, but if the world faces various kinds of emergency it would be good to see proposals that are more urgent and less conjectural.
Some of the most memorable exhibits, because they are specific and concrete, are the bleakest, such as a film by a team led by the architect Alison Killing (Newcastle-born, Rotterdam-based) that documents, through satellite imagery and other material, the scale and efficient cruelty of Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs. The Congolese photographer and artist Sammy Baloji documents the Belgian exploitation of the minerals and agriculture of his land, with among other things an exquisite new model in brass and copper of a 1935 design for an exhibition hall intended to glorify colonisation. By remaking a monument to appropriation as something gorgeous, he takes possession of it on his own terms.
But, given that it’s changing the momentum and direction that the biennale has followed for more than a century, it’s inevitable that Lokko’s endeavour would be patchy in places. (And, again, because of their unwieldy scale, so are all biennales.) Ultimately she succeeds in her main aim, which is to show how the world looks to people previously given limited access to the sort of prestige and visibility that the Venice Biennale confers.
She shows worlds with a deep past, until recently denied much by way of a present, which have the chance to make direct leaps into the future. The most dazzling space in the biennale, by the architecturally trained Nigerian-American artist Olalekan Jeyifous, gives form to this hope: it’s a make-believe lounge for the All-African Protoport, surrounded by images of lush vegetation and futuristic machines, an imaginary sustainable transport network created by the collaboration of decolonised states. It is also, hopefully, a point of departure from which the Venice Biennale and similar institutions can’t turn back.