The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
Last week saw the opening of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, which is the first in the exhibition’s 43-year history to focus on practitioners and projects on the African continent, and from African diaspora communities around the world. Curated by Ghanaian-Scottish academic, architect, educator and novelist Lesley Lokko under the overarching title of ‘The Laboratory of the Future’, its central displays examine, among many topics, the ongoing effects of colonisation and the toxic traces it has left in its wake: environmentally, socially, economically, as well as spatially. The conditions for creating architecture invoked by the participants in the Corderie dell’Arsenale and Giardini Central Pavilion are underpinned by troubling histories and present-day realities, but the exhibitions are also joyous spaces that celebrate the extraordinary breadth and depth of architectural and intellectual work happening in regions and communities that have been woefully underrepresented in previous editions of the Biennale.
Over the years, the AR has covered several practitioners featured in ‘The Laboratory of the Future’, and commissioned texts by many of its participants. Below is a carefully selected Reading List that re-introduces some of the work and thinking present in the 2023 Architecture Biennale to our readers.
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‘The paradigm of development-aid-charity has come to dominate African architecture to the exclusion of almost everything else’, AR May 2017, Lesley Lokko
‘By treating Africa as a world apart, separate from the movements, trends, shifts and forces that shape architectural culture everywhere else, we remain trapped in our own developmental bubble’
In practice: Cave Bureau on a museum for the Anthropocene, AR April 2021, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi
‘It seems to us that the Shimoni caves are what a “museum” on the African continent should be’
Home ground: the garden as a site of colonial critique, AR October 2020, Ilze Wolff
‘Bessie Head’s spatial practice sits with the legacies of the loss of land and people's dignity in South Africa at the time’
Retrospective: the way by Kéré, AR May 2017, Andres Lepik
‘A German-trained Burkinabé architect, Kéré represents a dialogue between the global North and South, and champions a social architecture that considers both ethics and aesthetics’
Between stoves, across borders: cooking as memory, AR January 2022, Gloria Pavita
‘Home cannot exist without the words of my aunt’s tongue, without the work of the hands and bodies of her sisters, carried by their mother before them, and other women of our kin who bear these traces of home in their implicit memory’
Photo essay: waste lands, AR June 2021, Sammy Baloji
‘I was looking at this fragility that was created by the system itself, and those people living close to the polluted areas and working in a really dangerous context and conditions’
Ingesting architectures: the violence of breathing in parts of Joburg, AR June 2021, Sumayya Vally
‘The invisible code for composing this landscape came from abrasive industrial processes decades ago; their implications are still producing this landscape’
Lead image: Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji with Cécile Fromont, Debris of History, Matters of Memo, displayed at the Arsenale as part of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia ‘The laboratory of the Future’. Credit: Andrea Avezzù / La Biennale di Venezia
