Diverging futures at the Venice Architecture Biennale

THE 18TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION—better known as the Venice Architecture Biennale—bears the overarching title “The Laboratory of the Future” and is dedicated to the idea of the exhibition as an agent of change. The theme is broadly in line with present practice in international exhibitions. It comes after the previous Architecture Biennale “How will we live together?” in 2021, and the Sharjah Triennial “Rights of Future Generations,” in 2019. The framing of the exhibition is explicitly progressive, even in a period of skepticism about progress. This preoccupation with the future obliges a quick check in the rearview mirror.

Much like the modern Olympic Games, the Venice Biennale was created in the late nineteenth century as an attempt to channel the great power rivalry between European states into cultural competition. Prominent at the openings were not only artists and middle-class tourists but also European nobles, heads of state, and diplomats—the entire geopolitical entourage. The Biennale thereby granted Venice, which had been looking for a job ever since losing its position as a chokepoint in European trade, a welcome role as mediator, and the Biennale has (mostly) been held every two years, with breaks for World Wars. From 1968 onwards, student activists, with plenty of justification, denounced the art exhibition as a playground for elites and demanded a turn to more socially engaged themes.

The International Architecture Exhibition opened in 1980 to placate the campaigners. The first full incarnation of the architecture biennale—Paolo Portoghesi’s “The Presence of the Past,” with its extraordinary postmodernist installation in the Arsenale, the “Strada Novissima,” and Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, a floating theater in the form of a medieval tower—was both enormously popular and had precious little of the discussions around public housing and social engagement that the activists demanded. “The Presence of the Past” helped scramble the coordinates of political architecture for the next decade (Is progress possible? Is history turning left, right, or inside out?). The shift from vehemence to irony was one of the great bait-and-switch moments of twentieth-century culture. The point of this potted history is that, contrary to some of the grumbling in the campo, Lokko’s “Laboratory of the Future” is not a hijack of a respectable architectural exhibition by a group of fractious activists. Rather, it is a very belated return to the Biennale’s original promise—one it leaves only partially fulfilled.

The strongest gesture of this Biennale was one of representation. More than half of the contributors to the Central Pavilion and Arsenale were African or from the African diaspora, and half were women. More than two-thirds of the exhibitors were by architectural standards tiny practices, individuals or collectives of no more than two or three people. That is to say, they were not yet architectural offices, and—aside from a couple of prominent exceptions—none had long lists of built projects. As curator Lesley Lokko writes in her statement, the exhibition “actively calls for a different and broader understanding of the term ‘architect.’”

Strikingly, the result of this approach within the Central Pavilion—entitled “Force Majeure”—was not so much a polemical exhibition as a celebratory one. There emerged no clear thesis, but rather a series of positions that hung together in a loose weave: Afrofuturist techno-triumphalism (Olalekan Jeyifous), beautiful adobe detailing (Kéré Architecture), moments of communal withdrawal (Theaster Gates), and monumental starchitecture (the embattled Adjaye Associates). The contradictions between the positions were obvious (what direction is this future going in? Up or down? Is it pastoral or hyper-industrial?), but the curatorial team was not at pains to tease them out, and the works themselves seemed to be able to live with them. The strongest installation in the Central Pavilion, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts, 2019, was all about the tension between silence and public debate. Just as when it was exhibited before, four years ago at the Manchester International Festival, the installation used the odor of shredded industrial materials to reconstitute the atmosphere of suspended promise that followed the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah. At least Mahama was not prevented from traveling to Venice. Three of his compatriots were denied visas by the Italian authorities.

The national pavilions betrayed a little more of the effects of cognitive dissonance. Their distribution in the Giardini is virtually a family portrait of the rivalry within which the art exhibition was conceived, with the main avenue leading directly to the opposing pavilions of France, Britain, and Germany on Venice’s sole hill. All the other national pavilions appear as a kind of infill, and the order of their addition is itself a history in miniature: Russia builds its pavilion in 1914, the USA in 1930, Israel in 1952, Japan in 1956, Korea, the final addition, in 1995, after which the golden book was closed. To give a measure of the geographic distribution of the park, it is enough to note that Serbia maintains a permanent pavilion in the Giardini, but neither China nor India has a plot. There are no sub-Saharan states with national pavilions. In the context of Lokko’s agenda, this spatial situation put most of the national teams in a position of acute discomfort. How could they address the theme of decolonization without at least formally repeating the gesture of appropriating, distorting, and representing? No matter their intentions, the historical and architectural setting lurked, waiting to deconstruct their claims.

In order to sidestep the dilemma, most pavilions opted to go either meta or full-bore sustainability. Those in the former camp reflected on the exhibition’s institutional history and local context. (Spoiler: Latvia achieved this with the most wit, opening a convenience store that auctioned off the press releases of previous biennales, as if to make clear how cheap the rhetoric sounds, year after year.) The sustainability move revolved around recycling, down to and including human excreta. Germany managed to be both meta and sustainable at the same time, presenting both history and piss without a flicker of humor. Concern with sustainability developed in some pavilions into a preoccupation with physical earth, dirt, and mud—indisputably righteous, but so often repeated that it became a little unnerving, as if one could endlessly talk about unique rights grounded in blood and soil without at some point getting covered in soft ethno-nationalist kitsch. The Brazilian pavilion won the Golden Lion with a project that was both virtuous and, in context, predictable: “Terra,” an investigation of earth as soil, territory, and construction material read in terms of Indigenous land use and development in the Amazon. The show was prominently sponsored by corporations eager to look better at ESG than the Brazilian government itself—including Credit Suisse, which collapsed shortly before the exhibition opened.

“Dangerous Liaisons,” the exhibition in the Arsenale, was above all characterized by collaborations and research-based works. Some of these were of a dispiriting preachiness, hellbent on informing the viewer that extractionism is bad, and that it leads to capitalism. The sense of redundancy was not helped by the fact that the curatorial team had retained most of the exhibition furnishings and layout from Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Art Biennale, ostensibly for environmental reasons. Still, a few projects managed to do the more subtle work required to show, rather than tell. Take Sammy Baloji’s Aequare: the Future that Never Was, 2022–23, a meditative montage on colonial agriculture in the Belgian Congo. What is perhaps most striking about the three-part film is the inability of the camera to possess the tropical landscape, a failure particularly evident in those images that attempt to show the jungle domesticated by agronomy. Everything looks false to the pitch of absurdity, from the details of European architecture crumbling in the humidity to footage of disoriented technicians sweating into their starched collars.

Likewise, Baloji’s wall—Debris of History, Matters of Memory, 2023—was a singularly beautiful work. Created in collaboration with architect Gloria Cabral and art historian Cécile Fromont, it consists of a wall some twenty-nine-and-a-half feet long and fourteen-and-a-half feet high, cutting across the middle of the Arsenale. The flat precast elements, each around two inches thick, folded back and forth like origami (the wall could have held itself aloft, but the Biennale’s engineers, puzzled by the construction, insisted on creating a steel armature behind it for fear that it might collapse.) Each element was made of broken bricks, some supplied by the artist, and others gathered from Venetian demolition sites (there are more than one might expect). Embedded within the wall were fist-sized balls of glass, salvaged from the wasteland of Sacca San Mattia, an ancient dump for arsenic-tainted Murano glass. In the cavernous interior of the Arsenale, they appeared opaque, but even the illumination an iphone flashlight made the wall shimmer like a Byzantine mosaic. The irony of the piece is how Venetian it also is. The idea was Baloji’s; the structural work was Cabral’s, and the research was Fromont’s, but the access to the materials, and its production, were made possible by collaboration with local fabricators and architects like Andrea Curtoni and the Venetian collective Biennale Urbana, of which Curtoni is a member, and by other people whose names will only appear as part of a long list of “technical collaborators.” Perhaps this is what is implied by “Dangerous Liaisons”: All work is collaboration from beginning to end. Indeed, granting authorship to single names seems—more than ever—like exhaustion with the work of listing, rather than the unreserved celebration of the individual.

They may not have been given a Golden Lion, but there is no question that the best pavilion of the Biennale—or at least the most liberating, entertaining, and intelligent—was Mexico’s. Architect Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman and colleagues installed half a basketball court in their space in the Arsenale. Visitors were greeted with a drink (either coffee or mezcal), and a ball, and could sink baskets off a Zapatista-themed backboard that bears the motto “Los Nunca Conquistados” (The Never Conquered). At unpredictable intervals, masked dancers crossed the court. Lively conversations took place between flying balls and circling dancers. Rather than preaching, the pavilion practiced. Every decision was motivated by meticulous research. As it turns out, basketball courts are a common feature of highland Indigenous communities in southern Mexico, in particular among the Huautecos and Zapotecs in Oaxaca, and among the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and Ch’ol peoples in the state of Chiapas, where the Zapatista movement was born. Well suited to the mountainous terrain, the compact format of the basketball court—a concrete slab with some esoteric line markings—effectively condenses the characteristic material of modernist architecture and its most abstract means of representation into a single physical object. Built from the Cárdenas regime in the 1930s onward, the courts rapidly became appropriated for every kind of civic ritual, whether secular or sacred. They provided what the curators called a “constructivist infrastructure” around which political and spiritual forms could organize, thereby fulfilling—quite by accident—the kind of communitarian promises that animate this Biennale, but that are so difficult to ultimately deliver.

— Adam Jasper

The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale is on view until November 26, 2023.