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by Elizabeth Paton
November 2023
As architecture curator of this year's Venice Biennale, Lokko sent the message: Creativity is decidedly not the prerogative of the global North. Prof Lesley Lokko OBE is honoured to be featured on this list of African creatives at the centre of a global shift.
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by Vera Sacchetti
June 2023
Curated by Lesley Lokko, Venice’s Biennale Architettura 2023 challenges dominant narratives of architectural production, shifting focus toward decolonization and decarbonization.
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by Marianna Cerini
May 2023
Until recently, the Venice Architecture Biennale — arguably the world’s largest architecture exhibition — has drawn crowds for its (mainly Western) star appeal. Big, established names from the realms of design and architecture have often been the main talking points, alongside pavilions that, for the most part, were all about the new, the innovative and the aesthetically pleasing.
This year’s edition, its 18th, which opened to the public on May 20 and is set to run until November 26, feels drastically different.
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by Sara Banti
May 2023
Decolonising, freeing peoples from political and economic domination, in a world that for the most part is still oppressed. That is perhaps the most invoked and declaimed word (together with the oft-repeated ‘decarbonise’) at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia that runs until 26 November 2023, curated by the Anglo-Ghanaian architect-sociologist, professor and writer Lesley Lokko. But there are also other definitions that help us grasp the deeper meaning of this research – titled The Laboratory of the Future – exhibited at the Arsenale and the central pavilion in the Giardini. C for coexistence, confront, condivision. R for repair, re-oriente, restore.
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by Christopher Hawthorne
May 2023
Don’t be fooled by its generic title. Lesley Lokko’s “Laboratory of the Future” is the most ambitious and pointedly political Venice Architecture Biennale in years.
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May 2023
Three Ghanaian curators of the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture, which opened on Saturday, were denied entry by the Italian government. The curators were travelling to Venice to attend the event and work with Ghanaian-Scottish curator Lesley Lokko, the first curator of African descent to helm the exhibition. A large portion of the Biennale, titled Laboratory of the Future, will focus on voices from Africa and African diasporas.
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by Rowan Moore
May 2023
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.
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by Sam Lubell
May 2023
The Venice Architecture Biennale is historically where designers from around the world critique and propose new directions for our built environment. But until now, the presence of African practitioners has been the exception, not the rule.
That has changed profoundly. Of the 89 participants in the 2023 Biennale’s main exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future,” on view at multiple locations through Nov. 26, more than half are from Africa or the African Diaspora. Half are female, and the average age — fitting for a continent with the youngest median population in the world — is 43.
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by Edwin Heathcote
May 2023
There is a lot of earth at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Heaps of soil, hardened mud floors, ground that has been polished into screens for projections, earth built up into walls and surfaces, clay made into bricks and blocks, the terracotta tones of tiles, piles and leaching dirt. It is a stark contrast to the self-indulgent conceptual models, visionary urban plans and conceptual simulacra of perfectly projected architectures which have defined the Biennale for more than four decades. In fact, buildings barely feature in what is, perhaps, the most radical shift in the Biennale’s history.
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by Debika Ray
May 2023
When Lesley Lokko was invited to curate the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, it felt like the next chapter of a narrative she’d been building for decades. “I told myself, ‘You’ve been waiting a long time to have a space: now take it, and say something,’” she says during a stopover in London on her way from Ghana to Venice.
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by Isabelle Regnier
May 2023
“I couldn’t have put together the biennial if I didn’t think like a writer. And I would never have been able to write novels if I didn't have training as an architect. »
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by Patricia Leigh Brown
May 2023
For most of her life, the Ghanaian Scottish architect and educator Lesley Lokko, curator of the forthcoming Venice Architecture Biennale, has moved between worlds. She grew up in both Accra, the capital, with its two seasons and hot steady climate, and cool coastal Dundee. “Scotland was shiver,” she recalled. “Ghana was sweat.”. Her ability to inhabit and interpret multiple worlds is a talent that Lokko, 59, the Architecture Biennale’s first curator of African descent, is bringing to “The Laboratory of the Future,” an ambitious exploration of Africa’s impact on the globe — and vice versa.
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by Walter Mariotti
May 2023
Lesley Lokko, curator of the 18th edition, tells us about her “Laboratory of the Future”, which reflects on production, resources, rights and the risks involved in architecture, with a focus on Africa.
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by Rowan Moore
March 2023
Africa” says Lesley Lokko, stopping over in a London hotel on the way from Accra to Venice, “is the world’s youngest continent. It is the most rapidly urbanising and has the fewest architects.” It is therefore a place of instability and invention, minimally constrained by professional structures, where the “speed of change is likely to outstrip the ability to understand it”. Its countries, meanwhile, have on average the oldest political leaders, which makes for a gap between governance and the pace of events.
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by Giovanni Comoglio
February 2023
Once again, and even more so, architecture is called upon to give answers – rather than shaping aesthetics – to imperatives, urgent demands from the planet and all the life forms that inhabit it, as Cicutto has stressed, and Lokko’s project fits in such emergencies, so much that the curator herself is the first to define the participants as practitioners rather than architects, in order to emphasize the priority of a “concrete and necessary action”.