Venice Biennale: Visions of a future blurred by our past

The moving spirit behind the whole event is director Lesley Lokko (Image: getty), who as well as being an architect, is an academic and a writer with eleven novels to her credit. She describes herself as Ghanain-Scottish. Her father was Ghanaian and met her Scottish mother while both were students in Scotland. She spent part of her childhood in Newport-on-Tay, although her recollections of the town as given in interviews in Italian newspapers are at best mixed. When her parents separated, she went with her father to Ghana.

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The Biennale has something of the riotous anarchy of the Edinburgh Fringe rather than of the official Festival. It now foregrounds in alternate years Art and Architecture, and has two central venues, the Arsenal and the Giardini, with most countries having permanent pavilions in the latter venue. The Russian one stands self-accusingly empty this year, while Ukraine’s is a ground zero, a dark shed whose floorspace is taken up by a plain sheet dragged out across the floor. Other churches, halls and residences all over Venice and the outlying islands have been pressed into service to house ‘collateral’ events. The already spectacular monastery-island of San Giorgio has one such stunning exhibition of glasswork.

The architect may have a central role in this Biennale and in many of its individual or national stands, but the idea of architecture is stretched to an extreme, as is clear in the poetic or mystic dispatches engraven on the walls, many by Ms Lokko herself. The magnificent architecture of Venice’s palaces and churches is no guide to what architecture is taken to mean today.

Scotland and Venice collateral event “A Fragile Correspondence (Image: GETTY)

The architect is no longer the classical engineering figure who designs buildings or plans the layout of inhabited spaces, or not only that, but is presented as a visionary, a sociologist, a philosopher and an idealist whose indispensable qualities are imagination, far-sightedness and humane intuition. They should also be endowed with a critical knowledge of past errors committed by their trade so as to be able to create a fairer and more humane as well as sustainable future. They are central figures in the creation of human society. James Baldwin is an indispensable writer when pithy words are to be spoken, and conveniently he wrote that imagination is more important than history.

There are fifty-four sites taken this year by African nations or groups, and while some look forward to a more hopeful future to be created by African peoples themselves, the thrust in others is a condemnation of injustices perpetrated by white colonialists or other power holders. The contemporary and historical plight of Africa and African peoples, including those enslaved and transplanted elsewhere, are central to the entire event, and the way forward from this inherited past is entrusted throughout to the architect’s trade.

A writing on the wall positioned significantly at the entrance by Lokko states that ‘the complex challenges that Africa and the African diaspora present demand bold and complex responses at a time when many perceive the term ‘architect’ to be under threat due to the slippery expansion of the architect’s role, or the encroachment of ‘other’ disciplines. Perhaps a retreat or return to basics is not the only way to adapt to changing circumstances, intelligently, thoughtfully, ethically, and resourcefully.’              

A prominent banner proclaims; ‘Africa produces less than 4% of the world’s emissions’. In colourful capitals, it continues: ‘Just because our history was intercepted by others does not mean that our future has to be.’

While much determined optimism is evident, in some cases, a bitterness of tone is uppermost, and it is a surprise to note how often the official programme prefers the mildness of euphemism when describing such venues. Canada takes as the title of its display Not For Sale! and according to the programme highlights ‘the country’s protracted housing crisis.’ This shortage is not restricted to one country, and in fact the Canadian show associates this problem specifically with the land grab which saw native peoples dispossessed. It then widens out to condemn laws and practices which saw State and Church, especially the Catholic Church, cooperate in the removal of children from their parental home to be forcibly integrated into a white, western notion of civilisation. There are two banners at the door, one disconcertingly proclaiming No Surrender! and other showing what the map of Canada would look like if the lands of the first nations were restored to them.

The British exhibition supposedly ‘promotes the idea that everyday rituals are forms of spatial practice of diasporic communities and present new ways of thinking about architecture and the built environment.’ In fact it focuses on the problems facing immigrants, largely from the Caribbean, in settling in Britain and their inventive ways of maintaining against the odds contact with their own cultural habits.

An exhibition devoted to Kenya is even more bitter. It details how the process of enslavement which involved local leaders, Middle Eastern agents and Portuguese traders was ended by the British, only for them to become imperialist rulers of the whole country. It denounces the cruelty of the British response to the nascent liberation movement, which included burial alive of leaders. We are far away from any conventional idea of architecture.

But everything passes. The Latvian pavilion is a cod supermarket where the items on sale are the idea floated in the Biennale in years past. They are now available at cut-price rates.

The Biennale runs until 26 November