This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale is brave, baffling, stimulating and essential

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.

It has been curated by Lesley Lokko, a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, novelist and educator who has mobilised her expansive network of friends and collaborators (one Nigerian architect I spoke to said he could not refuse her invitation because “she is our matriarch”) to produce a show centred on Africa, “decolonisation and decarbonisation”, and which touches on the big issues of land: rights, ownership, extraction, agriculture and displacement. Hence, I guess, all that earth. The result is a show that is brave, necessary, uneven, occasionally strange, occasionally baffling, at times stimulating and at others elusive.

Africa is, Lokko suggests, the world’s youngest continent and this is, without doubt, the youngest ever Biennale. Where once its halls were stalked by starchitects and the profession’s established figures in a clear hierarchy of academic or cult success, here we have instead a diverse array of practitioners including many people from Africa and its diaspora who have barely begun to define their careers, let alone build substantial work. It is a long-needed recalibration.

In the Central Pavilion, for instance, there is the joyful Afrofuturism of Brooklyn-based architect and artist Olalekan Jeyifous imagining a retro-sci-fi airport in a jungle paradise of Afro-eco-tourism shot through with 1970s glamour. There is Diébédo Francis Kéré’s loving tribute to handwritten shop signs in his native Burkina Faso, a calming sound installation by South African Sumayya Vally and photographer James Morris’s powerful shots of traditional mud structures looking strikingly contemporary and strange. Though when you get to Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s engrossing installation using bits of salvaged and reused interiors reassembled into “Parliament of Ghosts” (itself recycled from the Whitworth in Manchester from 2019), you understand that artists are so much better at this kind of installation than architects.

The one architect here to present a battery of buildings is David Adjaye (another Ghanaian-British architect), who finds himself exalted to near cult-status, his room a dark shrine of spotlit models of African megastructures. His work appears again in a black wood temple on the docks and in a model of the vast new proposed Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.

But what might be seen as an optimistic vision of an African future might also be accused of naivety. Africa, here designated a “Laboratory of the Future”, has its potential richly represented, but some brutal realities are less present: the massive Chinese construction projects which will leave countries in debt for generations, the civil wars and corruption, the mass migrations and the informal settlements in so many of its cities. This is deliberate and understandable on Lokko’s part but it also diminishes the responsibility of architects to address these issues.

Moving into the Arsenale and the Corderie, the ancient, attenuated ropemaking halls, Lokko has left a lot more space than is usual and the building itself, decaying, its walls a tapestry of traces of repairs and reuse, is much more present, much more tangible, a wonderful metaphor for neglect, adaptation and potential. That Venice was a place of global exchange and long a city with a black population crops up occasionally, along with explorations of slavery and the black body as a resource extracted by colonialists. The exhibits here become more diverse and diffuse, embracing other histories — and futures.

Forensic Architecture’s excavation in the floor reveals a projection (on earth, of course) of the relatively recent discovery of Nebelivka, a large settlement in present-day Ukraine dating back 6,000 years which posits a different kind of city that we might have had, more dispersed, less hierarchical. Beside that is Liam Young’s hyper-real scifi animation of fearsome, speculative megastructures for extracting carbon in a stormy, steamy world ruined by climate change, viaducts of massive turboprops, sinister machines for a near future.

The V&A’s installation on Tropical Modernism, initially a European colonial project but one adopted and adapted by African nations, notably in post-independence Ghana by the Nkrumah government (Ghana is big here), is intriguing but it would have been interesting to see the east European equivalent in which the Soviets funded massive programmes of education and construction. The Russian pavilion remains shuttered.

The national pavilions have been largely well-behaved, sticking to Lokko’s themes, examining extraction, climate, land rights and the cultures of first nations. The Nordics have inhabited their exquisitely beautiful Modernist pavilion (by Sverre Fehn from 1962) with a colourful and aromatic array of nomadic artefacts of the Sámi people, from reindeer skins to woodwork and tree bark, with earth and shards of pottery scattered across the usually impeccable concrete floor.

The Germans have established a tidy set of workshops and storage systems for the reuse of previous Biennale infrastructures, simultaneously serious-minded and ironic, a work about maintenance and time. The Belgians have created a mycelium enclosure in the middle of their always-cool interior (their future is fungal) and the French have built a strange, silvery theatre. The British meanwhile, have an unusually uplifting ensemble of black music, film and sculptural installations.

The US has an installation on the longevity of plastics; outside, there are garish sculptures created from barrels and buckets, creating a rather beautiful landscape of waste. Elsewhere the Uzbekistan pavilion is a paean to the disappearing blue-glazed bricks that were once a mainstay of its architecture, set into a labyrinth of brick walls in one of the Biennale’s most impressive spaces at the back of the Arsenale. It was wonderful too to see Nigerian Demas Nwoko win the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, thoroughly deserved for a rich career in architecture and art.

Lokko’s Biennale represents not only a geographical but a radical generational shift. I heard many complaints about the scarcity of buildings on show. But this is an expression of the desires of another generation and another continent and it is vivid, vital and timely. The gap between Lokko’s generous enthusiasm and the architectural establishment’s apathy is a sign of a huge schism opening up in the culture and the profession, the biggest split in three decades of Biennales. That many of the African participants were refused visas for the opening is the perfect testament to how necessary this readjustment is.

Lokko’s intent to open up the culture to other forms of expression, architecture by other means, what she calls “building knowledge” (rather than knowledge of building) is a serious stab at decolonising the culture of architecture and she is fully aware that she will face criticism. The questions, as ever, are about whether this is architecture. The shift towards the tropes, politics and concerns of the art world have been apparent in architecture for a long time. But art is different. It can reflect and ask questions without the need to propose solutions. This is a huge cultural shift, provocative and essential, but in architecture the question is whether questions will be enough.

To November 26, labiennale.org