2023 Venice Architecture Biennale will take place between May 20 and November 26, and the theme is decided as The Laboratory of the Future.
Lesley Lokko is the curator of the biennale.
Venice Biennale President Roberto Cicutto and Biennial Curator Lesley Lokko announced the title and theme of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which will take place from May 20 to November 26 at Giardini, Arsenale and various locations in Venice.
Lesley Lokko explains the theme: “New technologies continuously appear and disappear, giving us unfiltered glimpses of life in parts of the globe we will likely never visit, much less understand. But to see both near and far simultaneously is also, as Du Bois and Fanon famously put it, a form of ‘double consciousness’, the internal conflict of all subordinated or colonized groups, which describes the majority of the world, not only ‘there’, in the so-called Developing-, Third-, and Arab Worlds, but ‘here’ too, in the metropolises and landscapes of the global North. In Europe we speak of minorities and diversity, but the truth is that the West’s minorities are the global majority’ diversity is our norm. There is one place on this planet where all these questions of equity, race, hope and fear converge and coalesce. Africa. At an anthropological level, we are all African. And what happens in Africa happens to us all”.
Lokko adds: “We envisage our exhibition as a kind of workshop, a laboratory, where architects and practitioners across an expanded field of creative disciplines draw out examples from their contemporary practices that chart a path for the audience — participants and visitors alike — to weave through, imagining for themselves what the future can hold”.
Roberto Cicutto says, "Lesley Lokko shows determination and courage in using two words in her title that are time-worn but irreplaceable – “laboratory and future” – to restore the full importance of their meaning. And you will understand how her approach looks much like the proposal for a pact between the visitors of La Biennale, the world of architecture and of culture in general. This is an Exhibition that, based on very practical premises and very specific points of view, will look straight into the eyes of the representatives of participating countries and all those who will crowd the Giardini, the Arsenale and the City of Venice. All in order to speak to the world, which is the real reason why a Curator takes on the responsibility of organizing an International Exhibition of La Biennale.”
Venice Architecture Biennale will be the 18th edition of the event. It also includes a selection of auxiliary events organized by international organizations that will hold their own shows and initiatives in Venice. This is an exciting step for the whole world and of course an excellent reason to visit Giardini, Arsenale or Venice!
