The setting for Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale

She has been a Ghanaian Scottish architect and educator for most of her life Lesley Lokocurator of the coming Venice Architecture Biennale, has moved between worlds. She grew up in both Accra, the capital city, with its two seasons and hot, consistent climate, and the cool coast of Dundee. “Scotland was shivering,” she recalled. “Ghana was sweat.”

Her ability to inhabit and interpret multiple worlds is a talent that takes Lokko, 59, the Architecture Biennale’s first curator of African descent, to “The Laboratory of the Future,” an ambitious exploration of Africa’s impact on the world – and vice versa. More than half of the Biennale’s 89 participants come from Africa or the African diaspora – many of them ‘shape-changers’, as Lokko calls them, whose work transcends traditional definitions of both architecture and geography.

Among the Venetian Who’s Who is the Pritzker Prize winner Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso and Berlin); Sumayya Valley And Moad Musbahi (Johannesburg, London, Tripoli, New York); Cave_Bureau (Nairobi), a 3D mapping firm Shimoni Slave Caves on the Kenyan coast; the Brooklyn-based Nigerian visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous; and the well-known British Ghanaian architect David Adjaye (Accra, London and New York), a close friend and collaborator best known in the United States for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC

“It’s an opportunity to talk to the rest of the world about Africa, and also to talk to Africa from here,” Lokko said in a series of email and video interviews from Venice, keeping details secret. until the press opening on May 18. . Sub-Saharan Africa is often regarded as the fastest urbanizing country And youthful population on the planet, she explains, with most people speaking more than one language. “The ability to be several things at once — traditional and modern, African and global, colonized and independent — runs like a thread through the continent and diaspora,” she said. “We are used to thinking about resources, about lighting a lamp with no guarantee of electricity. We can handle change. That ability to conquer, negotiate and navigate the environment will be key.”

A shape-shifter himself, Lokko has long been immersed in issues of race, space and architecture – the subject of a groundbreaking book she wrote and edited while still a graduate student at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, where she received a Ph.D. Earlier this year, King Charles III made Lokko an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to architecture and education. In 2015 she founded an influential graduate school of architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Just four months before the. Biennale came calling, she opened the African Futures Institute in Accra, a postgraduate “Pan-African think tank” with public programs and an international reach that seeks to fill much-needed gaps in existing architecture education.

Those considered “minorities” in the West actually make up the global majority, she notes. “If you’re African, you’re speaking to a world that has an existing image of who and what you are,” she said. “You walk around with a label like that. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity to both talk about the label, confront it in a way, but also show how similar we are.

While the Biennale is not the first major exhibition to focus on black and diasporic practitioners, the successive crises of climate change, rapid urbanization, migration, global health emergencies, and a deep need to decolonize institutions and spaces – starting with the historically Eurocentric Biennale itself – make Lokko’s focus on hybrid forms of practice arguably current, whether for planners as policy experts or artist-environmentalists.

Walter Hood, a landscape designer and artist in Oakland, California, will be offering an installation at the Biennale titled “Native(s)” featuring his design for a series of public buildings for a Gullah community in South Carolina, inspired by a local native. landscape in which the community keeps sweet grass for making baskets.

The ability to “do” and improvise creatively with existing resources can also provide a template for a sustainable future. “She’s been saying it’s ‘our time’ for a while” Akosua Obeng Mensahan architect practicing in Accra said of Lokko, noting that about 80 percent of development in Sub-Saharan Africa has yet to be built.

Anonymous International-style skyscrapers still dominate many African cities. “A certain generation of architects has seen ‘the other’ – Europe or America – as the model to strive for, and it’s very difficult to decipher that to interpret your own modernity,” says Adjaye, who expanded his practice in Ghana and has contributed to the African Futures Institute. “Mocking Lesley,” he added, “gives the Biennale a real on-the-pulse desire from the continent to reinvent itself.”

Lokko’s father, Dr. Ferdinand Gordon Lokko, was a Ghanaian surgeon sent by the government to study medicine in Scotland shortly after Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957. Like many Ghanaian men sent abroad, he returned back with a white woman. (Lokko’s parents divorced when she was young.) Her father’s mother was uneducated. “I often think of the distance my father has traveled — not just literally, but culturally and emotionally,” she said.

Mixed-race children in Ghana were known as “half-castes” and Lokko recalls standing in front of the mirror wondering, “’Where’s the line? Is it in the middle?” she said.

She always considered herself to be half Ghanaian, half Scottish, until she arrived in England at the age of 17 to attend boarding school. “I was suddenly black and I understood very quickly that black in the UK was its own identity,” she said. “It seemed to capture all the cultural nuances I grew up with.”

She went to Oxford but left to follow a friend to the US. As a girl, she sought solace when her parents’ marriage was dissolved by delving into kitchen countertops; in Los Angeles, where she spent four years, a chance visit with an employer to a tabletop store led to a eureka moment where he suggested she pursue architecture.

Building has never been her forte – “I can’t even change a light bulb,” she jokes – and she went from being a student at Bartlett to teaching there practically overnight. By the late 1990s, however, she felt increasingly hampered by the fact that the issues she cared about were not widely shared. “I’ve always seen ‘race’ as a powerful creative category of exploration and expression,” she said. “I was tired of finding a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture that wasn’t just about poverty and ‘informality’, a word I hate,” a reference to slums.

So in a plot twist worthy of Jackie Collins, the British novelist whose books she devoured, Lokko stepped away from architecture for 14 years to write fiction — after reading a Time Out guide to writing a bestseller. Her novels – 12 and Counting – mix female-centric stories of passion and romance with questions of racial and cultural identity – “heavy messages in the froth,” as one reviewer put it. The latest is ‘Soul Sisters’, a cross-cultural story set in the midnight oil time and largely set in Edinburgh and Johannesburg.

In 2014, she returned to teaching at the University of Johannesburg, where she noticed that there were no black architecture students. Sstudent protests about fees, unjust educational differences and calls for decolonization shook the foundations of South African campuses. There was a “hunger for change”, Lokko recalls, and it seemed possible to attract a new generation of builders who were into things like spatial apartness – the deliberately designed racially segregated settlements forged under the control of the white South African state.

Lokko’s fleeting appearance as dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City University of New York, where she resigned in 2020 after less than a year, made headlines in the architecture world. “It didn’t fit well on either side,” she said, in which her leadership style — “not formal enough, not careful enough, not political enough” — didn’t work, complicated by the lockdown. “The history of race, labor and gender in the United States is complex and far from resolved,” she added. (“I think it’s fair to say I’m kind of polarizing.”) She was also reeling from a personal tragedy: months before her arrival, her 52-year-old sister died of a stroke, and seven weeks later her 50 year-old-old brother had a fatal heart attack. “It was the worst year of my life,” she said.

New York’s loss was Accra’s gain: With $2.5 million in grants from the Ford and Mellon foundations, Lokko returned home to pursue a long-held dream of establishing an institution that would produce what Adjaye, a patron, calls “the gamut”: planners, policy thinkers, inventors of materials and systems, and a group of intellectuals who truly understand the built environment ‌and what it means for the continent‌’s future possibilities. Sam city in Benin, which would allow it to bridge the francophone and anglophone cultures of the region.)

But the Biennale remains a “very exclusive European event for a Western audience,” he noted Livingstone Mukasaa Ugandan architect and researcher in New York State and co-editor of the seven volume book “Architecture Guide: Sub-Saharan Africa.” “The question is whether this seasonal curiosity is the right platform to try to create seismic shifts”

In a way, the Biennale is the African Futures Institute at large: the Venetian extravaganza even includes the first-ever “Biennial College of Architecture” in which careerists and students work on design projects with high-profile masters.

“She’s using the Biennale as a platform to expand on the work she’s been doing for decades,” she said Toni L. Griffin, a New York-based planner and urban planner whose outdoor installation will be on display in Venice. In graduate school, Griffin never had a professor of color, and there were few women. “Lesley is able to set the stage for others,” she said, “and expose the network that has always been there for some of us.”

Biennale Architectura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future

Opens to the public May 20 through November 26 in Venice, Italy; labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023.