Postcard From Venice: A Post-COVID Biennale Comes Into Focus

On the first night of the Venice Biennale, Francis Kéré, Hon. FAIA, was enjoying a casual evening with friends and colleagues, celebrating his newly opened installation Counteract in the exhibition’s Padiglione Centrale. The ecologically themed piece—a mashup of videos, text, and full-size fragments of sub-Saharan architecture—is an exploration of Africa’s potential for environmental regeneration “on its own terms,” the architect said, “rather than those imposed by the West.” Suddenly, without missing a beat of conversation, the 2022 Pritzker Prize winner plucked a previously unseen mosquito from the hand of a nearby patron. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I am from Burkina Faso.”

The 2023 edition of the sprawling design-and-ideas festival charged into town with full post-COVID force this week, treating a mixed crowd of architects, academics, journalists, and the occasional bewildered-looking tourist to an array of ambitious programming in venues all over Venice. At the recently opened Procuratie Vecchie on Piazza San Marco, architects Migliore+Servetto unveiled their woody, playroom-like interior for A World of Potential, an interactive experience that invited users to rethink their own notions of community and citizenship; at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, the government of Qatar presented Building a Creative Nation, a showcase of some recent and upcoming large-scale civic projects in the country, including Herzog & de Meuron’s Lusail Museum; and at the Giardini della Marinaressa, as part of the European Cultural Council’s Time Space Existence show, the landscape team from Snøhetta had set up “Counterbalance”, a sort of four-leafed seesaw that invited weary visitors to sit while reflecting on their shared social and physical interdependence. “The idea was to explore something that recognized instability and the necessity to work together” firm’s Michelle Delk says.

As ever, the scatter-site peripheral events were only the entrées to the meatier fare at Biennale proper—the national pavilions concentrated in the Giardini della Biennale, and the central exhibition, shepherded this year by architect and scholar Lesley Lokko. Well before her inaugural remarks on Thursday morning, a long line had formed outside the sprawling Arsenale complex, eager to hear Lokko explain her Laboratory of the Future concept but also curious if she would address the real-world politics that have intruded on the proceedings: As was broadly reported earlier in the week, a group of Lokko’s Ghanaian collaborators were denied visas to enter Italy by the national government, purportedly owing to doubts about their intended reasons for travel. Asked about the uproar, the curator expressed displeasure, but little surprise. “I think many people coming to Venice from the global South have encountered this problem at some point,” she said while taking questions after her remarks..

For the nearly 90 participants in Lokko’s show—themajority of them from Africa or of African descent—the controversy seemed only a minor distraction from a preview already full of challenges and promise, as exhibitors rushed to complete their installations even as the public arrived on the scene. En route to the debut of his Centrale project on Wednesday morning, Kéré was briefly detained when a passing Venetian pigeon made an artistic statement of his own on the architect’s suit. “I am from Burkina Faso,” he reportedly said. He then walked on, undeterred.