A faceted brick wall stands in the middle of Venice’s Arsenale, like a sharply creased origami screen, blocking the route of visitors to this year’s Architecture Biennale. As you get closer, it looks like a rubble tapestry, with pieces of crushed brick and coloured glass emerging from its gnarled surface like great chunks of mineral nougat. Fine geometric patterns are etched across its facets, adding an air of handmade embroidery.
On a wall nearby hang images that explain the origins of this arresting barrier: a reproduction of a 17th-century map of the coasts of Africa and Brazil, a slave-trading ship’s logbook, and a piece of woven raffia from The Kingdom of Kongo. The Brazilian-Paraguayan architect Gloria Cabral and Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, with Martinique-born Franco-American art historian Cécile Fromont, have fused these sources to craft a powerful monument to colonial extraction, forced migration, and the debris of empire: the rugged aggregate is demolition waste salvaged from Brussels, the imperial Belgian capital partly built on the brutal rape of the Congo.
