The Venice Biennale, a grand exhibition that concentrates on art and architecture in alternate years, has been until now a Eurovision of the visual. It is held partly in a series of national pavilions in specially dedicated gardens, originally laid out before the first world war, that reflect the evolving world order of the 20th century. Britain, France and Germany are in pride of place, the United States off to one side, other European countries also prominent, plus some representation from Latin America and south-east Asia. Another part of the biennale is held in a relic of an older power structure – the Corderie, the 16th-century rope works of the city’s Arsenale, which served the fleet of what was then a dominant maritime empire.
The architecture and architects celebrated by the biennale have also been predominantly European, with some contributions from Asia and the Americas. This year’s event, called “The Laboratory of the Future”, curated by the Ghanaian-Scottish academic and novelist Lesley Lokko, sets out to give space to those previously under-represented, in particular (but not only) Africa and the African diaspora. In so doing she aims to present ways of doing architecture that are differentiation of natural resources and expropriation of the wealth of others. (If you want an example, you need look no further than the famous St Mark’s Basilica, which is laden with loot seized from Constantinople in the fourth crusade in 1204.)
