This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Laboratory for the Future, was inaugurated on the same day that the leaders of the G7 industrialised nations met in Hiroshima. As different as these events appeared, both signalled the end of globalisation. Both also displayed the promise and perils of a fragmenting world.
Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally homogenising. Erecting tropical copycats of Paris and London was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable financial capitals the world over.
But the 2023 Biennale’s curator, the Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko, is using international architecture’s most influential event to critically reassess that one-world narrative. “The dominant voice,” Lokko writes in the introduction to her ambitious exhibition, “has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity.”
Brazil’s show (winner of the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion at the Biennale) centres on unearthing – quite literally – the architectural and living practices concealed by the establishment of the country’s modernist capital, Brasília. Modernism, the architectural style that spread after the second world war, we are told, represented a “colonial invasion” of “the Indigenous nations of central Brazil”.
And yet, modernism was a universal language shaped by non-western architects such as Brazilians Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, and Ghanaians John Owusu Addo and Samuel Opare Larbi. Tropical Modernism, a contribution to the Biennale by London’s V&A, shows that precolonial building practices were actually highly influential in its development.
But modernism originated in the colonial centre and from it developed one language fit for the planet as a whole. That language may have acquired many accents, but it only had one vocabulary – and it was written in the Latin alphabet. Modernism was an example of Eurocentric universalism.
As an alternative to it, the Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo, writing in the Biennale’s catalogue, claims that only tradition can provide a “nuanced understanding of the environment, culture, and context”. And tradition – real or imagined – is everywhere in this Biennale.
Many of the contributions to the main exhibition dig into their own particular, civilisational past, with a focus on materials, ways of building, of being, and modes of sociability that are firmly anchored in their place of origin. The construction of an autonomous African perspective is the explicit aim of many of the invited African practitioners, representing a majority of the 89 artists and architects included in the main exhibition.
The Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, for example, presents both a film illustrating the unique architectural morphology of the societies of precolonial Africa, and a series of architectural models for megastructures such as the Thabo Mbeki library in Johannesburg, framed by narratives forged outside of the western canon.
Attention to decolonial thought and practices has taken centre stage in recent cultural discourse. But many of the works on display in this show actually go a step further, from the postcolonial to the civilisational, where pride in the rediscovery of one’s own traditions takes centre stage and the west, no longer a benchmark of judgment, fades into irrelevance.
More accurately, the west fades into its own version of civilisational provincialism, abandoning the universal and embracing the particular. Symbolic of this transformation was the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who flew from Hiroshima to Venice to inaugurate a presentation of the New European Bauhaus, a flagship European architectural programme fostering a more sustainable and inclusive way of building for the continent.
Bauhaus, an early 20th-century European architectural practice aiming to merge aesthetics with utility, was the father of modernism. And so modernism, criticised as a homogenising, universalising western imposition, symbolically returns to Venice reduced to a homegrown, humbly European and no longer universal.
Freed of domination by western artists and ideas, Venice displays the joyous promise of a pluralistic world. Formerly colonised countries shape their own architecture – and worldview – with reference to their own traditions. And so: let a hundred flowers bloom? We would do well to pause before joining the cheers.
China, arguably the earliest country to celebrate its civilisational renaissance with a newfound pride and international projection in everything from architecture to semiconductors, offers the main cautionary tale. If modernity imposed a universal conversation anchored in colonial bias, it also spread the claim to the universality of democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Does denouncing all universal aspiration as a homogenising and ultimately colonial imposition run the risk of becoming an enabling factor for nationalism and authoritarianism?
Tellingly, the Chinese ambassador to Italy cancelled his participation at the opening of the Biennale in protest at the inclusion of an installation by the Rotterdam-based British architect Alison Killing, which used satellite images to document and visualise Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs. China’s political tradition never included human rights or democracy. Should we respect that tradition, too? The Chinese government – and a host of Chinese political scientists and philosophers – argue that we should.
It is a shame that the Biennale features almost no Chinese contributions to the main exhibition. Not only is China more responsible for the infrastructure boom in much of Africa than any of the African architectural practices on display, but exploring China’s own claims to civilisational uniqueness may have helped shed light on the darker side of this somewhat naively praised return to tradition.
As the Biennale opened in Venice, the authoritarian Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was inaugurating the controversial Central Vista redevelopment in Delhi, a megastructure celebrating both Indian architectural tradition and Hindu nationalism. Meanwhile, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was too busy winning re-election to attend the opening of the Biennale, but his own authoritarian regime proudly builds tradition-inspired, Ottoman-rekindling Turkish nationalism.
Authoritarians often deploy tradition and portray universalism as nothing but the product of European gunboats to justify their trampling of allegedly imported western democratic values: Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, is a master of this game. In their view, liberal democracy, like the New European Bauhaus, should lose its claim to universality and be the traditional culture of a western civilisation.
This was the world on show at the G7 in Hiroshima, a summit tasked with taking stock of the denunciation by Russia and China of the international rules-based liberal order as a western imposition. Let there be no mistake: we should celebrate our collective departure from fake western universalism. The arrival of a world built on multiplicity and interaction among equals is a world where people will be freer and happier – even if the road to multipolarity is bumpy.
And yet, how does multiplicity not slide into relativism? As we abandon the homogenising language of western modernity, is the future one where the large language models of artificial intelligence carry different values in different countries, adjusting what they say regarding the Uyghurs or LGBTQ+ rights depending on whether you ask the question in Beijing, Cairo or Madrid? Is tradition and identity and the slippery slope towards nationalism all that we have left, or can we imagine a new universalism binding together a common humanity?
Despite the promise of its title, Lokko’s Laboratory for the Future offers a stupendous glimpse into our present moment. It is the joyous, hopeful face of a fragmenting world. This makes it a resonant, powerful exhibition. And yet, this also means that some of the most urgent questions for the future are left hanging. As globalisation continues to unravel, we will need a laboratory for a new planetary universalism to try to answer them.
Lorenzo Marsili is a philosopher, activist, author and director of the Berggruen Institute Europe
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