Lesley Lokko¹ is this year’s curator of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, which she has entitled “The Laboratory of the Future”. She approaches this international event as an “agent of change” and wants to tell an inclusive story, at the heart of which imagination is presented as a tool for questioning modes of production (extractivist, voracious) and resources (finite). 1 Lesley Lokko is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, teacher and novelist.

These questions resonate in the research conducted by the multidisciplinary team consisting of psychologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret and architects Corentin Dalon, Florian Mahieu and Charles Palliez from the Bento collective, selected by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation to represent French-speaking Belgium in the Giardini in Venice. They convey the urgency with which we must change our modes of generation – what used to be called ‘production’. To do this, they look to the future by studying living organisms and propose the possibility of forming an alliance with fungi (mycelium²) to create a building material that they describe as available, sustainable, self-renewable and inexpensive. The team enlisted the expertise of designer and scenographer Corentin Mahieu, anthropologist Juliette Salme and microbiologist Corentin Müllender to showcase their research in the Belgian pavilion, In Vivo. 2 . A fungal material that works by proliferation, mycelium is a natural, living material derived from the vegetative part of fungi.