The Laboratory of the Future, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, looks the beast straight in the eye with Scottish-Ghanaian curator Lesley Lokko. Globally, we are experiencing crisis upon crisis: a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis and, in its wake, countless humanitarian crises – always with the usual victims. And then there are the raw materials crisis and a few vicious wars… There is no end in sight and solutions are scarce. The architectural world can therefore no longer turn a blind eye. It must broaden its perspective, both in terms of content and territory. Architecture must become a ‘laboratory of the future‘. That is how Lokko sees it. But as far as the dramatic state of Venice itself is concerned, this biennale also appears to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The Laboratory of the Future is already putting into practice what it preaches with a symbolic and practically meaningful gesture. Lokko took over the entire scenography of the 2022 art biennale, The Milk of Dreams. That saves mountains of waste. Lokko also sees her exhibition not as a ‘story’, but as a moment in a process of change. That change focuses on two themes. Firstly, the focus here is not on ‘big names’, but on architects and thinkers who have always been overlooked in the architectural discourse, especially those from the African diaspora.