#Lesley Lokko

[yettyd]

DEMAS NWOKO GOLDEN LION FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT OF THE BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2023

[ashotasfireandasdeepastheocean1]

...This year’s theme “The Laboratory of the Future”, is inviting architects to consider the African continent as the protagonist of the future...

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Lesley Lokko, is set to open in just one month's time with a focus on "The Laboratory of the Future", casting the African continent as a leading force in shaping the world to come, and challenging conventional notions of what the future can hold and what a laboratory can be. Featuring 63 National Pavilions, 89 Participants, and 9 collateral events in the city, the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale invites practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds to explore new possibilities.

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[loveilmiorifugiosegret]

Proprio quando pensi

di aver dimenticato com’è il sole,

spunta fuori di nuovo…♠️

(Lesley Lokko)

[theophagie-remade]

English translation of Questo mondo non mi renderà cattivo/This world can't tear me down's opening song:

Seafarers who go

Wherever they want, but not here¹

To steal my job in this jungle

And crushing my dream, which was to

open a bangla²

A bangla

It's fine if you remain here

But come on, stop talking to me about dignity

We bury waste where flowers grow³

(You're paid) €1.50 an hour and then you die⁴

But (do it) outside

Go die out there, 'cause here you're

You're in a wonderful country

This is a wonderful country

Wonderful

Wonderful

Seafarers who go

Wherever they want, but not here

To steal my job in this jungle

And crushing my dream of opening a bangla

A bangla

It's fine if you remain here

If you're running from a war, sure, but it must be a truly major one⁵

Nobody gives a damn about your shitty degree

It's just that your skin tone's a little too dark⁶

Dark for this place, for you're

You're in a wonderful country

This is a wonderful country

Wonderful

Bridges collapse⁷, ships sink⁸

But come on, it's all wonderful, as long as it doesn't happen to you

Students die, ministers speak⁹

This flavour of evil, can't you taste it too?¹⁰

This flavour of evil, can't you taste it too?

Factories explode¹¹, houses collapse¹²

But come on, it's all wonderful, as long as it doesn't happen to you

Rights die, ministers applaud¹³

This flavour of evil, can't you taste it too?

This flavour of evil, can't you taste it too?

Can't you taste it too?

1: Reference to Umberto Tozzi and Raf's 1987 song Gente di Mare ("Seafarers"). Most "illegal" immigrants reach Italy by sea through boats or rafts

2: Slang term for a mini-market owned by south asian immigrants. Also, "they steal our jobs", opposition to immigration 101 all across the board

3: Illegal waste burial is a really common practice in Italy

4: Exploitation of immigrants and their labour

5: Although anti-refugees sentiment is still strong, undeniably ukrainian refugees are more easily "accepted" than others due to both racism and to how close the russo-ukranian war is to Italy itself

6: Although this happened too recently for it to have been the inspiration for this line (which nevertheless expresses a commonly held belief), it should be known that just last May three ghanaian collaborators of Lesley Lokko who were supposed to be with her for the Venice Biennale cultural exhibition were denied entry into Itay. While details weren't made public, Lokko was allegedly accused of trying to bring "non-essential young men" into the country

7: Reference to the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in 2018. 43 people lost their lives

8: Reference to the Costa Concordia disaster of 2012. 33 people lost their lives

9: Suicides are becoming ever more common for a number of reasons, especially among university students. Giuseppe Valditara, the current Minister of Education, maintains that humiliation is a "factor for growth"

10: Likely a reference to Gino Paoli's 1956 song Sapore di sale ("Flavour of salt / Salty flavour")

11: Possibly a reference to the explosion of the Thyssenkrupp steel mill in Turin, 2007. It may be a broader allusion to workplace accidents and death. 2022 alone saw 1090 victims

12: Illegal construction is extremely common. Just last November 12 people died in Ischia due to a landslide. Hydrogeological instability is overall high in all of Italy

13: Amongst its objectives, the draft bill Ddl Zan aimed to criminalise hate crimes specifically motivated by homotransphobia, misogyny, and ableism. The Senate "killed" it on 27/10/2021, with the cheering and clapping of its detractors

[thoughtlessarse]

Musicians, authors, producers and festival managers have hit out at “humiliating” and costly visa-rejection rates for African and Asian artists visiting Britain and European Union countries, saying it is having a chilling impact on cultural diversity. Analysis shows the UK last year raised £44m in fees for visa applications that were then rejected, mainly coming from low- and middle-income countries. The EU made €130m (£110m). Total costs are likely to increase in 2024, since the standard short stay visitor visa application fee in the UK rose in October 2023 from £100 to £115, while in the EU the cost of visas rose from €80 to €90 in June this year. Lesley Lokko, a Ghanaian-Scottish author and architect, described the non-refundable fees as “outrageous”, noting that they were mainly paid by those who could least afford them. African visitors were disproportionately affected, with visa-rejection rates as high as 40-70%, according to analysis from arts and migration research group the Lago Collective. Sissay, who curated Ethiopia’s first pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, said that while none of his Ethiopian team had visa problems, he came across other Africans who did. “The idea is that you are not welcome,” said Sissay. “It has become a serious problem.” Rejection rates for EU visas from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal are as high as 40-47%, the analysis shows. In Britain, Algeria has the highest visa-rejection rate at 71%, followed by Bangladesh at 53%, while Ghana, Pakistan and Nigeria had rejection rates of between 30% and 46%.

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[poesiablog60]

Buongiorno...

Proprio quando pensi di aver dimenticato com'è il sole, spunta fuori di nuovo.

*

Lesley Lokko

[alonewolfr]

Proprio quando pensi di aver dimenticato com’è il sole, spunta fuori di nuovo.

|| Lesley Lokko

[eleonoramilner]

Highlights from @labiennale-blog by Lesley Lokko :

1.2: Mexican pavilion, "Utopian Infrastructure: The Peasant Basketball Court" 🏀

3.4: French pavilion, "Ball theather" by Studio muoto 🎭

5.6: US pavilion, "Everlasting plastics" 🪀🥏

7: Romania pavilion 🍃

8: Swiss pavilion, "Neighbours" by Karin Sander Philipur Sprung

[ladyfraga]

Lesley Lokko

¿Cuál es su mensaje a los futuros arquitectos?

Que un arquitecto puede hacer mucho más que construir edificios. La arquitectura tiene impacto en la justicia, en la salud pública, en el paisaje y en las finanzas. El futuro es abordar todas esas disciplinas desde la arquitectura.

¿Qué le hizo pensar que sabría contar una historia?

Toni Morrison dijo que todos los escritores son lectores. Y yo he sido una lectora compulsiva.

[universomovie]

Quem é Lesley Lokko, arquiteta vencedora do RIBA 2024

by Casa Vogue Quem é Lesley Lokko, arquiteta vencedora do RIBA 2024 — Foto: Divulgaçao/Bienal de Veneza Lesley Lokko foi a escolhida pelo Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) para receber a Medalha de Ouro Real de Arquitetura de 2024. O empenho da arquiteta, educadora, autora e curadora ganense-escocesa para “democratizar a arquitetura” como um “apelo para igualdade representação em…

[abwwia]

Architects Lesley Lokko and Marina Tabassum have been named on the list of the 100 most influential people of 2024 by Time magazine.

[africanfemalearchitects]

Lesley Lokko - the 2024 RIBA Royal Gold Medal Recipient

© Murdo McLeod. Image Courtesy of La Biennale Architettura 2021

Professor Lesley Lokko OBE is a renowned Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and best-selling novelist. She is the Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, which is an independent postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform. In December 2021, she was appointed as the Curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. In December 2022, she was awarded an OBE in the first New Year's Honors List by King Charles III, for her exceptional contributions to architecture and education. As an author, she has published 13 bestsellers.

She is the recipient of the 2020 RIBA Annie Spink Award and currently serves as a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and a Visiting Full Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin. She is also a Trustee of the London-based Architecture Foundation and a Founding Member of the Council on Urban Initiatives, co-founded by LSE Cities, UN-Habitat, and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

On the 18th of January 2024, the Royal Institute of British Architects announced that Professor Lesley Lokko had become the first African female to receive the prestigious Royal Gold Medal, which was established in 1848. She joins the ranks of Zaha Hadid and Yasmeen Lari, as the only women to have been awarded the medal since its inception.

 “I hope that this award will also make it clear that the divisions that we inherit, that we construct, that we put upon ourselves between different aspects of our lives not that they don't matter but perhaps they're not the first place that we should be looking when we're thinking about change and about moving forward.  So, I very much hope that this medal demonstrates that it's worth it to think differently. It’s worth it to go off piste or to go off the beaten track”. - Prof. Lesley

We at the AFA network hope that her final submission in the announcement video will inspire you on your path towards architecture.

Article written by Otie Pokua Yankyera on 23 January 2024.

[achou277-blog]

"Breaking Barriers: Lesley Lokko - Africa's First Female Architect to Wi... #BreakingBarriers #LesleyLokko #Africa #FemaleArchitect #RoyalGoldMedal #Architecture #Innovation #Design #Trailblazer #Inspiration #Achievement #Empowerment #WomenInArchitecture #AfricanInnovation #ArchitecturalExcellence #Pioneering #Leadership #SuccessStory #DiversityInDesign #BreakingGenderSterotypes

[anarchitektura]

Biennale Architektury w Wenecji 2023. Kuratorka: Lesley Lokko - architektka szkocko-ghańska.

[architectuul]

The Memory of Venice

This year's visit of Venice Architecture Biennial was super fast. Train from Trieste to Venice with the most beautiful gaze to the Adriatic coast. From Santa Lucia to Giardini with the targetto with a lot of open question on our VAB - Cold Cases campaign in my head. What will Lesley Lokko question herself under the title The Laboratory Of The Future.

She states that "an architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process. It borrows its structure and format from art exhibitions, but it differs from art in critical ways which often go unnoticed. Aside from the desire to tell a story, questions of production, resources and representation are central to the way an architecture exhibition comes into the world, yet are rarely acknowledged or discussed."

For the first time ever, this year the spotlight has fallen on Africa and the African Diaspora, that fluid and enmeshed culture of people of African descent that now straddles the globe.

According to Lokko it is often said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. Whilst it is true, what is missing in the statement is any acknowledgement of who the ‘we’ in question is. The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter. They are a unique moment in which to augment, change, or re-tell a story, whose audience and impact is felt far beyond the physical walls and spaces that hold it.

"The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition of six parts and includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is 50/50, and for the first time ever, nearly half of participants are from sole or individual practices of five people or less. Across all the parts of The Laboratory of the Future, over 70% of exhibits are by practices run by an individual or a very small team. These statistics reflect a seismic change in the culture of architectural production at large, and an even greater shift in participation in international exhibitions. The balance has shifted. Things fall apart. The centre can no longer hold," wrote in her statement Lesley Lokko.

New South exhibit in the part of the Guests from the Future under the theme of the Mediterranean Queendoms which is a continuous interior space stretching across three cities and two continents and spanning the Mediterranean.

I started my exhibition walk exactly at 10 am at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. There are 16 practices who represent a distilled force majeure of African and Diasporic architectural production have been gathered. It moves to the Arsenale complex, where participants in the Dangerous Liaisons section – represented also in Forte Marghera in Mestre, Venice mainland, with a large-scale installation by Emmanuel Pratt - rub shoulders with the Curator’s Special Projects, for the first time a category that is as large as the others.

In the extremely well structured Giardini central pavilion there is also our LINA fellow Meriem Chabani (Algiers, Algeria, 1989). With John Edom (Portsmouth, UK, 1983) and in collaboration with Mélissa Dyminat and Marine Gilouppe presents their office New South based in Paris. The Mediterranean Queendoms is a continuous interior space stretching across three cities and two continents and spanning the Mediterranean. It is Meriem's family’s territory: an intricate, intimate infrastructure of care that is reigned over by its women – her mother, her two grandmothers, and her seven aunts. The Queendom’s houses, (in Vitry, Paris; in Algiers, and in Batna) – are its logistical hubs, collecting the family’s members in one place for celebration, mourning, and holidays. The queens come and go in permanent flux. The schedule is conveyed through rumours which may later transpire to be false. Each present is cared for, nourished, transported, entertained, clothed, and sent away with dates, envelopes of money, pots of honey, leftover food wrapped in tinfoil, ancestral jewellery, adjusted wedding outfits, medicine, plane tickets, gossip, and family secrets according to and in excess of each one’s immediate need and for distribution to those dispersed throughout the Queendom who could not be present.

Israeli Pavillion

Empty Russian Pavillon.

We can definitely say that this year's exhibition is not about clima change but about how we will change. As Kyong Park, a curator of Korean pavilion, states "we can not control our future if we can’t control our past."

"We are not citizens anymore we are consumers participating in creating inequality," states Kyong Park.

Central to the presentation, A participatory video game allows viewers to choose actions in present and future ecocultural settings. The Pavilion encourages visitors to comprehend how global environmental challenges are founded in humanity’s prior decisions.

In this edition of the 2023 Venice Biennale, the Korean Pavilion, curated by artistic Directors Soik Jung and Kyong Park, presents “2086: Together How?” bringing together architects, community leaders, and artists to explore how people can cooperate in withstanding the current and future environmental crisis until 2086 when the global population is said to the peak.

The exhibition invites visitors to imagine an eco-cultural revolution by critically reassessing the world's capitalist, globalist, and colonial history. The viewers will be encouraged to reconsider current conditions through a participatory video game and a series of multidisciplinary installations that include photographs, drawings, models, videos, and architectural installations.

The curators of the Korean pavilion Soik Jung and Kyong Park explores a new ecocultural paradigm for the future. | Photo © Nam Yun Jung

2086: Together How? presents three small communities in South Korea actively involved in regeneration projects, each with a different population and characteristics. The targeted subjects include a significant colonial center in Gunsan, the rural areas of the Gyeonggi Province, and the historic colonial center in the global city of Incheon, symbols of South Korea’s urbanization and westernization. The project’s theme addresses reconciling individualism and communalism in future humanities.

In fact, a group of architects and community leaders has conducted joint research projects with the local neighborhoods, guided by a set of dialects that have shaped our eco-cultural growth. Moreover, the project stresses how the current understanding of development has come through limitless material pleasure, permitting industrialization, colonization, and globalization to spread. According to the pavilion, the dooming environmental catastrophe will be an opportunity for humanity to create a new eco-cultural paradigm for the future.

The highlight of the biennial: a Child eating sunlight by Wolsik Kim

And for the end what will architecture in the future look like? A question asking many curators of the Venice biennial. End of era of star architecture, investment meeting and mingling. We have to change our way of perception, to bcom honest and transparent. As Dunja Krvavac states, today is important to "focus on communities, programs, systems that we can change is the most important thing at the moment. We seriously need to take stronger stands on may questions that they are happening."

[pikasus-artenews]

THE LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE – MOSTRA DELLA CURATRICE LESLEY LOKKO

La curatrice della 18^ Biennale Architettura di Venezia presenta una mostra personale