2023-05-24 16:14:19
The Golden Lion of the 18e edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale was awarded to the Brazilian pavilion, whose tone was in tune with the “decolonial and carbon-free” program proposed by Lesley Lokko, the event’s general curator. In charge of the exhibition, the architects Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares wanted to dig under the concrete of Brasilia, a new city erected as the capital of the country in the late 1950s by President Juscelino Kubitschek, to see what the project covered. demiurgic by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, classified by Unesco as World Heritage of Humanity. Their enterprise led them to lay bare the modernist myth of the clean slate and to reveal the abuses committed in its name.
In this case, the appropriation by the central power of fertile lands where lived, and which took great care of, indigenous and quilomboloa tribes (descendants of black slaves who had fled the plantations).
This decolonial pulsation runs everywhere in the arteries of the Biennale, from the Arsenale to the Giardini. And in particular in the exhibition that the Victoria and Albert Museum devotes to tropical modernism in Ghana: it opposes a first period, openly colonial, launched by a duo of British architects (Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew) disdainful of any form of knowledge of the African continent, to a second which took the form, when the country gained its independence, in 1957, of a fruitful cooperation between Ghanaian and Western architects.
Colonial policy and recycling
In the pavilions of the so-called global North countries, the same uncompromising view is taken of the territorial domination they exercise. The Israeli pavilion has put itself under seal as part of an exhibition intended to oppose the bunkerized architecture of data centers to that of the communication centers of the past century, evoked by a series of small models arranged in the courtyard located in back. However, this radical gesture can only be understood as a sibylline commentary on the colonial policy of this country, which is more than ever closed in on itself.
The Swiss project consisted in bringing down the wall which historically separated their flag from their Venezuelan neighbour, as a sign of appeal to fraternity and cooperation between nations. The Austrian exhibition calls into question even the merits of this private organization that is the Venice Biennale, whose influence devours an entire part of the city…
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