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Voices
Abigail Thomas: To begin, could you
explain the Venice Biennale and its
theme this year?
DK Osseo-Asare: The theme this year is in
two parts. The title is “The Laboratory of the
Future,” and the intent here is to drive something that will live beyond the Biennale itself. It’s
not just about what you get when you come and
see things here, but how this can be a platform
for precipitating other things in the future.
The other half of it is that it’s very much
themed around Africa. The curator, Lesley Lokko,
is Scottish-Ghanaian but also a dame in the
United Kingdom. She has been very outspoken
about how challenging it has been to showcase
Africa at the Venice Biennale. In many historical
contexts, there was this notion that Black people
existed just to produce labor — not to be the
bene昀椀ciaries of arts and culture, just to contribute
to them. The current demographic projections by
the UN tell us that birth rates are declining across
the world, and the only place that’s still growing
at a high rate is Africa. So the current projection
is that, by the end of this century, more than one
in three people in the world will be African. The
future is African. And I think that’s why Lesley
made the Venice Biennale about Africa.
I think it’s a particularly interesting Biennale because it’s bringing to the fore a lot of the
tensions that are simmering beneath the surface
around the world. But beyond that, we’re mostly
focused on just helping make people’s lives better.
We’re excited to be here because our work has
been a bridge between Texas and Africa. It’s why
we call ourselves “the transatlantic studio.” We’re
excited to showcase some of the work we’ve been
developing that is in dialogue with work in Texas.
It shows how we’re thinking about the future and
how we can play a role in Africa’s future in terms
of the diaspora.
AT: How involved was Lesley Lokko in
the process of developing this project?
DO: I think that Lesley has been unbelievably involved because the Venice Biennale is
enormous. There’s the country pavilions and
the central pavilion, and she added a number of
additional events this year. It’s a huge production with so many moving parts, and so from
my interactions with her, she’s been incredibly
involved. That said, she had a whole team of
curatorial assistants distributed around the
world, so we worked primarily with the assistant
curatorial team. We weren’t meeting with her
directly. Although, for some of our submissions,
she would send a letter with very speci昀椀c feedback that we would then incorporate.
Ryan Bollom, AIA: And I think we were very
lucky, too, that we were a part of her “special
projects.” We are a part of her own curation, as
opposed to the country pavilions. So I think that
provided a lot of freedom for our proposal that
maybe we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
DO: That’s true. And I could also add that I
was the architect of the Ghana pavilion at the
Art Biennale last year. Ghana has not yet had
a pavilion at the Architecture Biennale, but it
was the second time that Ghana had a pavilion
at the Art Biennale. The 昀椀rst time was in 2019,
and the architect was David Adjaye. We did a
follow-up for David with the same curator, Nana
Oforiatta Ayim. In 2021, she developed a new
vision for the future of Ghana’s museums, monuments, and natural heritage. The government
of Ghana just recently reclassi昀椀ed this highest
tier of natural heritage as part of the museum
structure. I wrote the chapter on the future of
museums for Ghana as a pan-African vision.
Based on that initial set of ideas and conversations, she then invited me to do the pavilion last
year. It was a real honor for us.
Lesley saw the pavilion last year, so she was
very keen for an opportunity to revisit what we had
originally proposed. That’s why this year’s pavilion
recycles the physical components of last year’s
Ghana pavilion. We redeployed and modi昀椀ed
them in a number of di昀昀erent ways this year. It’s a
AT: What was the selection and proposal
process like for getting your design into
the Biennale?
Facing The
DO: We received an invitation email that said
the curator of the Biennale had been following
our work and found it something that could make
sense as part of what she’s trying to curate. Then
there was a whole series of submissions where we
started with a very succinct conceptual proposal —
just a few words and an image — and the project
evolved from that point in conversation between us
and the curatorial team of the Biennale.
pavilion’s
modular bamboo con昀椀guration is self-structural,
allowing it to be oriented
in any direction.
Right This year’s pavilion
recycles many components
from last year’s Ghana
pavilion, also designed by
Osseo-Asare.
9/10 2023
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