May 2022

Lesley Lokko has revealed the title of her forthcoming Venice Architecture Biennale: The Laboratory of the Future.

‘New technologies continuously appear and disappear, giving us unfiltered glimpses of life in parts of the globe we will likely never visit, much less understand.’ Lokko said in a statement announcing the theme. ‘But to see both near and far simultaneously is also, as [W. E. B.] Du Bois and [Franz] Fanon famously put it, a form of ‘double consciousness’, the internal conflict of all subordinated or colonised groups, which describes the majority of the world, not only ‘there’, in the so-called Developing-, Third-, and Arab Worlds, but ‘here’ too, in the metropoles and landscapes of the global North.’

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