Eventful Beginnings

After a long flight and a series of late trains, I arrived in Venice a little worse for the wear. This wasn’t the case for Jean-Louis Cohen, who looked right at home. I spotted the historian on the Vaporetto from the Santa Lucia train station to the Arsenale, the hangarlike Kunsthall that doubles as the entrance to the eighteenth edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Its sprawling gallery space is complemented by programming in the Giardini, where the main exhibition is staged; the leafy surrounds also support two-dozen national pavilions (give or take), each with their own gloss on the event theme. This year, it’s Laboratory of the Future, with a spotlight on Africa and the African diaspora.

To attempt to cover the entirety of the Biennale in a single day would require superhuman strength, or at least a pair of very comfortable shoes. To attempt this feat during the vernissage, when curators, architects, designers, press officers, journalists, critics, and academics and students are thick on the ground, is surely misguided. Wanting to avoid this critical mass, I opted to roam the Giardini, stopping wherever I saw something interesting or people I know. As architect Emanuel Admassu put it outside the US Pavilion shortly after its opening, “sometimes you just have to follow people to get a sense of where the conversation is going.”

Throughout the day, I recalled director Lesley Lokko’s remarks from the morning’s press conference. “All events are beginnings in some way,” she said, “but I really do think that this is the beginning of something special, but also something that has been going for a long time.” Lokko was referring to the innumerable projects on display, which, while exciting, shouldn’t be taken as representing an end point.

The first parties began breaking out in the early evening. Much later, I ran into curator Carson Chan, who laid out the stakes for someone new to the architecture biennale. “The challenge,” he said, “is not just curating a massive exhibition in Venice, but to curate it in what is perhaps the best architecture exhibition in itself—the city of Venice.”