Leela Keshav
Projects
Writing
W004 → New Architecture Writers at the Venice Biennale 2023
In 2023, I was a member of the fifth
cohort of New Architecture Writers (NAW), a year-long
programme for nine emerging design writers
of colour. Over the course of the programme, I
engaged with writers,
architects, and curators to develop multiple ways of
writing about space and visual culture, participating
in a series of tutorials and workshops.
The programme included a week-long
residency at the Venice Biennale that culminated in a
public event at the Biennale Carnival. My review for
the Architectural Review’s House competition was
published on the magazine’s website to conclude
the NAW programme.
Read my AR House review
At first glance, you might
wonder if there is a protest happening in the Venice Biennale. And there is of
sorts, albeit in an extremely well-mannered way. In a corner of the Giardini
park, signs reading “Land Back!” and “AirBnB Kills Cities!” are perched by high
screened walls showing imagery of encampments. This is Not For Sale!,
the work of activist collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA)
who are “occupying” the pavilion of what they term c\a\n\a\d\a, written to
communicate the division and erasure propagated by the setter-colonial nation
state.
In the
shadow of the neoclassical British Pavilion, this is the Giardini’s noisiest space:
it is a workplace, hosting visiting studios from the University of British
Columbia (UBC) and the University of Waterloo who are collaborating with the
activist-advocate-activist curators to develop AAHA’s demands. Walking through
the “Land Back” garden and into the timber building, I have the sense of
entering a DIY activist space. A wall calendar marks events planned throughout
the Biennale, often involving the students who work upstairs in a makeshift
studio mezzanine. Wall-sized posters frame key information, while student-made
zines complement films, models, and images exhibiting AAHA’s ten demands toward
just housing in c\a\n\a\d\a.
The demands
address issues of affordable housing, gentrification, and land rights, rooted
in AAHA’s belief “that the roots of the housing crisis lie in the
capitalist and colonialist dispossession of people from their land and
homes.” AAHA’s work reveals the inseparable ties between housing justice
and Indigenous justice. It advocates for Land Back, a decolonial movement to
return “crown” territories—land legally owned by the British monarchy that
constitutes nearly 90% of the country—to Indigenous stewardship through what
they call “co-management trusts.”
With funding from Canada Council
for the Arts and other organisations, AAHA isn’t quite staging an
occupation—but that doesn’t limit the powerful messages it carries. Not for
Sale! refuses to mute its political voice. If viewers leave discomforted,
the exhibition has been a success: decolonisation is unsettling both physically
and emotionally.
Not for Sale! isn’t alone
in its political stance. The Biennale’s themes centre decolonisation and
decarbonisation, with most participants from Africa and the African diaspora. The
vast exhibition showcases tremendous displays of politically charged projects. Yet
tensions inevitably arise in presenting this work in a European capital that
remains inaccessible to visitors without the means to travel to Venice and pay
the entry fees.
“We
have to be double agents,” a student-in-residence confides in me, referring to
the contradictory nature of working on issues of access and land rights within
an elite institution where the land inhabited by the Giardini is itself
contested. The students tell me about the Open the Giardini movement, which
challenges the park’s enclosure and privatisation. When I bring this up to
Roberto Cicutto, President of the Biennale, he denies that access is an issue,
defending the institution as enlivening an otherwise abandoned part of Venice.
Accessibility
aside, the Biennale is undeniably at a turning point. In an age of climate
collapse and the increasing irrelevance of traditional architectural practice,
the exhibition’s very existence is contestable, a fact of which
Ghanaian-Scottish curator Lesley Lokko and her collaborators seem well aware.
Despite Lokko’s ambitions to reduce waste, focusing on film and minimising
new-build exhibitions, the sheer amount of materials and money poured into the
half-year exhibition is astounding.
The
Canadian students seem troubled by this, too, voicing concerns about the
legitimacy of large-scale global exhibitions. Ultimately, the pavilion is
“AAHA’s strategy for international attention,” a student tells me, but Not For Sale! extends well beyond the reach
of the Biennale, setting the scope of its ambitions apart from the rest.
While some continue
to trumpet their country’s best work in the tradition of world’s fairs, many
exhibits seem deeply uncomfortable with the Giardini’s inbuilt nationalist
tendencies. Several curatorial teams focused on their own pavilion and on the
Biennale itself, such as Germany’s “Open for Maintenance” that showcases waste
from past exhibitions. Others, including Not for Sale! and Brazil’s “Terra”,
go further, exposing the violence of colonisation inherent to their country’s
formation.
Despite
these provocations, the pavilions remain strangely insular. Can they persist in
breaking down boundaries? Can the displays begin to merge, fostering real
collaboration between national teams? And perhaps most importantly, can the
Giardini be restored as a public park, open to all and integrated into the city
fabric? If the Biennale proclaims itself a “laboratory of the future,” it must
first reconcile with its past, and resolve dilemmas of the present. “The
Biennale is weird,” concludes a UBC student candidly, “why does it even still
exist?”