BK Africa
A Laboratory of the Future?
BK Africa: a Laboratory of the Future? follows Lesley Lokko’s invitation as Curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice to take Africa to the frontline of speculation(s) on the future. The exhibition brings together a wide array of recent projects, research, and other initiatives that address the current rapid transformation of the African built environment. The work was developed by students, faculty, and partners in Africa of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Delft University of Technology) .
BK Africa aims to include as many voices as possible beyond popular design discourse, and to veer away from common representations of Africa as a homogenous space - afflicted by deprivation, conflict, drought and famine of similar amplitudes- almost as if it were a singular country. On the contrary, the exhibition’s aspiration is to highlight an often-forgotten reality: that Africa is a vast continent - a complex collection of diverse biomes, territories, cultures, societies, and built environments.
Various supports (physical models, photographs, films, or written manifestos) unfold alternative cartographies and new narratives on the memories, the history, the stories, the resources, and the landscapes of some of Africa’s 54 nations.
The selection of works ranges: from revealing the hidden or neglected memory of places to revising the colonial implications of Modernism; proposing affordable and inclusive housing solutions in the middle of the urgency; envisaging urban accommodation for the fastest growing continent on earth; renewing existing city fabrics forensically; pursuing community-making in rural and urban areas based on participatory processes; addressing the climate catastrophe using landscape as infrastructure; or acknowledging the sheer environmental, social, political and cultural implications of immense new infrastructures and settlements as fundamentally flawed urbanistic propositions…
BK Africa is a (modest) invitation to deviate from presupposed validities of western neoliberal models of settlement as the requisite points of departure for the imagination and production of new urban forms and patterns of daily life.
Exhibition Design
From a total of fifty plus entries from the faculty, some where selected and presented in families. New cartographies, new narratives, restoring rural communities, forensic renewal and old new towns, new new towns.
Each familie was displayed in a different way on a system of reusable elements assembled in a simple way. The zigzag is perfect to display a graphic novel, Hanging texts work great to make them a manifesto, big blocks display a series of maps to name a few.
BK Public Programs
Dick van Gameren, Ifrah Ariff, Max Bernaerts, Javier Arpa Fernández, Alex Kirschstein, Lex te Loo, Robin Weishaupt and Linda van Keeken.
Dick van Gameren, Ifrah Ariff, Max Bernaerts, Javier Arpa Fernández, Alex Kirschstein, Lex te Loo, Robin Weishaupt and Linda van Keeken.
The BK Public Programs would like to extend a special thanks to all the contributors of this exhibition, and to all those who submitted their work in response to the faculty-wide open call.
