The “Laboratory of the Future” title refers both to Africa—which stands on the forefront of global urbanization and growth but also faces severe threats from climate change and inequities—and to the Biennale itself. “We envisage our exhibition as a kind of workshop,” she said, “a laboratory where architects and practitioners across an expanded field of creative disciplines draw out examples from their contemporary practices that chart a path for the audience to weave through, imagining for themselves what the future can hold.”

Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute, a postgraduate architecture school and center for research and public programs in Accra, Ghana. Trained as an architect, she also founded and serves as editor-in-chief of FOLIO, a journal of contemporary African architecture, and is a prolific novelist. 

Much of Lokko’s work has examined issues of culture, space, and race, placing architecture in a social and political context that often goes unacknowledged within the profession. “I know that I sound like a broken record, but these questions of decolonization and decarbonization are really a gift to the architectural canon,” she said. “And that’s how I would like this exhibition to be seen—as a gift.”

Accra, Ghana. Photo by Jackson Davis