Ghanaian Scottish architect and educator for most of her life Leslie RoccoUpcoming Curator Venice Architecture Biennale, moved between worlds. She grew up in both Accra, the capital, which has a warm, stable climate with two seasons, and Dundee, on the cool coast. “Scotland was shaking,” she recalled. “Ghana was sweaty.”
Her ability to inhabit and interpret multiple worlds has inspired Rocco, 59, the first African-American curator of an architectural biennale, to explore the ambitious influence of Africa on the planet, and vice versa. It’s the talent I brought to Laboratory of the Future. More than half of her 89 participants in the Biennale come from Africa or the African diaspora. Many of them are what Rocco calls “shapeshifters,” creating works that transcend traditional definitions of architecture and geography.
Inside the Venetian Who’s Who Pritzker Prize Laureate Dievedo Francis Quere (Burkina Faso and Berlin); Sumaya Valley and moad musbahi (Johannesburg, London, Tripoli, New York); Cave_Bureau (Nairobi), a company that does 3D mapping Simoni Slave Cave on the coast of Kenya.Nigerian visual artist based in Brooklyn Oralecan Jayfuth; eminent British Ghanaian architect David Adjay (Accra, London, New York), a close friend and collaborator, best known in the United States Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC
“It’s an opportunity to talk to people all over the world about Africa, and to talk to Africa from here,” Rocco said in a series of emails and video interviews from Venice. clarified.. Sub-Saharan Africa is often considered the most rapidly urbanizing and young population Most people on Earth speak more than one language, she points out. “The ability to do multiple things at once—traditional and contemporary, African and global, colonization and independence—is a powerful thread that runs across continents and diasporas,” she said. “We are used to having to think about resources, and we have to think about turning on lights with no electricity guarantee. Its ability to navigate will be a star.”
A shapeshifter herself, Lokko has long been immersed in issues of race, space and architecture. groundbreaking book She wrote and edited while still in graduate school Bartlett School of Architecture I got my PhD in London. Earlier this year, Charles III appointed Rocco an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to architecture and education. In 2015 she Establishment of a leading architectural graduate school at the University of JohannesburgOnly 4 months before that.The Biennale called me and she said African Futures Institute .
She observes that those considered “minorities” in the West are actually the majority of the world. “When you’re African, you speak to a world that has a pre-existing view of who and what you are,” she said. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity not only to talk about the label and in some ways confront it, but also to show how similar we are.”
The Biennale is not the first major exhibition to focus on black and diasporic practitioners, but it does bring together the cascading crises of climate change, rapid urbanization, migration, the global health emergency, and history. There is a deep urgency to decolonize institutions and spaces, starting with the quintessentially European-centric Biennale itself. Whether a planner as a policy expert or an artist and environmental expert, Rocco’s timely focus on hybrid forms of practice is undeniable.
Walter Hood, a landscape designer and artist from Oakland, California, presents at the Biennale an installation titled “Native(s),” in which he designed a series of public buildings for the Gullah community in South Carolina. Here the community preserves sweetgrass to make baskets.
The ability to “get it done” with existing resources and to improvise creatively can also provide a template for a sustainable future. “She said, ‘It’s our time’ for a while.” Akosua Oben MensahAccra-based architect Lokko said of Lokko, noting that about 80% of developments in sub-Saharan Africa have yet to be built.
Anonymous International-style skyscrapers still dominate many African cities. “A certain generation of architects sees the ‘other’, such as Europe and the United States, as aspirational models, and it is very difficult to untangle them and interpret their own modernity,” he said in Ghana. Expanding the practice, the African Futures Institute. “By finding Leslie, what the Biennale is getting is a real impulsive desire for the continent to rethink itself,” he added.
Rocco’s father, Dr. Ferdinand Gordon Rocco, was a Ghanaian surgeon who was sent by the government to study medicine in Scotland shortly after Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957. Many Ghanaians were sent abroad. Like a man, he returned home with a white wife.(Rocco’s parents divorced when she was very young.) “I often think about the distance her father traveled, not just literally, but culturally and emotionally,” she said.
Mixed-race children in Ghana are known as “half-caste,” and Rocco recalls standing in front of a mirror and thinking: in the middle? ‘ she said.
She always considered herself half Ghanaian and half Scottish until she arrived in England at the age of 17 to attend boarding school. “I was suddenly black, and I quickly understood that blackness is a unique identity in the UK,” she said. I did.”
She went to Oxford, but followed her boyfriend to America. As a girl, she sought solace as her parents’ marriage dissolved through perusing kitchen magazines. A chance visit to her tabletop store with her employer in Los Angeles, where she spent her four years, led to a moment of epiphany, and he suggested she pursue her architecture.
Architecture wasn’t her forte — “I can’t even change a light bulb,” she jokes — and she went from being a student at Bartlett to teaching there practically overnight. . By the late 1990s, however, she felt increasingly constrained by the lack of widespread sharing of the issues she cared about. “I have always thought of ‘race’ as a powerful and creative category of exploration and expression,” she said. “I was tired of trying to find a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture, and not just about poverty or ‘informality,’ a word I dislike,” she says. I am referring to slums.
So, befitting the book-devoured British romance novelist Jackie Collins, Rocco stepped away from architecture for 14 years, write fiction — after reading Time Out Guide to Writing Bestsellers. Her novels, which are her dozen and far too many to count, blend female-centric tales of passion and romance with issues of racial and cultural identity. Her latest work is Soul Sisters, a midnight oil-burning cross-cultural tale set primarily in Edinburgh and Johannesburg.
She returned to teaching at the University of Johannesburg in 2014, only to find that there were no black architecture students. S.student protest Fees, unjustified educational disparities and calls for decolonization were rocking campuses across South Africa. There was a “thirst for change,” he recalled Lokko. space apartheid — deliberately designed and racially segregated settlements built under the control of the white South African nation.
Rocco’s fleeting gig as dean of the Bernard and Ann Spitzer School of Architecture at the City University of New York left her in 2020, less than a year later. It has become a hot topic in the architectural world. “It was a misfit for both sides,” she said. America’s history of race, work and gender is complex and far from resolved,” she added. (“It’s fair to say I’m pretty polarizing.”) She was also reeling from a personal tragedy. A few months before she arrived, her 52-year-old sister died of a stroke, and seven weeks later she turned 50. – Her brother had a fatal heart attack. “It was the worst year of my life,” she said.
New York’s loss was Accra’s gain. With a $2.5 million grant from the Ford and Mellon Foundations, Rocco returned to his hometown to work in what Patron Ajayi calls “the whole spectrum — planners, policy thinkers, inventors of materials and systems, and built A collective of intellectuals who truly understand the environment and what this means for the continent’s future potential.” Seme City Benin allows you to straddle the French-speaking and English-speaking cultures of the region. )
However, he said the Biennale was still “a very exclusive European event for Western audiences.” Livingston Mukasaa Ugandan architect and researcher in upstate New York and co-editor of Volume 7Architecture Guide: Sub-Saharan Africa“The question is whether this seasonal curiosity is the right platform to try to bring about a tectonic movement.”
In a way, the Biennale is Africa’s Institute of Futures, and it’s been heavily written about.Biennale College Architettura” among them Career practitioners and students work on design projects alongside eminent masters.
“She uses the Biennale as a platform to extend the work she has been doing for decades. Toni L. Griffin, New York-based planner and urban designer Her outdoor installation will be presented in Venice. In graduate school, Griffin had no professors of color and few women.
Biennale Architectura 2023: Future Laboratory
It will be open to the public from May 20th to November 26th in Venice, Italy. labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023.
