The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, was on hand last week for the debut of the Biennale’s 17th edition, participating in a talk held under the auspices of the World Economic Forum. The conversation commemorated the launch of the Davos Baukultur Alliance, a new global initiative from the organization that aims to advance eight core principles it deems essential to a prosperous and sustainable future for humankind. “How to deliver on those principles when there is no money and no time?” the Pritzker Prize winner asked the audience. Answering his own question, he then put the responsibility squarely on his fellow designers, saying, “We must use housing as a tool to overcome poverty.” Backed up by images of his projects, including his celebrated half-built house developments, Aravena’s words were as stirring as ever—only now, their impact felt strangely, eerily different.

The ground in Venice, always a little damp and unstable, has unquestionably shifted over the past seven years, both metaphorically and literally. With the same force with which Aravena, in his Biennale, insisted on architectural practice as the premier vehicle of social and environmental justice, his successor, Lesley Lokko (the guest on Ep. 160 of our At a Distance podcast), has successfully placed a similar onus on architectural discourse, with a particular emphasis on makers and architects from Africa and the African diaspora—and on decolonization and decarbonization.

Just steps from the entrance to Lokko’s “Laboratory of the Future” show in the Arsenale exhibition hall, visitors are greeted with a video, drawings, and an impressive scale model created by the Congolese artist and photographer Sammy Baloji, all revealing the unsettling legacy of the Belgian Congo. The piece sets the tone for what follows: Through various interpretive artworks (such as Kate Otten’s “Threads,” a reflection on South African landscape and culture through the medium of traditional weaving); material-focused conceptual exercises (like the New York–based firm AD-WO’s “Ghebbi,” a wall fragment from an Ethiopian streetscape repositioned as a cultural and metaphysical symbol); and, most of all, film (in countless flickering displays, from Liam Young’s eco–science fiction featurette to Blac Space’s mini-doc on the experiences of African women in transit), Lokko’s show makes the case that research, dialogue, and representation are not only upstream from the making of buildings, but possibly downstream, too—the place where the architecture-world rubber hits the political road. It’s a fascinating proposition, and it makes for an exhilarating, if occasionally frustrating and flawed, show.

At its best, the “Laboratory” on view in Venice operates as an active creative space for the forging of community. At the Central Pavilion, “Parliament of Ghosts” by the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (the guest on Ep. 36 of our Time Sensitive podcast), as well as the “All-Africa Protoport” lounge by the Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based Olalekan Jeyifous (winner of a Silver Lion from the Biennale jury), take the form of actual meeting spaces—the former a stoa-like pair of risers, the latter a multicolored rumpus room—inviting viewers to imagine the kinds of conversations that might unfold within them.

Even when the presentations shift to more conventional types of architectural representation, the focus remains on the construction of new and forward-looking forms of collective identity. A group of exquisite models from the office of David Adjaye, as well as his firm’s freestanding A-frame “Kwaeε” timber pavilion, are strong enough on their own merits, but also serve to point to a larger transformation underway with respect to the studio’s ongoing commitment to building in Africa and the global South. During a roundtable on Saturday, Adjaye himself put it this way: “We’re trying to make an architecture that engages with the idea of building a future.”

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During the same event, Christian Benimana, of the Boston-based firm MASS Design Group, confessed to Lokko his own feelings about being tapped for this year’s Biennale. “My first response?” he said. “Fear.” Overcoming his initial inhibitions, the architect and his collaborators produced “Afritect,” a multichannel video shown in the Central Pavilion that presents an array of professionals from around the continent talking about their lives and work, and about the challenges of shifting the built environment in these fast-growing and underdeveloped countries. The piece is effective—and affecting—yet it also points up certain issues within the overall curatorial drift of the show. Among the most creative and resourceful practices currently operating in the United States (or, for that matter, anywhere on earth; the firm also has an office in Kigali, Rwanda), MASS has created exceptional spaces, including the Gun Violence Memorial Project and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The office could have presented almost anything in Venice. Why bring just a few movies?

Part of the answer has to do with one of Lokko’s express imperatives to the show’s contributors. “Leslie came to us and asked, ‘How would you guys respond to this decarbonization conversation we’re dealing with?’” says Lyndon Neri, standing beside his wife, Rossana Hu, and their contribution, “Liminality.” In assembling the model-based review of their work in East Asia, the duo felt obliged to observe a strict carbon economy, assembling their lightweight mock-ups from easy-to-build, easy-to-recycle materials. On the one hand, the emphasis on ease of assembly and disassembly goes a long way to explaining why video is used so extensively throughout the main exhibition; on the other hand, installations such as Neri & Hu’s prove that there are other, less two-dimensional solutions. Incidentally, it may be worth asking whether filmmaking—with its large crews, foreign travel, complex shoots, and energy-sucking projectors—really results in significant carbon savings over other mediums.

More broadly, the shift in Venice from “Let’s do design” to “Let’s talk about design”—a move that was also at the heart of the 2021 edition curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of the Dublin-based firm Grafton Architects—does little to shake one of the signal problems of the older, Aravena-esque approach. This concern comes into particular relief by way of counterpoint, offered up by a few of the national pavilions, but is smuggled into the main show as well: In the Estonian Pavilion, a mock Airbnb invited guests to to sit in secondhand squalor, joining in absurd, mantralike meditations on the wonders of capital; in the Latvian Pavilion, the themes of Biennales past are turned into packaged products in a hilarious pseudo mini-mart; and, best of all, back in the Arsenale, the guerilla group Looty is showing imagery of ancient African artifacts, illegally scanned from the Western museums that now hoard them. In this work, discourse is put to different purposes altogether, allowed to critique both itself and architecture and design as a whole—and to have fun doing it. For a profession too often deadly certain of its own importance, it’s a refreshing take, and one that could represent the next step of Lokko’s intellectual revolution.