#they both work but the gba at least is gross

[moghedien]

I’m probably gonna keep my original gameboy as is because it’s mostly there just to have it

I have other plans for these boys tho

[rosekin]

FIRE EMBLEM REVIEWS

Fire Emblem 1, or “The Marth Game”: My advice to everyone everywhere is to never play an RPG thats released on the NES. 0/10

FE2, Gaiden: I really wish this one wasn’t an NES RPG because it’s honestly really promising. Here’s hoping it gets a remake one day haha 2/10

FE3, Mystery of the Emblem, or “Marth 2″: NES RPG 0/10

FE4, Genealogy of the Holy War: Ah, a SNES RPG! Those are often good. Too bad this one has atrocious map design, boring characters, poorly balanced gameplay, inherent genetic superiority built into its royal units, and incest. c’est la vie, 0/10

FE5, Thracia 776: It’s not a BAD game exactly, but it is a game that was designed with the kind of “difficulty” that exists purely to sell strategy guides. 3/10

FE6, Binding Blade: Entering into the GBA Era, we have a game that is incredibly dull and has a lot of poor design decisions reminiscent of FE4. It gets points for including Roy from Super Smash Bros Melee, however. Bold choice, Intelligent Systems. 2/10

FE7, Blazing Blade: The prequel to Binding Blade, Blazing Blade is better than Binding Blade in every regard except instead of Roy, Binding Blade has 3 main protagonists and the only good one is the one with the least screentime. Lyn is a cool and interesting character, but Eliwood is too milquetoast and Hector is a dick. 6/10

FE8, Sacred Stones: It has good maps, good characters, an actual postgame, and introduces a feature that makes it far more replayable than previous games, Class Trees. No longer does every Mage become a Sage, for they could also become a Mage Knight. For certain base classes, this opens up a range of up to 4 possible options for their final class! Some people might complain that Sacred Stones is too easy, but I’ll take a game easy enough that I can use whatever party I want over something like Genealogy where units who aren’t mounted are absolutely worthless any day. No, the only complaint I have about Sacred Stones is the unfortunate misogyny in the writing surrounding Eirika. I highly recommend that if you play the game, you use the Restoration Queen fan hack(it also adds gay marriage which is cool.) 9/10, 10/10 with Restoration Queen

FE9, Path of Radiance: Ike game, baby. This is the Fire Emblem I’d recommend the most for sure. The first game in the series that’s not largely from the perspective of nobility who are in charge of armies, The central players to this plot is a small mercenary company. It’s a very refreshing change of pace. The only problem I have with it is in regards to the Fantasy Racism aspect. I’m the kind of person who would rather have, like, Racism With Furries in a game like this than Actual Racism being portrayed, and PoR honestly handles it rather well, but it always grinds my gears when they’re like “oh yeah mixed people are the most oppressed because the humans and the furries both shun them” like god thats not how it works. Aside from that, wonderful game. 9.5/10

FE10, Radiant Dawn: Ike 2, this time with co-protagonist Micaiah, the first female lord to not be a naive, softhearted damsel, who hails from the “evil” country from the last game. It’s hard to talk about without spoilers, but Radiant Dawn is very pro-proletariat. Also the “Ike gay” subtext becomes closer to being just regular text, and new character Heather is definitively a lesbian. This is, very unfortunately, the best Fire Emblem will ever do for gay rights. 10/10

FE11, Shadow Dragon: A remake of FE1 that doesn’t manage to throw off its shackles of being based off of an NES RPG, which limits its gameplay and story. 3/10

FE12, New Mystery of the Emblem: A remake of FE3 that is arguably worse than its original in some ways, and started the trend of having player avatar characters that ruin the plot by being overly significant. 0/10

FE13, Awakening: Very boring. Makes a lot of gameplay changes that absolutely trivialize the gameplay aspect, as if the bland map design didn’t do that enough already. Had to introduce difficulty modes that made all of the enemies insanely strong with busted skills because that’s the only way this game could be remotely challenging. The characters are bland, the plot is borderline nonsensical, and Robin ruins it all as well.This game also introduces new series mainstays such as homophobia, pedophilia, and rampant oversexualization of women. 0/10

FE14, Fates(Birthright, Conquest, and Revelations): A game so nice you buy it thrice! Fates manages to take a lot of things from Awakenings gameplay and improve them enough that they’d be worth maybe a 3.5/10, if it wasn’t for the fact that Fates continues, and actually increases, the homophobia, pedophilia, and rampant oversexualization of women, as well as adding our fourth horseman of the anime apocalypse, our long lost friend Incest who hasn’t been seen since Genealogy. It’s okay, though, because you just grew up thinking you were siblings, you’re not actually related(except for Azura, who is your actual cousin so that excuse wouldn’t even work). On the bright side, Corrin is actually the avatar character who fits reasonably in the plot so far, if only because the plot of Fates is so laughably bad even compared to Awakening. I could rant about so many things about this terrible terrible game, but it’s already taking up too much of my review post as it is. 0/10.

FE15, Shadows of Valentia: Finally, a remake of FE2, I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with it. It’s got really cool kinda choppy animation in the CGI cutscenes I like that. Wow, they managed to capture the innovative gameplay of the original while updating it to be far less frustrating... And they managed to update the already surprisingly interesting plot by... adding unnecessary characters and making it way more classist and sexist. Great. 3.5/10

FE16, Three Houses: The gameplay, quite honestly? Worse than Fates. The story... I like the characters, and it’s not really as problematic as Fates(hardly any incest to speak of, the sexualization of women isn’t quite as bad, the homophobia is less “depicting gay people in gross ways” and more “the only options for dudes are a base gametwink, a free DLC twink, and a paid DLC twink”). Really the biggest stumbling block is they took the pitfall of doing Actual Racism instead of Fantasy Racism, and then they really fucked up by portraying it far worse than Path of Radiance did Furry Racism. In Path of Radiance, the racist people who join you consist of Soren, who has a Distrusting Furries pass on account of being mixed(I already complained about this) and Jill, who is from Daein(the Bad People country) and has had her brain poisoned by propaganda. Ike doesn’t coddle her on this, however, and tells her to shape up or get the boot. In Three Houses, characters are allowed to be racist with no repercussions. Pretty much any and all character growth connected to Stopping Being Racist is carried out through completely optional support conversations. This? Sucks! It sucks! uhhh 3.5/10 as well

[adrastiana]

More things that happened

Yes that's an Inland Empire reference. :P

So I've discovered that more stuff was stolen. Earlier in the month my room smelled like cigarettes and people who don't bathe regularly. So I think it may have been recent. I am very upset. I have to move soon and have no idea where I am going so I guess I have bigger fish to fry. But this just made it worse.

When I went into the back of the closet to gather the remainder of my games I noticed that the small plastic case I kept GBA games in had its lid ajar. You have to pull the handles up and click them to the lid to close it. So if someone was in a rust or couldn't figure it out then they would likely not do it right.

I checked and Breath of Fire 2, Shining Soul 2 and Harmony of Dissonance were all missing. I thought the two Castlevania games were together in a separate case that will hold one GB/GBC or two GBA games. But I guess not. I usually try to group things together. Anywaiz, I think one or two PS1 memory cards were taken as well. Because I am almost positive I had more left from the initial theft than I do now.

Also missing is Twilight Princess for Gamecube and Ys 1&2 for DS. I am devistated.

I also discovered that Phantasy Star Universe for PS2 is not in the case. I think it may have been in the PS2 and I was so upset at the time I didn't give it much thought. I thought that Resident Evil Outbreak was the last PS2 game I played. But thinking back I am pretty sure that it was PSU now.

I cannot find the Ratchet & Clank HD collection for PS3 either. I am wondering if the disc is in the system, which is hidden in a large box of Comcast equipment. I cannot find the sleeve for the game. It was a pack-in so it came in a sleeve and not a plastic case. I am hoping that it turns up. If not I think it is easily replaceable. Still pisses me off though. -_-

At least my Gamecube, 3DS, PSP and PS3 are untouched. Although I cannot find my PSP charger. I thought I hid it under some heavy clothes on top of a chair. But the PSP was under there in its case. So I don't think that it was there. Because I know they're dumb but not that dumb. Why would you take a random charger? The PSP charger is really weird looking too. Plus it's a cumbersome pain in the ass. To make it worse despite being official the plastic on the plug that goes into the console has started to degrade. It looks kind of nasty. Since my battery asplode from old age I need that charger to play. Hope I can find it.

And to make things even worse, I dug into my armoire to get out Wind Waker and discovered the game inside was Ocarina of time. Now I ave two. My sister claims she bought it back from some guy she wouldn't give me the name of. But I thought at the time the case was way too filthy so it definitely wasn't mine. It looked like years of grime and not just the grossness of some piece of reseller scum who is also a slob. So I can't even play Wind Waker. And I have an extra Ocarina of Time. I wish I had looked inside the case back in the summer. I wish I had confirmed. But I was just so mad that I hid it and that was that. I hid my Gamecube and PS3 away because I feared that they would also be taken. So I didn't play those systems at all since then and I just couldn't look at the remainder of my collection. It was just too painful. Same with my CDs and DVDs.

Speaking of CDs, I don't know if this happened in the summer when stuff was taken or what. But I was packing the sad remainder of my CD collection and noticed that Return Of The Killer A's (Anthrax) had a broken case. The bottom hinge was cracked off so the top just comes off now. I do no remember that being an issue before. And inside of the case was the software CD for my PC monitor.

WTF? o.O

I literally have no clue. No clue at all. By the way, the music CD is still inside. I think this was a mad scramble and errant discs were shoved into cases. I did not check many of my CD cases. It was just too much to gandle. I can't take any more of this.

There's also what I assume is a blank CDR in my cabinet under what was left of my CDs. Again no clue. I have not burned a CD in a very long time. But my sister's boyfriend burned TV shows all the time. Maybe he had the dumb idea to replace some of the music CDs with CDRs for weight or something. I don't know. It ain't my CD. And I can't really check it out right now to see if anything is on it.

I confronted my sister about all this and all I get is a nasty attitude. Is she still defending him? She claims they broke up permanantly. Sure Jan.

She claims no one messed with my CDs recently because no one wants CDs. Well someone sure as hell wanted them last summer. She says no one was in my room but I beg to differ. someone stole those games. Someone needed to get high.

The piece of human filth was begging his dad on the phone for money on multiple ocassions. I overheard everything. At one point his dad hung up on him. Mind you this is a guy in his 40s with no job who is able bodied. I think he got frustrated that his parents wouldn't give him anything so he went through my stuff when I wasn't home. Yeah I should have gotten a lock but I have a feeling that it would have been picked anyway. After all, that happened to my mom. Nothing keeps this loser out. He steals from his parents too. I have heard them yelling at him over the phone about missing valuables.

I think I mentioned before that the cops were not helpful at all. They would not grant a restraining order and told me that I didn't have proof that he stole from me and that my sister had the right to invite him over. They told me that I should move. Can you believe that? I pay all the damn bills and I am the one that needs to leave to resolve the issue? Give me a break.

My sister defended him and lied and took off when I called the police both times. She was protecting him when she should have been protecting me.

And now we have to leave by the 22nd. It is all her fault. She has no income and failed to obtain a social security card and birth certificate like she was supposed to. So she cannot even get benefits. I told her to apply for the SS card online. It is free and it comes pretty fast. She did nothing. She had a year to get it together. I could not pay the mortgage after our stepfather died. So it defaulted and went into foreclosure. Had she gotten an income and stopped freeloading we could have done something as I was in contact with the mortgage company and they were trying to work something out. But I still didn't have enough to pay it and the utilities and everything else. I had to go on food stamps. And as I was applying those creeps were in my room cleaning me out to buy drugs. And then they do it again when I am applying for utility assistance. Ungrateful scum.

They were mad and verbally abused me for not giving them $20 and tokens. My sister's boyfriend was yelling at me and calling me a bitch. In my own house. Once the authority figure had died everything went to hell and there was no one left to protect me or stand up for me. So a couple weeks after that episode the stealing began. And that was my summer. Full of bullying, verbal abuse and epic freeloading. And I should have left. But when you are being abused you don't exactly think straight all the time. I didn't want to burden people with my problems. I was afraid to ask for help. I was afraid if relatives found out what my sister had a hand in that they would cut her off from any sort of help and she would die somewhere

So now I have until Friday and have no idea what will happen. I guess I need a storage unit. I have packed a lot but ran out of boxes. No idea where I am going or what will happen. I do get some money out of this but have to split it with my sister who will likely buy cigarettes and other junk with her half like the irresponsible child that she is. I'd rent a room if I could afford it. But Philly is kinda high rent and I am currently in the Far Northeast. That is not a cheap area. My primary care doctor is here. I don't really want to leave the area. But it's not like I was originally from here. I used to want to go back to the old neighborhood. Not anymore.

I hope I don't end up homeless. I'm worried about my dog.

Whatever happens happens. I will just have to live through it. I am used to suffering through bad times. But this is the worst yet. My family was evicted when I was nine. But we got a place to rent. I am just ill prepared. I hope everything works out in some way. If I don't post for a long time then that means I am likely unable to. I guess that's life. That's just the way it is. Hopefully the "it is" won't be too bad.

Sorry about the length. I don't think you can read more cut on the app. If you can I can't find it. ><

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[geekysweetie]

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix PS4 Videogame Review

Title: Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix

Platform: PS4 (note this release combines various Kingdom Hearts games originally found on the PS2, GBA, Nintendo DS and 3DS)

Genre: Action Roleplaying Game ARPG

Publisher: Disney + Squarenix

Where to Buy: $49.99 on Amazon (at time of this writing)

Overall: 68/80 85% B “Very Good Game for Girls”

Geeky: 3/5 The games have fun gameplay, good graphics for the age of the games, and a great soundtrack. However, the Disney segments can be a bit too kiddie for some more serious gamers, and although the entire series is about the juxtaposition of light and dark, the light hearted disney characters can sometimes take away from immersing yourself in the deeper darker story of Sora and his friends.

Sweetie: 5/5 – This game is cuteness overload by combining well loved Square and Disney characters. It also has a surprisingly deep, relatively dark (for a Disney product at least), and mature storyline, which evolves and grows deeper and darker from game to game as characters grow and evolve.

Gameplay: 10/10 Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG. You play as Sora, a young boy who dreams of leaving his home town on a tiny island. When the game begins you are asked to choose a weapon. You may choose between shield, sword, and magic wand. You’re also asked which weapon you will give up. This allows you to customize your fighting style to match your preferences. You’ll also be asked a few questions. These questions do not have any significance on the story, but they do have a large impact on how quickly you will level up throughout the game.

A tutorial will give you a taste for how combat is in each of the games. You can run, jump, push and pull objects, climb, and use your chosen weapons as you chain attacks, dodge, defend, and parry to take down your foes. Enemies will drop small glowing orbs which can offer XP or sometimes restore health or other benefits. You will have to run around and touch the drops, because they do not get added automatically.

After settling into the game, you are allowed to freely explore the island, interact with NPCs, and engage in several minigames, such as fighting or racing with your friends on the island. You will see many familiar faces from both Squaresoft and Disney franchises.

Fairly early in the game, Sora gets his wish of leaving the island, and the rest of the game is played through traveling between different worlds, each representing a key franchise from Disney or Squaresoft. There are numerous battles to fight, areas to explore, sidequests, mini games, and hidden goodies. In fact, to find everything, across all games will take you almost 300 hours (and you’ll be awarded with an extra ending in each game). There’s plenty of content here to sink your teeth into, even for the most seasoned of gamers.

The action based combat is fun and snappy, while the mini games and interaction with a wide variety of characters gives you a break from the hack n slash combat, creating a well balanced game that equally values action as well as adventure.

Story: 8/10 I find it jarring at times how the story jumps between worlds, and I sometimes cringe at some of the Disney characters (and I consider myself a Disney fan! But it can really take away from the story, just when things are getting interesting to flash back to Goofy or Donald, especially with their well known silly voices and all). This can all make the story less immersive. However, at the heart of the story, you have a coming of age tale and a love triangle between 3 best friends. You watch throughout each game as Sora and his friends evolve and grow and change and how their friendships and relationships change as well. The story from each game is directly related from one game to the next. We’ve already watched Sora age by 2 years (and gotten a glimpse at a very young Sora as well). When Kingdom Hearts 1 starts, Sora is 14. By the end of Dream Drop Distance, he is 16. Many speculate he will be 16 or 17 in Kingdom Hearts 3. We witness Sora’s changing emotions as he transitions from adolescence to young adulthood. The main theme song in Kingdom Hearts 1 even hints at this with the lyrics of the chorus stating “Don’t get me wrong, I love you, but does that mean I really have to meet your father? One day when you’re older you’ll understand what I meant when I said No, I don’t think life is quite that simple.” Those lyrics perfectly describe the relationship between Sora and Kairi. An innocent love, a boy who still quite often views love/girls as “gross”, and a boy embarrassed by his emerging feelings of love for Kairi. And we witness not only how friendship can grow to love, but also how platonic friendships can change to rivalries when two boys love the same girl. The depths of both Riku and Sora’s love for Kairi is perhaps the best thing about the story.

I recently picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix. I had played the original KH1 and KH2 on Playstation 2 but that was over 12 years ago now. And I had not played the other side games.

Every game in Kingdom Hearts is connected, and contains the same 3 characters, Riku, Kairi, and Sora, and the story gets deeper and more complex as the games go on as more is revealed building upon back stories and prequels and sequels and spin off games. It can be intimidating for someone new to the franchise to pick up the games now with almost 15 years of games to catch up on.

Many people recommend the following order to play the games in to get the most out of the story:

Kingdom Hearts 1 (1.5 remix) Re: Chain of Memories (1.5 remix) Kingdom Hearts 2 (2.5 remix) 358/2 Days (1.5 remix) Birth By Sleep (2.5 remix) Re:Coded (2.5 remix) Dream Drop Distance (2.8 remix sold separately) 0.2 Birth By Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage (2.8 remix sold separately) X Back Cover (2.8 remix sold separately.) Unchained X (free mobile game, available separately) Kingdom Hearts 3 (sold separately – coming soon)

So you will need bare minimum to purchase 3 games

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Kingdom Hearts 3

And optionally download and play Unchained X on your cell phone.

Some of the “games” above are actually “cutscenes” because they could not emulate the nintendo DS “touch screen” on the PS4. So each of these nintendo remakes are movies which reuse old, and add new cutscenes to tell the story.

You can alternatively purchase and play these Nintendo games separately. But you should be fine with just the cutscenes from an understanding the story standpoint.

Characters: 10/10 I really enjoy watching Sora and friends evolve, age, mature, and change over the course of multiple interconnected games. I also really do enjoy seeing favorite characters thrown in from Final Fantasy and Disney. It’s a strange mashup but it works surprisingly well. If you are either a Disney or Squaresoft fan you will love the cast of characters in these games.

Graphics: 7/10 – Taking into consideration the age of the games, I think the graphics are beautiful and memorable. They are vibrant, full of color, detail, and fun. The character designs blend Disney’s whimsy and charm with Squaresofts more stylistic approach. Sora also reminded me of a brunette Cloud wearing Mickey’s big “clown” shoes. The bobble headed appearance of the characters, makes them cute, but it’s almost a bit too juvenile, given that even when we first meet Sora and friends in KH1, they’re already teenagers. I feel like they look like Precious Moments dolls, and about 7-10 years old because of the proportions of their heads to bodies. — Luckily, the artwork does improve in later games.

Take a look below:

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 1 (Does he look 14 to you? Not even close in my opinion).

14 Year Old Sora in Kingdom Hearts 1

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 2 (He is supposed to be 15 here, looks about right.)

15 Year Old Sora in Kingdom Hearts 2

Sora from Kingdom Hearts 3 (Speculated to be 16 or 17 here) (meh this design is alright, I expected to see something like Final Fantasy XV quality here. There are very few details in the hair/face and almost no shading on the clothing, it just looks kinda flat/plastic-y… not what I’d expect from a PS4 title. He does look a tiny bit more mature, slimmer face, etc.)

Music: 10/10 I’m a big Utada Hikaru fan, and I love the opening theme “Simple and Clean” – as I mentioned, I feel the lyrics foreshadow the coming of age story and changes that our little island buddies are about to experience. She also sings “Sanctuary” the opening theme of Kingdom Hearts 2. And it has been confirmed that she will also be involved with the opening for Kingdom Hearts 3. My favorite Utada Hikaru song though will always be “First Love”. The Japanese versions of the tracks are also quite catchy even without knowing the lyrics or understanding Japanese. The background music is also fitting and full of adventure and wonder.

Voice Acting: 6/10 – The voice acting is definitely hit or miss for me. Some characters I think are perfectly cast, and others way off mark. Some give pretty convincing performances, while others are too overdramatic and/or the opposite, lack any feeling or emotion in the deliverance of their lines. The iconic Disney characters also can tend to annoy and detract from the story with their overly cartoonish voices for which they are so well known.

Replay Value: 9/10 Although the games are linear, there are multiple games in this “bundle”, and each game has a secret ending, usually only uncovered for completing all side quests, or playing on the hardest difficulty settings, which will take you around 270 hours total according to How long to Beat. Even if you don’t want to go for the secret endings, you’re still looking at over 130 hours of gameplay just for the main stories of each game. For just $40something, that works out to around 30 cents per hour of entertainment. Therefore your return on investment is quite high in this title, even if you might only play each of the games once.

Overall: 68/80 85% B “Very Good Game for Girls”

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix PS4 Videogame Review was originally published on GeekySweetie.com - Geeky & Kawaii Anime, Tech, Toys, & Game Reviews & News

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.

[architectnews]

"We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head"

The haughty dismissals of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale by western critics overlook the welcome involvement of African architects, argue Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi and Patti Anahory.

It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. This year's Venice Architecture Biennale serves it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants.

These criticisms include articles such as Carolyn Smith's critique in the Architectural Review, titled Outrage: The Venice Biennale Makes a Mess and Oliver Wainwright's review in the Guardian, headlined A pick 'n' mix of conceptual posturing.

Edwin Heathcote's review in the Financial Times was titled Full of words, questions and stuff.

Roberto Zancan's piece in Domus, titled Biennale, Stop Making Sense! at least presents a more balanced reading of the event, but yet with a sobering conclusion.

Our unapologetic positioning as Africans in this response to these criticisms cannot be understated, especially when considering architecture's poor heritage of representation of diverse thoughts and practices of people seen to be "below" the enlightened global North.

This year's biennale discusses urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world

Broadly speaking and without too much posturing, we present a collective counter-position that can be partitioned into five main headings, with the simple brief to balance the debate surrounding this exhibition and how it was all put together.

It sifts through the thoughts of a few participants in the exhibition, processed and consolidated into, yes, more words and readings that can help visitors take a fresh and deeper look at the exhibition. We then conclude with some free-radical thoughts about the Biennale's future.

Traditional models versus emergent models

Many of the criticisms fail to place enough gravity on the heterogeneity of contemporary practices, and the ongoing expansion of the architecture discipline. It seemed clear that some of the readings were locked in a nostalgic past where architecture is synonymous with construction.

This year's biennale set itself to discuss contentions and urgent topics that we, as a global society, need to address if we are to build a more egalitarian, inclusive and ecologically conscious world.

The answers coming from participants attest to the diversity of topics that need to be engaged with if we are to achieve such a future, which has to be the opposite from, if at least in addition to a homogeneous one.

Architecture's knowledge and strengths go beyond the beautiful practice of building that too often gets obsessively relied upon to address the questions of how indeed we will live together.

The value of research and the installation format as a medium to convey its message

The seemingly blatant disdain toward research and or the diverse range of research production is another telling point in some of the critiques.

Much of architectural knowledge is produced through research and the ways to display them demand formats other than the traditional instruments of architecture, such as plans, sections and models.

The installations mocked as "research" are serious works that try to bring to the foreground many of the pressing issues of our times.

If the criticisms were targeted to the medium through which such works got expressed, it would have been acceptable. What is not acceptable is the ridiculing of long-term, serious efforts to advance knowledge in specific areas by discarding them, after short bursts of analysis into the work.

The role of the curator

The figure of the curator was also attacked. This could not have been more apparent the moment statements such as "a good curator should mirror the practice of a museum curator" emerged.

This could not have been more anachronistic. Museum settings are one thing, international platforms such as the biennale are another, from the way works are produced to their meanings, audience and lifespan, which attests to the diverse role architectural exhibitions play today.

The museum model has long been challenged and, arguably, surpassed. Architecture and art exhibitions have been shifting in character while undergoing a significant self-critical revision. It is the role of the curator to work towards creating the conditions and pushing boundaries for this new model to emerge.

To not have bothered in the first place: fighting pandemic procrastination

According to the curatorial team, only a handful of participants were able to maintain their initial proposals without the need to change or adapt their installation due to the hardships and ideological shifts in thought that the pandemic brought, such as the loss of sponsorship or logistical challenges from shipping to production.

This in many ways made the exhibition all the more refreshing and current to not only consider the impact of the pandemic but, in the words of Roberto Zancan, to consider that this year's biennale marked the end of an era. It was an incredibly difficult series of moments in time when the curator and the whole biennale institution found it crucial to have the exhibition.

There is a great need to reignite the energy of the city but also that of the architectural world as a whole. A decision made to live and work with the trouble, without the luxuries and mirage of the post-pandemic comforts that may or may not come to look back at 2020 and 2021 with the crystal-clear vision that hindsight affords.

Participants addressing architecture's inability to grapple with the most difficult of issues and crises across the planet

We find it hard to avoid the stereotypical depictions of critics' aloof and often ambivalent to works by diverse communities – and this exhibition has a good supply of diverse projects. Many participants either received the gross broad-brushed grouping under the demeaning banner of Hashim's selection bag of candy, or in many cases, given overly surfaced critiques about their seemingly pseudo research, or as described by one critic, served as inedible "word salad" – a description that even made the proudest recipients of this criticism giggle inside.

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation

It begs the question, however, how deep did the critics dig to understand the participants, as probed in the Yoruba proverb quoted by Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise in Alasiri, her project in the Among Diverse Beings section of the Arsenale.

"Yara rebate gba Ogun omokunrin ti won ba afara denu", runs the proverb, which means "a small room can inhabit 20 young men if they have a deeper understanding for one another."

How much time was really afforded to actually review the work and research of the participants at the biennale, and by extension Hashim's curation of the entire exhibition? Surely the cultural barometers of our time might every so often need calibration to look in closer to read the longer climatic formations of such an event, rather than the immediate weather patterns of a press-day opening in isolation?

The celebration of the many African participants seemed to be cut short by the clouds cast over such works as Alatise's Alasiri installation. This is a continuous body of sculptural and architectural objects and readings, reigniting mythical figures of the past and present, all set within free-standing door openings linked to another African proverb that states: "Eniyan ri bi ilekun, to bagba e laye ati wole, o ti di alasiri" ("People are like doors; if they permit you in, you become their keeper of secrets").

"How will we live together is a poignant question, made more complex by the current Covid 19 crisis," said Alatise, whose body of work both creates and inhabits a space where both women and men are liberated through a phantasmagoria of feminist origins and infrastructures. "The answer begs for moral inclusion that I feel architecture alone cannot give."

Patti Anahory (who co-authored this piece with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau) and Cesar Schofield Cardoso from Cape Verde present their project Hacking (the Resort): Water Territories and Imaginaries in the Arsenale in the As Emerging Communities section.

It features an exquisite artisanal fishing line floating plastic bottle wave installation, which in their own words "investigates a confluence of the possibilities where tourists and local labour meet in a choreographed strained dance of labour and leisure".

This project imagines a space and time where both disparities and possibilities are confronted in equal measure, with a continuous body of work that manifests in their built projects and digital artworks.

Separately, with the biennale in mind, Anahory emphasized the disparities in funding allocations to realise the exhibition. She asks what would happen if all participants were constrained to a capped budget as a way to balance the output from both an environmental impact perspective, and to squarely bridge the north and south global economic divide.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition

Our Nairobi practice Cave_bureau presents The Anthropocene Museum, "Obsidian Rain", an installation under Galileo Chini's fresco in the dome of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, presented as part of the As One Planet section curated by Sarkis. This is a post-colonial architectural reading, representation and proposal to critique the anthropocene era.

This project was also whitewashed under the broad-brush criticism of the entire exhibition, dismissing the installation via comical depictions of moonstones and meteor showers, when in fact the hanging obsidian stones follow the shape of a cave used by Mau Mau freedom fighters during the colonial period and celebrated by Malcolm X.

Today, Cave_bureau uses this story to curate forums of resistance against the continuous neoliberalist expansions of geothermal energy extraction that is often done to the detriment of the local Masai community and the natural environment in Kenya.

The stones, sourced from the Great Rift Valley, reference mankind's earliest raw material, which was used to create stone tools. This is an ignored architectural heritage that catapulted the homo sapien species into the troubled brave new world that we find ourselves in today.

So here the floating cave structure is critically juxtaposed against Chini's fresco in the dome. This architectural refocusing is grounded further back beyond Plato's Allegory of the Cave; that is, the human race's collective heritage of cave inhabitation by our early ancestors. This is a heritage that is still caricatured right up to today, more so in the surfaced reading of this work.

Concluding together

We live in a deeply broken and divided world where many of the participants choose to work with the communities that are most affected by the global pressures that have their anthropogenic roots in slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

This is a continuous struggle lived through today, epitomized by the climate crisis movements, The Black Lives Matter movement and women's rights movements among many others. These pressures are intertwined and exacerbated by the present-day neoliberalist powers.

Architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges

It was in fact the use of the hybrid counter powers of the contemporary arts within architecture that was heavily criticized, which in fact allows many to mould our place within the profession that often struggles to meet the current global challenges head-on.

As Sarkis intimates, architects can no longer ignore and leave this difficult work to politicians and activists to address these formidable global challenges, lest we all just remain as professional pawns aloof and marginalized from the pulse on the ground.

The question posed by Sarkis, "How will we live together?" in many ways remains both rhetorical and requiring an immediate space to grow and generate these answers together, especially when many voices and ideas continue to be silenced and ridiculed.

One could argue that the profession remains in the early sketching phase of confronting our impotence in the face of these pertinent global challenges of our time, while the hurried brick-and-mortar readings and spatial-planning remedies that seemed to be so desperately craved could very quickly lead us towards the mistakes of our forebears.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era

This biennale was in fact a safe and open space, where we never felt overburdened to be the monolithic authors of a bright new future but instead allowed to creatively work with the cultural and physical matter that would in fact help us forge this new future together.

One welcome criticism was that future biennales can no longer remain the same: this one indeed marks the end of an era, where mountains of matter are shipped to Venice without confronting and justifying the carbon footprint. We should enact previous suggestions where carbon is sequestered by planting trees across the globe and through working with marginalized groups to do so.

We should be questioning if anything should be shipped in the first place? Maybe we should even be pondering over the observation by one critic to look at the accumulated knowledge and dexterity of many of the domestic biennale installers, subcontractors and artisans that could be curated in its own right.

Finally, we should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head. Maybe the one wearing the latest Royal Gold nugget on his neck right now or, better still, his protege, Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara, whose contribution to this year's biennale was close to genius if you care to look and listen a little closer.

Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi are architects and spelunkers who founded Cave_bureau in 2014. They are natural environment enthusiasts, leading the bureau's geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature including orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley in east Africa.

Patti Anahory is an architect, educator and independent curator and co-founder of Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Her work focuses on interrogating the presupposed relationships of place and belonging in reference to identity, memory, race and gender constructs. She explores the politics of identity from an African island perspective as a fugitive edge and radical margin.

The main image shows Cave_bureau's Obsidian Rain installation at the central pavilion.

The post "We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head" appeared first on Dezeen.