Double consciousness

Art Biennale curator Cecilia Alemani’s and Lesley Lokko’s parallel universes mark an ideal passing of the baton from the world of historical, futuristic, inclusive, militant, and feminist art of The Milk of Dreams (Alemani’s Biennale) to the research of extended identities, identity relationships, culture, and space of the Laboratory of the Future (Lokko’s upcoming Biennale). The trait d’union between the two art curators is certainly their being deeply rooted in contemporary society: themes like equity, gender, identity are the centre of creative research for both, and both employ similar methods in their artistic and architectural investigations, as exemplified by their educational and professional backgrounds.

Alemani’s curriculum ranges from philosophy studies to the direction of the High Line Art in New Yok, to work on public and social art parallel to art experiences in experimental, independent places. Lokko’s range from Hebrew and Arabic studies at Cambridge to the direction of the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana. Essential for both is the role of literature and, even more important, of writing. Alemani has been for long committed to curating columns on several magazines; Lokko is the founder and director of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, and an accomplished novelist herself. In 2004, she published her first novel, Sundowners, which was followed by eleven more. Both curators believe in the essential power of imagination and dream, a dream that, for Lokko, starts and ends with the word Africa, the theme of next year’s Architecture Biennale. While in Alemani’s Biennale, we saw a lot of the Americas, we are anticipating a lot of Africa from Lesley Lokko.

In between, the Venice Biennale, since years the workshop of modernity and a space where questions on the relevance of art and architecture are always welcome, to define the present world and the world to come. Lokko’s Laboratory of the Future will sweep away everything we thought we knew about the dogmas and paradigms of architecture.