The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, which opened in May and closed in November after receiving over 700,000 visitors, will be remembered as a watershed moment in the institution's seventy-year history. Curated by Lesley Lokko—the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and founder of the African Futures Institute—the exhibition broke decisively with the Biennale's traditional Eurocentric framing to center the architectural practices of the African diaspora, migrant communities, and voices that have been structurally excluded from the global architectural conversation.
The exhibition's title, "Foreigners Everywhere," borrowed from the collective Experimental Literature of the 1970s, established the curatorial framework: an investigation of architecture through the lens of foreignness, displacement, and the creative possibilities that emerge from the condition of being out of place. Lokko's introductory text, displayed prominently at the Arsenale entrance, framed the exhibition's ambition: "We have gathered here not to celebrate architecture as object, but to examine architecture as practice—as a way of understanding and shaping the world that carries particular responsibilities when the world itself is in flux."
The Arsenale installation, the exhibition's largest single space, was organized as a series of encounters rather than a linear narrative. The opening section, titled "The Arrivant," presented work from practices based on the African continent, with particular attention to the generation of architects who have established their practices in the decade since the Biennale's first major African representation in 2023. The work on display revealed a sophisticated engagement with conditions that Western architecture has traditionally struggled to address: rapid urbanization without formal planning, mixed economies that blur distinctions between formal and informal, and the challenge of producing architecture with limited resources but deep cultural specificity.
The exhibition's most discussed installation was "The Atlas of the Disappeared," a research project led by the Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace. This installation, occupying a full third of the Arsenale, documented architectural interventions in communities that have been erased from official maps—informal settlements, refugee camps, migrant housing, and the temporary architectures that emerge in the spaces between formal recognition. The installation's power derived from its refusal of conventional architectural representation; rather than presenting polished buildings, it used maps, documents, oral histories, and physical fragments to reconstruct the architectural lives of places that official culture has chosen not to see.
The national pavilions, always a significant component of the Biennale, reflected the curatorial theme in varied and sometimes surprising ways. The Golden Lion for best national participation was awarded to the Uganda Pavilion, which presented the work of the Kampala-based practice Local Studio in an installation documenting their decade-long engagement with informal settlement upgrading in the Ugandan capital. The pavilion's power lay in its specificity: rather than presenting architectural solutions, it documented the slow, patient process of working with communities to improve conditions without erasing the social and economic networks that give informal settlements their vitality.
The Nordic Pavilion, typically a showcase for Scandinavian design, presented a provocative installation on the architecture of Sami reindeer herding communities. The installation, developed in collaboration with Sami craftspeople and political organizations, examined the ways in which state architecture—schools, housing, infrastructure—has been used to sedentarize nomadic communities, and the contemporary architectural projects that are supporting Sami claims to land and cultural autonomy.
The German Pavilion, which has been the site of some of the Biennale's most politically charged installations since the 1990s, presented "The Architecture of Deportation," a research project documenting the architectural typologies of detention and deportation facilities across Europe. The installation, which filled the pavilion's rooms with documentation of these facilities, created an experience of considerable discomfort—a deliberate curatorial choice that challenged visitors to confront architecture's complicity in systems of exclusion.
The Biennale's program of parallel events, distributed across Venice and attracting substantial international attention, extended the curatorial theme into a wide range of practices and concerns. Particularly notable was "Diasporic Architectures," a collateral exhibition at the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin that presented the work of twenty-five practices whose work engages with the architectural implications of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity.
The exhibition's discourse program, which brought architects, scholars, and activists to Venice for a series of conversations and presentations, extended the curatorial investigation into the conditions under which architecture is produced. Panels addressed topics including the architecture of refugee camps, the preservation of migrant heritage, and the particular challenges faced by architects working in conditions of political displacement.
Critical reception of the exhibition was largely positive, though not without controversy. Some critics, particularly from European architectural publications, argued that the curatorial focus on diaspora and migration represented a departure from architecture's core concerns. Lokko, in a widely reported press conference, responded directly to this criticism: "If we understand architecture's core concerns to be the production of buildings for those with resources and voice, then yes, this exhibition departs from those concerns. If we understand architecture's core concerns to include the spatial conditions of all human life, then this exhibition is urgently central."
The exhibition's longer-term impact remains to be assessed, but several effects are already visible. The Biennale's emphasis on practices from the Global South has prompted several major museums and cultural institutions to revise their acquisition and exhibition policies. Architecture schools, particularly in Europe and North America, have reported increased applicant interest in programs addressing diasporic and postcolonial architectural studies. And the practices featured in the exhibition have seen significant increases in commissions and institutional attention.
For the architectural profession more broadly, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition may come to be seen as the moment when the center of gravity in global architectural discourse began to shift. The exhibition demonstrated that the most interesting and relevant architectural thinking is no longer happening exclusively in the traditional centers of the Global North, and that the practices emerging from the conditions of displacement and cultural hybridity that define contemporary globalization have much to teach architecture about its future possibilities.
