Lesley Lokko Quotes

There’s something about the training of an architect that’s particularly suited to our time: it’s about bringing disparate pieces of information together in a framework. Architecture is about more than building buildings.

I think all cultural output is a form of narrative. Somebody once said that culture is the sum total of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So, there's a very deep need to say something, to impart something. In these questions of colony, identity, territory, and history, there is a sense amongst many black practitioners that we've never had the space to tell our own stories, and part of the act of recuperating what has been lost is the desire to speak. In some senses, the Biennale has been a healing experience, a kind of closing over of a wound, of a void.

When you are African, you speak to a world that has an existing view of who and what you are. You walk with this kind of label. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity to both talk about the label, to confront it in a way, but to also show underneath how similar we are.

I’ve always thought of ‘race’ as a powerfully creative category of exploration and expression. I was fed up trying to find a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture that wasn’t only about poverty and ‘informality,’ a word I loathe.