Diminished Capacity - Nigerian Pavilion

Established in 1980 curated by Paolo Portoghesi, the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia has developed into the world’s foremost architecture event. It’s the leading forum for the exploration of architectural ideas, the social architecture, the preeminent showcase for building design and the biggest and most publicized gathering of the international design and architecture community. What better place for the first Nigerian Pavilion’s architectural creativity and quality to take the world stage?
La Biennale Architettura promotes debate about the architectural and urban design issues confronting communities and societies around the world. It’s a highly stimulating event that brings together architects with famous careers, theorists, connections with contemporary art and young practitioners on the rise.
Some countries have permanent national pavilions in Venice; others stage their exhibitions in historic buildings. The Nigerian Pavilion have chosen an industrial building with a strong programming in the year: Punch Space where create a site-specific exhibition of architect and artist Ola-Dele Kuku.
Being at Venice feeds back into this country’s built-environment planning while also telling the world that what we do here has its own distinctive character.
The 15^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia kicks off with the two-day Vernissage – one of international architecture’s most prestigious occasions – which includes a host of opening parties and opportunities to tour the exhibitions and meet their curators.
Each edition of the International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia has a theme set by the events director, to which the creators of the national exhibitions respond. La Biennale Architettura appeals to a large and highly focussed audience: architects and designers and urban planners, naturally, but also companies that support architecture, clients that commission it, institutions that teach it and the media that publish it.
In 2014, 66 countries staged exhibitions and the 14^th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia attracted 240,000 visitors. More than 3,300 media were accredited, and 120 universities took part in the Biennale’s educational programme. So also this year we will have an amazing audiences!
Visit La Biennale di Venezia website http://www.labiennale.org/it/architettura/mostra/
 
'Diminished Capacity' intends to analyze an historical transaction moment with the ambition to rewrite history, starting from Nigeria to provide unpublished interpretations.
In this condition rewrite history becomes a necessary evolution. The wrong reading of Africa transforms continent itself in a country poised in perpetual opposition to restlessness; what is its identity being a ghetto in forms and structures unsuitable? The Africa is not a country. In that conflict the first Nigerian Pavilion wants to prospect a new methodologies.
Conflict is one of the recurrent themes in the work of Ola-Dele Kuku. The architect-artist sees that as one of the driving mechanisms in our world, and as a tool to set change in motion. 'Conflict has played a crucial role since the dawn of creation, just think of the stories of the Big Bang and the paradise of Adam and Eve'.
Throughout his practice, Ola-Dele Kuku has consistently re-shaped representation in a timely challenge. Working with both drawing, installation and sculpture, he has revisited the mainstays of architectural representational methods - plan, elevation, section - to inject unsettling slippages into their rigorous formalism. This new body of work fully embraces an analytic socio-philosophical visceral slant, confronted complex issues such as resource depletion and their manipulation, migration, micro and macro global changes, an alternative vision of west Africa, growing impoverishment and the diminished capacity of a country in a multiplication use of manipulation strategies.

Deputy Curator: Mr. Koku konu (architect – critic) Lagos, Nigeria.
Project Manager: Mr. Fabrizio Orsini
Co-founder - AAC Platform, Italy.
Exhibition Promotion and Communication: Mrs. Kavita Chellaram
Director - Arthouse Contemporary Limited, Lagos, Nigeria
Graphic Design: Gabriele Mizzoni
Photo Editing: Barbara Rossi
Assistants*: Simone Spiga, Giorgio Cingolani, Alice Mestriner, Janina Lucia Beha
* Collaboration with several universities

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