The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 18th Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition entitled “The Laboratory of the Future” (May 20 – November 26, 2023) was awarded to Demas Nwoko, Nigerian artist, designer and architect.
The decision was approved by the Biennale’s Board of Directors, chaired by Roberto Cicutto, at the suggestion of the curator of the eighteenth exhibition, Lesley Lokko. The award ceremony of 88-year-old Nwoko and the opening of the 2023 Architecture Biennale will take place on Saturday 20 May at Ca’ Giustinian. An exhibition of the Nigerian architect’s work will be set up in the Giardini’s Stirling Pavilion alongside the Book Pavilion project of The Laboratory of the Future.
At the Architecture Biennale, which will place great emphasis on the future and give Africa a lot of space, the curator Lesley Lokko finds it quite appropriate in the justification for the award that “the Golden Lion is awarded for life’s work to those who have done it have to their credit a production of tangible works spanning the last seventy years, but whose intangible legacy – approach, ideas, ethics – is still valued, understood and celebrated».
“A deep desire to fuse and synthesize rather than sweep away has characterized Nwoko’s work for over fifty years – explains Lokko – Nwoko was one of the first Nigerian designers to criticize Nigeria’s dependence on the West for imported materials and goods, as well as for ideas and has always been committed to using local resources».
Chi è Demas Nwoko
Demas Nwoko is everything at once: architect, sculptor, designer, writer, set designer, critic and historian. When asked, he describes himself as an “artist-designer,” which says a lot both for the multilingualism of his talents and works, and for the rather narrow interpretation of the word “architect” that has arguably supplanted his name in the annals. The son of a traditional obi (ruler), he was born in 1935 in Idumuje-Ugboko in southern Nigeria. His early forays into painting, drawing and woodcutting at Benin City Secondary School led him to study architecture at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria. The discovery that the course focused more on technical drawing skills than creative imagination prompted him to change course to pursue the study of fine arts. He was one of the founding members of the Zaria Art Society – along with Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Uche Okeke and Simon Okeke, a group also known as the «Zaria Rebels», which advocates a blend of modernism and African aesthetics as an authentic language interested reflected the growing spirit of political independence in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite being relatively few buildings, Nwoko’s buildings in Nigeria serve two important functions. Lokko explains in the rationale for the award: “They are the trailblazers of sustainable, resource-conscious and culturally authentic expressions that traverse the African continent – and the world – pointing to the future, no small feat for those who are themselves too largely unknown at home.” In 1977, the architectural critic Noel Moffett wrote of the first work Nwoko commissioned to build the Dominican Institute complex of Ibadan: “Here, under a tropical sun, architecture and sculpture combine in a way as perhaps only Gaudí can.
