Can you tell us more about the work of the exhibiting architect, Ola-Dele Kuku?
It wants actually contribute creative and critical thinking to how we might live otherwise with a different point of view of a continent. My curatorial approach seeks to examine how Ola Dele Kuku have not only focused on Nigerian history, but also simultaneously investigated the conditions of mobility in relation to the actuality with innovative installation chosen for re-write the diminished capacity of an territory. Conflict is one of the recurrent themes in the work of Ola-Dele Kuku. The architect-artist sees conflict 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. The diminished capacity is a part of the mechanism of a state of conflict. The existing hierarchy is at its zenith and is therefore about to fall. And although social media sometimes give the impression that our world is just a village, we are still increasingly concerned with what is happening outside our own front door. How our world will evolve is still unclear, but there is no doubt that conflict stimulates change. It stands the existing order on its head and inspires innovation. Throughout his practice, Ola-Dele Kuku (architect and– artist), has consistently reshaped representation in a timely challenge. In this pavilion he working with drawing, installation, and objects, he has revisited, in an unconventional approach, the mainstays of architectural representational methods - plan, elevation and, section - to inject unsettling slippages into their rigorous formalism. The exhibition will create a stratification of tensions between methods, concepts and the materials used. It's an unexpected and site-specific use of the space with contemporary art in which the curatorial concept starting from a sentence of an installation: “Africa is not a country!”; In that conflict wants to prospect new methodologies.
How did you become the curator of their national pavilion?
Global world is in a trans-formation and the cultural world is creating several unedited connections. Increasingly, intellectual projects are parts of a bigger ecological, economic and technological system in which collaborations are a source of innovation. I think that the rest of the world can learn from Nigeria from our participation at La Biennale a careful architect of a sculptural-design pathway dedicated to the iconography, presents an innovative installation, through which Kuku can transmit his personal thought and the ethical and artistic message, which has always characterized his work. A visual-literary pavilion which can be enjoyed by the public, invited to take part not only in the perception of the work but also directly inside, where written communication takes up a role that is active and equal to the one of the forms, affirming itself in the surrounding circular space.
It was born out of artistic interest and the ‘urge’ to speak about social architecture, to talk about difference in cultural and even aesthetic canons, why these differences are there and how we approach them. It’s quite easy to ‘dismiss’ a certain approach as naive, immature or wanting to play hardball with geopolitical issues, without really understanding what’s going on in that nation and why certain tendencies have developed and are there. Being that 'Reporting from the Front' either a political / activist approach incidentally, both very present in the Nigerian architecture scene and in my research; I was the perfect curator for this collaboration with architect and artist Ola-Dele Kuku. In the last years I have curated several public art projects and I investigated architecture topics in museums and galleries; my research focused an analysis of the social architecture and art projects that investigated the interaction between art-architecture is been always developed with several exhibitions: as Cities part of the preview of Festa of Architectura of Rome with the lectio magistralis of Paolo Soleri at Auditorium Parco della Musica and show also at Torrance Art Museum in the South Bay of Los Angeles in 2011; as Sensational Architecture group show with two site-specific video installations of Mark Lewis and Spencer Tunick at Auditorium Parco della Musica of Roma,in 2012; and I have curated many others shows with collaboration with: Michael Wolf, Gabriele Basilico, Catherine Opie, William E. Jones, Olaf Otto Becker and others; in which I have analysed topics of transformation of cities and landscape.