Away from the national pavilions, the main exhibition put together by Biennale curator Lesley Lokko shines a light on the enduring impact of the colonising Europeans who upended traditional ways of life. Mounir Ayoub, a 40-year-old Tunisian architect based in Geneva, has long been interested in the phenomenon in Tunisia of forced settlement. The desert was populated, it was a place of immense civilisation," he told AFP at the exhibition at Venice's former shipyards. The policy continued even after Tunisian independence in 1956, he said, with Tunisian nomads definitively settled by the 1970s and 1980s. "We're looking at the more painful aspects of the past, and using that trauma and that vulnerability around questions of identity, migration... which are generally questions architects don't deal with, to inform new visons of the future," Lokko told AFP.

Source: The North Africa Journal May 27, 2023 13:05 UTC