West < > Africa Biennale is an international biennale is being held between 20 February, 2022 and 31 July, 2022 in Lagos, Nigeria. 

Organized by the A3-Archnet Collaborative, the biennale fosters and helps grow an academic and professional community around the intellectual preservation of under researched, underexposed, and underrecognized architecture in Western Africa. 

The biennale serves as a forum to collect and share documentation of obscure and lesser-known modes and styles of architectural heritage as formal objects, in addition to studies of the cultural factors that contribute to their non-canonical attributes and status.

Though West Africa serves as the regional hub for the works under study, the combination of these two words has separate identities under hegemonic binaries of progress and tradition, modern and vernacular, colonial and postcolonial. When these words meet, they serve as the connection between the symbology and history of the West and Africa (“West”, “Africa”, “West Africa”) in both a continental and global context, to become the discursive basis for teasing out and dismantling what factors contribute to architecture of the West African cannon and subaltern architectures.

The West < > Africa Biennale will interrogate the criteria and processes that lead to the valorization of certain structures and architectural traditions over others. It also aims to collect documentation of architectural and urban planning projects in this regional hub. Programming may include round tables, lectures, conferences, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, and other events. The biennale will also serve as the space to organize long term pedagogical workshops around how language, globalization, urbanization, environmental politics, material histories, construction methods, pedagogy, and architectural education affects what becomes in/visible, under/represented.

"This inaugural edition will be a journey of discovery through knowledge building activities such as: a public panel and workshops to investigate the issues that orchestrate what is seen; before terminating in a public exhibition that unmasks the hitherto underreported, under researched and under documented architectures in Africa," said Baba Oladeji & Michael Toler, PhD, Co-Directors, A3-Archnet Collaborative.

Schedule of West < > Africa Biennale

17 - 25 April 2022: Digital Interfaces Workshop Week / Hybrid

23 - 24 May 2022: Teachers Workshop: Crafting Syllabi for Pluralist Architecture around the World / Hybrid

24 - 31 July 2022: Exhibition: From the Unknown to the Known / Hybrid

Read more about the event on this page. 

Top image courtesy of West < > Africa Biennale.

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