Lesley Lokko

Lesley Naa Norle Lokko OBE (1964 in Dundee, Scotland) is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist.

Lesley Lokko in 2010

Quotes

• I think all cultural output is a form of narrative. Somebody once said that culture is the sum total of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So, there's a very deep need to say something, to impart something. In these questions of colony, identity, territory, and history, there is a sense amongst many black practitioners that we've never had the space to tell our own stories, and part of the act of recuperating what has been lost is the desire to speak. In some senses, the Biennale has been a healing experience, a kind of closing over of a wound, of a void.
  • Maria-Cristina Florian, The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale as a Healing Experience: In Conversation with Curator Lesley Lokko, Arch Daily, May 23, 2023.
• I don't expect this exhibition to teach anybody anything, I don't think it's a didactic exhibition. That's not to say that people won't learn something from it. But I don't want any of the participants to be the ones dictating what the lesson is. It should be read from it. What they have done is put out an authentic, genuine, sometimes vulnerable story. What happens to that story is somehow beyond their control. What I hope that the audience takes from it is a kind of openness where previously, there might have been a closeness, or an unwillingness to engage with the other, not on our terms, but on their terms.
  • Maria-Cristina Florian, The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale as a Healing Experience: In Conversation with Curator Lesley Lokko, Arch Daily, May 23, 2023.
• It is an opportunity to talk to the rest of the world about Africa, and also to talk to Africa from here (Venice). The ability to be several things at once — traditional and modern, African and global, colonized and independent — is a strong thread running through the continent and the Diaspora. We’re used to having to think about resources, about switching on a light with no guarantee of electricity. We’re able to grapple with change. That capacity to overcome, to negotiate, to navigate ones’ surroundings is going to take center stage.
  • Patricia Leigh Brown, Setting the Stage for Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale, The New York Times, May 14, 2023.
• When you are African, you speak to a world that has an existing view of who and what you are. You walk with this kind of label. So for me, the Biennale was an opportunity to both talk about the label, to confront it in a way, but to also show underneath how similar we are.
  • Patricia Leigh Brown, Setting the Stage for Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale, The New York Times, May 14, 2023.
• I’ve always thought of ‘race’ as a powerfully creative category of exploration and expression. I was fed up trying to find a way to talk about identity, race and Africa in architecture that wasn’t only about poverty and ‘informality,’ a word I loathe.
  • Patricia Leigh Brown, Setting the Stage for Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale, The New York Times, May 14, 2023.
• There’s something about the training of an architect that’s particularly suited to our time: it’s about bringing disparate pieces of information together in a framework. Architecture is about more than building buildings.
  • Debika Ray, Curator Lesley Lokko on the Venice Architecture Biennale: ‘It’s about a world that’s yet to come’, Financial Times, May 18, 2023.
• Architects have the power to change the culture of how we build and how we think about resources.
  • Debika Ray, Curator Lesley Lokko on the Venice Architecture Biennale: ‘It’s about a world that’s yet to come’, Financial Times, May 18, 2023.
• No job is worth one’s life.
  • Debika Ray, Curator Lesley Lokko on the Venice Architecture Biennale: ‘It’s about a world that’s yet to come’, Financial Times, May 18, 2023.
• Succession is something you make, by constructing opportunities.
  • Debika Ray, Curator Lesley Lokko on the Venice Architecture Biennale: ‘It’s about a world that’s yet to come’, Financial Times, May 18, 2023.
• Africa's unique context, which is both richly challenging and richly creative, means it's a powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century – climate change, societal change, demographic change, new forms of governance, explosive urbanity.
  • Lizzie Crook, Africa a "powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century" says Venice curator Lesley Lokko, Dezeen, May 17, 2023.
• All futures are uncertain. We do our best to anticipate the future.
  • Lizzie Crook, Africa a "powerful place from which to examine the issues that will dominate the next century" says Venice curator Lesley Lokko, Dezeen, May 17, 2023.
• The dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only.
  • Nadia Neophytou, Lesley Lokko Speaks About a More African Architecture Biennale, okayafrica, 6 April 2023.
• Change is the one thing that everybody hollers for and longs for, but when it actually arrives, most people don't want it. It's a complex thing.
  • Nadia Neophytou, Lesley Lokko Speaks About a More African Architecture Biennale, okayafrica, 6 April 2023.

Sundowner

• You have to find yourself. When you meet him again, you have to know who you are. He's finding out who he is.
  • [1]

• The glow of delicioous tension coudn't be faked, not at any price. So when you leave, that's when you realise you've been living in a lie.
  • [2]

• How could you teach someone to survive? You pointed them in the right direction and hoped they'd swim, not sink. Waving, not drowning. There are more important things in life than individual happiness. It was an easy trap to fall into, mistaking a lack of self-direction for an expression of love.
  • [3]

Bitter Chocolate

• She would love it. Just as he loved her. He paused for a second, his fingers touching the door handle. He was in love. The realisation came to him quite suddenly.
  • [4]

• Guilt, Ameline discovered, was a terrible, unruly think, like toothache - dull nagging, persistent, never far from attention. Just when you got used to its rumbling, ruminating presence, it would lash out, stike you down, stio you dead in your tracks. The worst thing was, it was entirely unpredictable.
  • [5]

• It wasn't sealed - she opened the flap. Inside was a cheque for a thousand dollars. Made out to her. From Daniel. It was a colossal slap in the face.
  • [6]

Quotes about Lesley Lokko

• She (Lesley) is using the Biennale as a platform to extend the work she has been doing for decades. Lesley is able to set the stage for others and expose the network that for some of us has always been there.
  • Toni L. Griffin as quoted in Setting the Stage for Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale, The New York Times, May 14, 2023.