Diminished Capacity
Nigerian Pavilion
15th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice 2016
Dates: 28 May – 27 November 2016
Venue: Spazio Punch, Fondamenta San Biagio 800/O, Giudecca

‘Diminished Capacity’ intends to analyze an historical transaction moment with the ambition to rewrite history, starting from Nigeria to provide unpublished interpretations.

In this condition rewrite history becomes a necessary evolution. The wrong reading of Africa transforms continent itself in a country poised in perpetual opposition to restlessness; what is its identity being a ghetto in forms and structures unsuitable? The Africa is not a country. In that conflict the first Nigerian Pavilion wants to prospect a new methodologies.

Conflict is one of the recurrent themes in the work of Ola-Dele Kuku. The architect-artist sees that 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, just think of the stories of the Big Bang and the paradise of Adam and Eve’.

Throughout his practice, Ola-Dele Kuku has consistently re-shaped representation in a timely challenge. Working with both drawing, installation and sculpture, he has revisited the mainstays of architectural representational methods – plan, elevation, section – to inject unsettling slippages into their rigorous formalism. This new body of work fully embraces an analytic socio-philosophical visceral slant, confronted complex issues such as resource depletion and their manipulation, migration, micro and macro global changes, an alternative vision of west Africa, growing impoverishment and the diminished capacity of a country in a multiplication use of manipulation strategies.

Commissioner: Mr. Nkanta George Ufot (Director – International Cultural Relations, Ministry of Information and Culture)
Curator: Mrs. Camilla Boemio (curator, writer, critic)
Exhibitor: Mr. Ola-Dele Kuku (architect – artist)