In Venice, the forced urbanization of Africa in the shadow of colonization

Mounir Ayoub, a Tunisian architect in his forties established in Geneva, was thus interested in the phenomenon of forced sedentarization which marked his country of birth in the wake of French colonization.

Before being colonized by France "in 1881, Tunisia was mostly a country with a nomadic population: 600.000 nomads and 400.000 sedentary", he recalls in an interview with AFP at the former Arsenal in Venice. , where he presents a set of photos, documents and videos at the Biennale, which opened its doors this weekend until November 26.

"France then created new towns with oases where water is extracted deep in the desert to settle the nomads, to control them in fact, to start setting borders", he explains. This policy continued after independence in 1956, laments the architect in front of a map of the desert showing all the toponyms of these areas once teeming with life.

"The desert was not empty, it was an extremely rich ecosystem with a gigantic culture. The desert was populated, it was a place of immense civilization and there there is almost nothing left", he notes with bitterness , and this "while all Arab civilization comes from the desert and from nomadism, it is dramatic".

The 1970s and 80s marked the definitive sedentarization of Tunisian nomads, a cultural loss but not only, because nomadism had "minimal impact on the environment" compared to the sedentary way of life, raves Mounir Ayoub, pointing to a nomadic tent.

"It's organic architecture in the first sense of the word: goats, sheep and camels provide hair that is woven into tents."

According to a study by the African Development Bank published at the end of April, the number of cities in Africa has doubled since 1990 and their cumulative population has increased by 500 million people. "With a particularly young population, African cities are the fastest growing in the world," she said.

"Projecting an idea of ​​the future"

An urban and economic growth that has come at the expense of natural spaces, the Tunisian desert therefore, but also the forests.

"The Congo forest, where I come from, is the second most important forest and is quite interesting in terms of decarbonization on the equatorial line", estimates Sammy Baloji, an artist photographer native of Lubumbashi (in DR Congo) and author of the project "Debris of History, stakes of Memory".

"I wanted to study all this human activity from which global warming comes, through the colonization and devastation of this original vegetation", explains to AFP this soft-spoken man who has collected photos and old magazines in particular. .

"The question is not to put Africa back to its pure state", he defends himself. "What is interesting is to observe what has been done so far: has it been done taking into account the local populations, their knowledge? Or has it been a devastation of this system to impose another system?" he asks.

Questions at the heart of the reflection that the curator of the Biennale, the Ghanaian-Scottish Lesley Lokko, wanted to place at the center of her project, entitled "The laboratory of the future" and for which she invited 89 participants to contribute, including more half come from Africa or the African diaspora.

"We examine the most painful aspects of the past and we use this trauma and this vulnerability around questions like identity, migrations, hybridity, which are generally questions that architects do not confront, to nourish new visions for the future", observes Lesley Lokko during an interview with AFP.

“Our relationship with the environment is cultural, not just scientific or commercial with the aim of colonizing or exploiting something,” she concludes. "It is the job of any architect to study the past to project an idea of ​​the future."