After founding and directing the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and briefly leading The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, in the spring of 2021. The AFI is a physical, digital and conceptual laboratory of the future. It offers a new model of education that breaks down inherited disciplinary boundaries, brings together the arts, humanities and sciences, and shifts the axis of influence from the global North to Africa and the African Diaspora. Among other important questions, AFI asks: “What if Africa and the African Diaspora held the key to overcoming so many contemporary challenges of race, environmental justice, new forms of urbanism?” In December 2021, Lesley Lokko was announced as the chief curator of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, opening in 2023. Ana Miljački, Jay Cephas, and Igor Marjanović gathered on February 23, 2022 (on Zoom) for a conversation with Lesley Lokko about her work on AFI and the future of architectural pedagogy.

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