Curating Failure: How the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale Misread Global South Urbanisms

Abstract

Through critical discourse analysis of exhibition catalogues and visitor ethnography, we demonstrate that the Biennale’s curatorial narrative flattened heterogenous urban practices into a single informal trope. This representational failure marginalized African and South-Asian participatory design movements, reducing potential partnerships by 62 % according to post-event surveys. The paper proposes curatorial protocols grounded in epistemic justice.