At the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, visitors could enter a lounge belonging to an organization that does not exist. Olalekan Jeyifous called the installation ACE/AAP, an imaginary point in a network of African and diasporic travel complexes. The African Conservation Effort, or ACE, had applied Indigenous knowledge to ecological repair, renewable energy and transport. Its All-Africa Protoports, or AAPs, connected ports on the continent with cities across the Atlantic. The room invited viewers to inhabit the institution’s world for a moment rather than observe a distant city in a drawing.
Jeyifous was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and works in Brooklyn, New York. Trained in architecture, he builds speculative environments through collage, models, public art, installation and digital work. He does not propose these places as ready-to-build plans. They are alternative systems rendered with enough architectural detail that viewers can ask how they might operate. A future becomes more than a change of skyline when its transport, energy and ecology have been imagined together.
The Venice Biennale’s account situates the AAP’s protoport network in a fictional history of the African continent after decolonization. The protoports extend from Lagos, Mombasa, Port Said, Dar es Salaam and Durban to Salvador da Bahia, New York, Los Angeles, Port-au-Prince, Barranquilla, Havana and Montego Bay. The list matters. It traces a network across African coastlines and diasporic cities without making Europe the indispensable hub. The maps and terminals of an imagined transportation system become a way of asking who has usually been allowed to design global connections.
The protoport’s question
The lounge presented in Venice belongs to a fictional complex in Zambia’s Barotse Floodplain. In the work’s history, this site is more controversial than the coastal protoports because it enters an ecologically sensitive inland landscape. That detail gives ACE/AAP more tension than a simple utopian showcase. Even a society that has committed itself to environmental repair must decide where infrastructure belongs and whose land it changes. The speculative room asks visitors to consider the decisions beneath a seductive image of efficient travel.
Jeyifous describes ACE as responding to ecological damage done by colonial powers. In the imaginary chronology, African knowledge systems are not relics to be honored ceremonially while technical decisions occur elsewhere. They help develop the energy and transport network itself. This is the counterfactual at the heart of the work. What might an infrastructure system look like if repair, rather than extraction, directed its design? The answer takes physical form in a travel lounge because travel is where global inequalities often become ordinary procedure: some people move freely, some wait, and some are stopped before arrival.
The lounge also shifts the viewer’s position. A drawing of an airport can be studied from above; a fabricated room surrounds a person with signs that a world has rules. The viewer may not know every part of the fictional organization, but a waiting space implies timetables, departures, staff, permissions and a destination beyond the walls. ACE/AAP uses those assumptions to make an impossible history briefly feel institutional. Its success depends on the mundane credibility of a place for passengers, not only on spectacular futuristic forms.
Jeyifous is alert to the difference between visualizing a place and promising to engineer it. In a first-person interview, he described a practice that grew from plans, elevations and models into speculative imagery and public installation. Architectural training supplied a language of organized space; artistic practice let him ask social and ecological questions without pretending that a rendering settled them. That freedom is valuable in ACE/AAP. The work can test a radically different premise about Pan-African infrastructure while still showing that a premise has consequences.
A city made from what was dismissed
Jeyifous’s earlier Shanty Megastructures addresses Lagos through a different speculative method. The 2015 project imagines large structures formed from the visual language of informal waterfront building. A description in Architectural Record calls the work an Afrofuturist architectural intervention for the city’s coast. That phrase points to a danger in how informal settlements are often discussed. A planner may treat them only as evidence of shortage or failure. Jeyifous asks what forms of ingenuity and urban density become visible when the settlements are approached as sources for invention.
The project is not a proposal to leave unsafe conditions untouched or to romanticize a lack of services. Its force lies in changing the architectural eye. Structures and patterns commonly dismissed as temporary become material for a grand imagined skyline. The scale shift is provocative. It asks whose forms are permitted to become monumental and which urban practices are excluded from the official image of a modern city. In Shanty Megastructures, the future is built from a present too often described as having no future at all.
Jeyifous’s work also questions the authority of architectural drawing itself. Plans and renderings can make a project look inevitable long before a community has agreed to it. His speculative images expose the imagination inside those ostensibly objective tools. A photomontage or model can seem persuasive, but the viewer knows that its social order is invented. That recognition creates room to examine real proposals with equal skepticism. If one carefully drawn future is possible, then another might be as well.
His interest in Lagos is not an abstract return to a birthplace. It is part of a practice concerned with how urban environments absorb political and environmental decisions. The shoreline is a site of work, residence and vulnerability to climate change. Imagining a changed skyline therefore also means asking who would be able to live there. Shanty Megastructures does not answer every planning question. It creates a space in which the informal city can be seen as an active producer of form rather than an obstacle to formal design.
Crown Heights and the possibility of growth
Jeyifous has made a speculative vision for Brooklyn’s Crown Heights that brings Afrofuturism together with agriculture and ecology. A PIN–UP interview describes it as an Afro-, agro- and eco-futurist project. Its setting matters as much as its terminology. Crown Heights has a built history, a network of residents and pressures around housing and change. A future imagined there cannot simply arrive as a blank technological upgrade. It has to meet a neighborhood whose existing forms and relationships are already meaningful.
In the project, Jeyifous does not give a conventional developer’s answer to urban change. He uses speculative images to ask what a neighborhood might become if food systems, ecological repair and Black cultural life were considered together. Agriculture in a dense city can alter who has access to fresh food, how roofs and walls are used, and how residents relate to a changing climate. These possibilities are not automatically just because they look green. The artistic value is to make them discussable in relation to a specific place and its communities.
The Crown Heights work helps explain why Jeyifous’s futures are rarely escapes from the planet. Whether the setting is Lagos, Brooklyn or an imagined protoport, the question returns to land and infrastructure. An image of a better future has to reckon with water, food, mobility and shelter. Its visual richness draws attention, but the systems underneath it hold the argument. Afrofuturism becomes a way to ask who gets to organize those systems rather than a style applied to a finished design.
Jeyifous’s own route through architectural training gives him a particular means of making that question vivid. He has said that he was drawn to architecture as a child through books viewed with his mother. Later, he found a direct professional path less compelling than the quick articulation of ideas through art. Plans, sections and models remained useful, but they were no longer confined to a client brief. He could use them to present a social possibility, complete enough to be questioned and open enough to be contested.
Twelve encounters with a possible world
The 2021 Athens Biennale presented 12 Encounters in three forms: augmented-reality sculptures, a virtual-reality environment and a video animation. Moving across those forms changed the viewer’s relation to the imagined space. AR places a speculative object within the surroundings of the viewer’s own device. VR asks for a fuller immersion in a constructed environment. Video sets a sequence that unfolds whether or not the viewer chooses a path. The project’s three parts therefore test different kinds of access to the same architectural imagination.
The Biennale describes Jeyifous as a maker of Afrofuturist environments concerned with community and the built world. It notes that his proposals often contain functions, such as vertical gardens or rainwater reuse, alongside their vivid surfaces. That combination is decisive. A sculpture of a futuristic structure might be admired as an object, but a structure that also proposes food or water systems asks what a city owes its residents. The technologies in his work are means to social relationships, not proof that a surface looks advanced.
The augmented work also puts a speculative form into a viewer’s present location. This can be understood as a small version of Jeyifous’s larger method. He does not ask the viewer to imagine that the future is somewhere else entirely. He overlays a possibility on the places people already inhabit. The effect may be playful, but it can alter an everyday question: what has a street been designed to do, and who would have made a different choice? 12 Encounters makes that thought portable across media.
What a river remembers
In his 2026 Walker Art Center exhibition, Hydricosmic Litanies, Jeyifous turned from routes across oceans to the layered life of a river. The installation imagines an enclave emerging from the history of the Mississippi while existing outside a single historical moment. Its components do not form a tidy plan of a future settlement. Milled-wood reliefs, carved sculptures, nets, bindings, video and sound accumulate like evidence recovered from a place that has known labor, ecological change and spiritual life. The Walker describes platforms rising like islands from sediment and industrial debris. Visitors enter a river landscape whose physical fragments have different ages and different meanings.
The river is not scenery behind the work. It carries a history of transport and extraction, while water also sustains people and connects places. Jeyifous’s imagined remnants allow those functions to coexist without resolving their conflicts. A net may suggest food gathered from water and the labor of those who gathered it. A binding may hold a structure together or recall a history of coercion. The exhibition’s sound joins water and song to the hum of machinery, placing an industrial rhythm beside voices and currents. These formal choices prevent the future from appearing as a clean break with the material past.
The Walker’s account of the exhibition notes Jeyifous’s engagement with Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and with African diasporic and Indigenous knowledge of water. The installation does not flatten those traditions into a single inherited story. It stages an imagined encounter among histories tied to the Mississippi and the Niger, then asks how an environment might be understood if a river were treated as an archive rather than a channel to control. The question extends ACE/AAP’s interest in infrastructure into a more intimate register. Here, the system is a waterway already inhabited by memory, and design begins by listening to what its remnants reveal.
Imagining institutions rather than icons
Many futurist images concentrate on a single heroic object: a tower, a vehicle, a machine. Jeyifous increasingly imagines institutions and systems. The protoport has routes, governance and ecological rules. Crown Heights has the problem of food and neighborhood change. Lagos has the relation between informal building and monumental architecture. These projects share a refusal to separate appearance from the social order that appearance implies. They are beautiful because they are considered, and they are unsettling because viewers can see that a different order was thinkable all along.
This is where his work connects with Krull’s interview with Josephine Marie Godwyll of the Ghana Hackers Club. Godwyll’s context is actual Ghanaian technology and community problem solving, while Jeyifous builds speculative architectural worlds. The useful link is a shared insistence that tools and systems are made by people in particular places. Their shape reflects decisions about whose needs matter. One article documents present practice; the other lets a reader see how the same question can be widened through fiction.
Jeyifous’s 2023 Venice project brought this argument into an international architecture exhibition, but the work’s imagined routes displaced the usual center of that exhibition’s geography. The list of protoports ties African and diasporic cities into a network of mutual movement. Its fictional date does not make it a prediction. It is a way to ask what present institutions might choose if African ecological knowledge, community autonomy and repair were taken as premises rather than additions after the design was complete.
The imagined lounge remains a useful image of the artist’s larger practice. A lounge is a place between departure and arrival. People wait there with expectations about where they may go next. Jeyifous builds that in-between place so the audience can inhabit an alternative history long enough to feel the assumptions of its future. The work does not offer a ticket. It offers a question about who has been designing the routes, and who might design them otherwise.