Showcase

2025 Fellowship

Charlotte Brooks

Venetian Threads: Letters from the Wall

My research has traced Venice through its most overlooked material: the brick. Each brick in the city carries a layered story of extraction, trade, craft, and repair acting as both a fragment of architecture and a witness to history. By walking the city, I’ve assembled a speculative archive of ten bricks, each tied to a place and a narrative: the brick that was borrowed, the brick that remembers or the brick that doesn’t belong.

This project explores how Venice’s walls embody global entanglements, from colonial trade routes to local repair practices. Alongside material histories, I’ve examined the hidden carbon legacies of bricks: the clay dug, the wood burned in kilns, the ships that carried surplus loads, and the mortars patched centuries later.

The work takes form as letters from the wall; a collection of fragments that blend storytelling. climate research, and architectural heritage. What do these modest objects reveal about the politics of building, the urgency of climate change, and the fragile, enduring fabric of Venice?

“…they are storytellers… of a complex past that is layered in oppression, resilience and liberation.”

From ‘red brick by blue brick’ installation at the British Pavilion

Pencil sketch of brickwork overlayed with handwritten text.

Charlotte Brooks Fieldwork example

Research example: Carbon Legacy of the brick that was repaired

2024 Fellowship

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British Pavilion . Listening All Night to the Rain John Akomfrah

Listening All Night To The Rain continues artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change with a renewed focus on the act of listening and the sonic. The exhibition, conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multi-screen sound and time-based works, is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and positions various progressive theories of acoustemology: how new ways of becoming are rooted in different forms of listening. Encouraging visitors to experience the British Pavilion’s 19th century neoclassical

building in a different way, Akomfrah’s commission interprets and transforms the fabric of the space in order to interrogate relics and monuments of colonial histories.

Open-ended in structure, the alliterative nature of the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. Listening All Night To The Rain repositions the role of art in its ability to write history in unexpected ways, forming both critical and poetic connections between different geographies and time periods.

Listening All Night To The Rain at the British Pavilion 2024 | British Council 

2023 Fellowship Yearbook

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British Pavilion . Dancing Before the Moon 2023  curatorial team and exhibition – Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham

‘Dancing Before the Moon’ aims to inspire debate that will challenge and influence the future of British architecture. Through its installations of new work, and a film and soundscape, it promotes the idea that everyday rituals (from growing food and cooking to playing games and dancing) are forms of spatial practice for diasporic communities and present new ways of thinking about architecture and the built environment.

Dancing Before the Moon at the British Pavilion 2023 | Blog | ADF | British Council

18th International Architecture Biennale theme:

LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE
Curated by Lesley Lokko

Biennale Architettura 2023 | Introduction by Lesley Lokko (labiennale.org)

2022 Fellowship Yearbook

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Venice Architecture Biennale 2020

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Page from a yearbook incorporating text and images.

Pages from 2020 LSA year book, click here to download a full copy.

2019 After Island

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2019

Andrew Lane Fellow July 2019
Research: The spread of style within architecture. A study of Andrea Palladio’s buildings in and around Venice