GREAT BRITAIN: WE INVITED KENYA FOR THE COMMON VOICE
Commissioner: Sevra Davis, British Council
Curators: Owen Hopkins, Kathryn Yusoff, Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi
Exhibitors: Cave_bureau, Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), Mae Ling Lokko & Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenso
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Curators: Owen Hopkins, Kathryn Yusoff, Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi
Exhibitors: Cave_bureau, Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), Mae Ling Lokko & Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenso
A marginal collaboration between architectural curators from Britain and Kenya, its former colony. The joint research aimed to reimagine the relationship between architecture and geology, people and land. The project explores how architecture is implicated in ongoing “empires of geology” defined by forms of extreme extraction that are complicit in inequality, injustice, and environmental degradation while recognizing that architecture also offers opportunities for repair, reparation, and renewal.
Wars, political conflicts is always a fight for resources, extraction and exploitation of earth materials, — which in its turn builds history. At the exhibition, in the main atrium — a graphic line of different countries responsible for carbon dioxide emissions within the building industry.
The main installation covering the exterior of British pavilion with bids is made by Maasai tribe women in Kenya, — speaks about architects ignored by history because of not having educational degree or not being born in privileged countries, takes us back in history to vernacular practices in building. Often Africans have neglected the traditional practices of construction because the focus has been on colonial ideology. Architecture in colonies have been conditioned to value Western ways of building over sustainable local ones. For example, in the facade beads installation, charcoal that widely used in Africa is actually a recycled vegetable waste.
In terms of decolonization and reparation, the research offers collaborations between Britain and Kenya, France and Cameroon, Germany and Angola, Belgium and Kongo, the Netherlands and South Africa. Especially when we keep witnessing today that dictating countries economically are not interested in small independent countries on political map and continue to mine resources on foreign lands.
