The Venice Biennale is a study of global politics in miniature. While most nations exhibit in the shared complex of former shipyards, the Arsenale, a privileged few maintain permanent standalone buildings in the Giardini, the event’s historic heart since 1895. This leafy enclave is dotted with 29 national pavilions: European countries dominate, compared with just three from South America, two from Asia, and a solitary African representative, alongside the US, Canada, Australia, Russia and Israel (with Qatar soon set to join the fold). If the Biennale is, as often described, the Olympics of the cultural world, this arrangement makes it clear which nations get to shape the conversation.
Perched on the highest hill in the compound sits the British pavilion — flanked on either side by France and Germany. Over the decades, this neoclassical building has exhibited work by some of the most celebrated names in British art and architecture. For the 2025 architecture Biennale, however, this prime spot will offer something different: the British Council, which commissions the project, broke precedent by calling for proposals from initiatives that were collaborations between curators from the UK and Kenya. The winning team comprises Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja, co-founders of Nairobi-based architecture firm Cave Bureau; Kathryn Yusoff, a professor at the school of geography at Queen Mary University in London; and Owen Hopkins, director of the Farrell Centre for architecture at Newcastle University.
Collaboration is at the heart of the project. “The Giardini’s arrangement of national pavilions is a concept from a particular age: while voices from the global south are increasingly prominent at the Biennale, many don’t have their own permanent presence,” says Sevra Davis, the British Council’s director of architecture, design and fashion. “We’re working within that structure, but pushing its boundaries.”
Kenya was chosen for the project as it coincides with the British Council’s UK-Kenya season of culture. But there’s also the heavy symbolic significance of a pavilion being a shared space for ideas from a country that has enjoyed a prime position at the Biennale for more than a hundred years, and one of its former colonies. Their exhibition will confront the relationship head-on: Geology of Britannic Repair (GBR) explores how British colonialism — in Africa and beyond — has affected the planet, and what can be done about it now. “The fact that we’re in the British pavilion shouldn’t be understated,” Karanja says. “Given how impactful its empire was across the world, it’s critical for it to begin to talk about repair.”
The curators’ central argument is that colonial relationships are not just ideological or political, but physical and quantifiable — and therefore fall squarely within the realm of architecture. The urge to build — the development of cities, mining of raw materials, industrialisation, flow of goods across the world and exploitation of human labour — have imposed devastation on vast swathes of the Earth and its people. For centuries Britain led this process, as well as being responsible for the majority of global carbon emissions until the United States overtook it as the leading emitter in the early 20th century. “The British empire conceived and exported the colonial-era practices of geological exploitation, with architecture as a manifestation of that, to its enduring detriment,” says Hopkins, whose work focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, politics and society. “The practice that has led us into this planetary situation now has to become the practice of repair that we desperately need.”
If architecture is the problem, the curators also believe it can also be the solution. “Architecture is transformative by its very nature — it generates reflection and creates new possibilities,” Karanja says. GBR will present a vision of a more reparative form of architecture — without which, he says, humanity “will spiral into complete destruction”. What form this will take is under wraps until the exhibition opens, but they can reveal that its starting point is the Great Rift Valley, a series of trenches that runs for more than 6,000km from Mozambique to Turkey.
In the pavilion, “rift” becomes a metaphor for how colonialism broke worlds, severed our connection to the land and created tiered systems of privilege, as well as hinting at the restorative thinking needed now. Ideas will be presented by a range of designers and researchers from around the world, with a focus on the regions most ravaged by these historic processes. Cave Bureau themselves are among them, and the rest range from designers who specialise in materials experimentation, such as the Ghanaian-Filipina artist Mae-ling Lokko (known for her work transforming bio and waste materials such as mycelium and coconut husks into building materials), to architects working on reparative projects, such as the Palestine Regeneration Team (a group that engages in reconstruction work in the West Bank and Gaza).
The group is deliberately international, Mutegi says, because the need to repair the planet transcends national borders. “Kenya can’t do it alone, and the UK can’t do it alone — everyone has to be at the table if we are to conquer the problem,” she says. The reference to a table echoes Cave Bureau’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale’s main exhibition in 2021: “Obsidian Rain” was a hanging formation of obsidian stones arranged in the shape of the Mbai cave, which had been used by Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya as a place of refuge. Underneath their display, Cave Bureau placed a table that was intended to host discussions about the environment and architecture.
That was part of the studio’s wider Anthropocene Museum project, a series of exhibitions in institutional spaces that explores the impact of colonisation and extractive development on nature and on communities most vulnerable to the cataclysmic effects of climate change — who almost never have an international platform to voice their concerns. Another of these, “Cow Corridor”, proposed a network of routes — paths, green spaces, watering holes and veterinary clinics — for Maasai farmers to herd and graze their cattle in Nairobi, reconnecting pastoral communities with the ancestral lands they lost as the Kenyan capital was built by the British colonial government and individual property rights were imposed.
Yusoff’s scholarly work, including in her provocative 2018 book A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None, also speaks directly to the pavilion’s concerns. She specialises in “inhuman geography”, a term that spans both people who have been dehumanised by processes such as slavery and colonialism and the non-human elements of our planet that have suffered alongside them. “We think of urbanism as the future, and the rural as a site for extraction and dumping,” she observes.
But when we look beyond the urban for visions of the future we often find vernacular ways of making and building that are rooted in environment and local knowledge — looking to such precolonial and pre-architectural practices for inspiration is something Cave Bureau calls “reverse futurism”.
“People in many of the rural communities we visit don’t describe themselves as architects, because architecture is considered a high art, but they do have buildings and design and they do so many of the things Kabage and I are trained to do,” Mutegi says. Yusoff argues that we should “think about the architectural practices of, for example, Maasai women as an intellectual tradition, and one that is utterly vital”. Putting such ideas at the heart of the world’s most important architecture exhibition challenges not only what counts as architecture, but who we think of as an architect — and therefore who gets to construct the future.
venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org
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