We asked the curatorial team a few questions to help break down the themes of this year’s exhibition.
How would you describe this year’s exhibition?
Geology of Britannic Repair suggests a much bigger geography of empire, colonial afterlives, and the Earth as the real territory or architecture of grand Britannia, and the necessity of addressing questions of repair in that expanded geography. The pavilion is a collaboration between the UK and Kenya, who have had a difficult and unequal history marked by extractive relations. And this collaboration is an intervention and a re-imagining of a better relation that acknowledges the interdependence of colonial afterlives, the focus on geology and architecture as an earth practice, and recenters architecture's relation to geology and to the ground.
The exhibition was created as a partnership between our team in the UK and Kenya with our collaborators from across the globe – Palestine, Ghana, Congo, Denmark, Zambia, United States – to form a rich mix of entangled colonial afterlives and emancipatory practices.
We wanted to shift the ground of architecture debate to understand architecture as integral to building the planet, and understand the history of the built environment as being predicated on colonial values of geological expropriation, which is to say every building is a mine, a consumer of energy, materials, water, heat, a producer of extraction of carbon. In short, a participant in Earth geologic processes. Architecture is also the producer of concrete imaginations of the world, and so occupies a unique space in which to imagine the world differently.
Can you tell us what you mean by ‘architecture as an earth practice’?
It's working out from the idea that every building is a geological intervention in the world. Materials that a building is made from have been extracted, mined, or even if they're natural materials, they're still indirectly from the earth. And that side of architecture is often overlooked. It's seen very much as a kind of artificial, synthetic or wholly man made thing. And that's really problematic, because that has, in part led to this: the way that architecture has become a driver of extractive processes, which is essentially that resources have been mined and ripped out of the earth with little consideration of their environmental impact – both locally, ecologically in terms of the local populations, but also from a planetary point of view. Thinking about carbon emissions, climate change and those extractive processes are bound up in the history and present reality of colonialism.
What we're interested in is that relationship between architecture and colonisation; that they are parallel, interconnected practices. And what we're looking to do is trying to dismantle the prevalent concept of architecture that has shaped the world over the last 250 years, and rebuild it as a non-extractive practice that is actually geared towards repair, restitution and renewal, which is intended to operate on both the local level, reconnect people to the places, to the lands, the ecologies where they live, and try to mitigate the kind of planetary processes that are unfolding through through climate change. So it's a kind of philosophical, and I suppose deeply political project as well. We hope this is one of the things that architecture is uniquely able to do; to try to materialise, visualise, aestheticise these vast processes and histories that are colonialism or climate change into something that is meaningful, tangible and relatable.
And how did you interpret the British Pavilion as an architectural site for this exhibition?
We were very interested in the physical site of the British Pavilion. It runs through the project from the intervention on the facades through to what we call the ‘earth compass’, and then beyond. And we're interested in this not being just a neutral venue. It's anything but neutral. Of course, sometimes it might seem to act that way, where histories are set to one side – but we're interested in embracing that, reflecting on that and critiquing that, and actually transforming the pavilion through this UK-Kenya collaboration into something else. There's almost a kind of critique of the worldview that's implicit in the idea of great nations competing for cultural supremacy. So that for us is a really fundamental part of the project.
What made you want to focus on the Rift Valley for this exhibition?
After many conversations we settled on the Rift Valley as a conceptual focus. This is what many of Kathryn’s ideas have been about: the rift as this base for resistant or oppositional practices to colonisation and the empires of geology, as she describes it. So the idea was that in one of the rooms, there would be this new axis that we propose from London through Venice – parabola down the Rift Valley – which is this geological formation which runs from Northern Turkey through Israel, Palestine, through the Red Sea, through Ethiopia, through Kenya. The Rift Valley was the cradle of early humans, in a sense. And so for us, this is the kind of the germinating site for the project.
What do you hope people will get out of this exhibition?
We hope visitors bring their own experience and understandings of architecture as an earth practice and question, who gets to imagine the world? Who gets to materially shape it, and how can architecture be a force of reckoning with current and inherited, unequal and deeply unsustainable earth futures?
It’s important to note that these are not solutions. This is not a ready-made package of things that you can just put out into the world. This is more about changing the mindset, and creating a new imaginative space to think about alternative forms of architecture that are fundamentally derived from its position as what we describe as an earth practice. So that’s what all the installations are about – creating the possibility of thinking about architecture and its role differently.