Insurgent Geologies - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Owen Hopkins, Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi, Kathryn Yusoff

Contributors Hugo ka Canham, Huda Tayob, Achille Mbembe, Nzinga B. Mboup, Owen Hopkins, Eva Branscome , Stella Mutegi, Sandra Nzioki, Hannah le Roux, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, and more…

Architecture is geological and geology is a medium of empire building, now at the scale of the planet. As colonial geology produced a grammar of extraction, where race and land became a twinned enterprise of inscription, anti-colonial practices built other languages of and in earths—Black, brown, red earths, fraternal earths, matrilineal earths, ancestral earths, flesh of the earth, cooked earths. Within these other practices of architecture was an anti-colonial intellectual tradition that saw the question of liberation and environmental activism as indivisible.

Insurgent Geologies is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair,” the British Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, and Owen Hopkins, commissioned by the British Council.

View Grid

View List

11 essays

Planetary Vernaculars

Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, and Owen Hopkins

Thomas Sankara’s infamous speech of anticolonial environmentalism in 1983, which locates the polis of insurgent struggles in the forest, came from an intellectual history of seeing independence as a geologic practice.

Tea House Négritude

Bonolo Masango, Sechaba Maape, and Kabage Karanja

To curate the British pavilion is to unwittingly entangle oneself with Britain’s imperial and colonial heritage while being served a cup of tea.

Bodies of Evidence, Evidence of Bodies

Lesley Green and Planetary Portals

South of Cape Town, the Cape Town Flats slope towards the Cape of Good Hope and open onto the large crescent-shaped False Bay, so called because it was mistaken by early traders for Table Bay.

On Diminishment, II: Vanishing Points and Turbulent Pluvialities

Sarah Nuttall

In the history of gold mining in South Africa, wealth was accrued by “working in the earth, not on the land,” as Rosalind Morris has put it.

On Weathering, Shoring, and Relational Geology

Margarida N. Waco and Patti Anahory

I often describe these shores as inherently wavy, cyclical, Atlantic, and immanently Black—both in the literal and figurative sense. The metonymy, black, in this context, unearths the absent presence of the door of no return and the storms that saturate our air, soils, and waters—a lingering imprint of shifting imperial and colonial regimes.

Flooded Futures: Resettling Imaginaries of the Akosombo Dam

Hannah le Roux and Nana Biamah-Ofosu

Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, for which the homes of 80,000 villagers were submerged beneath 135 cubic kilometers of the Volta River’s waters, is an apt place to begin a Pan-African conversation on subsurface architectures.

Beadwork of Empire

Eva Branscome , Stella Mutegi, and Sandra Nzioki

Most of the trade beads that made their way to Africa were originally produced in Venice. The majority of beads that the British used for the slave trade in West Africa, and for trade generally also in East Africa, were produced there.

Recovering In Situ Intelligence

Nzinga B. Mboup and Owen Hopkins

When I moved back to Senegal seven years ago and began teaching architecture, I realized that the students couldn’t name more than five Senegalese architects. And actually, I myself maybe knew only ten. It was this strange situation of really not knowing what Senegalese architecture was.

On Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum

Achille Mbembe

Besides making fire, hunting animals, or cooking food, building a shelter must have been one of the first conscious activities humans undertook from the moment they could stand on their feet.

Ghostly Longings in the Charged Quiet of the Shoreline

Hugo ka Canham and Huda Tayob

The memorial site works with the materials that have been there for over a century since the genocide, and they refuse grandeur. They operate on a double register, both of neglect and also a form of thinking about what happened.

Editorial

Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, Owen Hopkins, and e-flux Architecture

Insurgent Geologies is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair,” the British Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, and Owen Hopkins.

Subject

Architecture, Extractivism, Raw Material, Environment

Contributors

Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja and Owen Hopkins Planetary Vernaculars
Bonolo Masango, Sechaba Maape and Kabage Karanja Tea House Négritude
Lesley Green and Planetary Portals Bodies of Evidence, Evidence of Bodies
Sarah Nuttall On Diminishment, II: Vanishing Points and Turbulent Pluvialities
Margarida N. Waco and Patti Anahory On Weathering, Shoring, and Relational Geology
Hannah le Roux and Nana Biamah-Ofosu Flooded Futures: Resettling Imaginaries of the Akosombo Dam
Eva Branscome , Stella Mutegi and Sandra Nzioki Beadwork of Empire
Nzinga B. Mboup and Owen Hopkins Recovering In Situ Intelligence
Achille Mbembe On Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum
Hugo ka Canham and Huda Tayob Ghostly Longings in the Charged Quiet of the Shoreline
Kathryn Yusoff, Stella Mutegi, Kabage Karanja, Owen Hopkins and e-flux Architecture Editorial

Category

Subject