Editorial

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. It features conversations between Eva Branscome, Stella Mutegi, and Sandra Mbula Nzioki; Lesley Green and Planetary Portals; Hannah Le Roux and Nana Biamah-Ofosu; Sechaba Maape, Bonolo Masango, and Kabage Karanja; Nzinga B. Mboup and Owen Hopkins; Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe; Huda Tayob and Hugo Ka Canham; and Margarida Waco and Patti Anahory; as well as an essay by the curatorial team.

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.1 Within these other practices of architecture was an anti-colonial intellectual tradition that saw the question of liberation and environmental activism as indivisible.

Common to any architecture is its role in the imagination of building worlds, where spatial practices articulate different genres of the earth as ideation and built structures that frame the human. Architecture is crucial to the material power dynamics of matter and life. It shapes planetary imaginaries of the earth and their design, as well as the political dynamics of forms of life and their resistance. In the context of colonialism, simply to be in place in ways not designated by the occupier and resistant to industrial ecology was an insurrection. Using the earth to manifest other political, social, and ecological relations was an insurgent act. Repair across the rifted times of colonialism is a politics of materially remaking the future as an environmental philosophy, theory of history and social map that must travel across disturbed and rubbled grounds.

While architecture has organized the intimate and social spatial “time” of relations with the earth (as geology, mine, material, matter, building, energy, ecology, infrastructure, and poetics), colonial empires of geology have engineered a planetary mix of climate emergencies and ecological breakdown. Within this context, architectures that practice an insurgent geological relation are an archive of environmental knowledge and philosophies.

Insurgent Geologies are those forms of earth practices that have been maintained and survived in the wake of colonial earth. They are architectures of lived social materiality that have sustained and sheltered resistance projects and political agency (in moorages, in forests, in caves, in undergrounds, within and adjacent to the colonial architectural projects of extraction and expulsion). They collaborate with the earth in multiple geophysical states and scales for a different future, yet are haunted by forms of geotrauma.2 Ghost geologies rattle across time, from the past, and in tempo with the earth to deliver a buried “consciousness, of knowing, of being.”3 Every political event then is also a geophysical event. Its residues are shared with the earth and in bodies, as scars, memories, rivers, and explosions.

The seeds of the future do not need to be newly discovered or made but are held within those earths that colonialism tried to destroy with its plantations, mines, and abattoirs of matter and meaning. Anti-colonial histories reveal imperialism’s reliance on the role of ecological dispossession to exercise racial hierarchies and the new cartographies that are needed to counter this violence. Political ecologists such as Wangarĩ Maathai, Thomas Sankara, and Amílcar Cabral all mapped how localized structural violence at the level of the environment can be mobilized as a planetary vernacular that speaks to power.4 In the Black sciences of African agronomy, the destruction of the environment was understood to be inseparable from oppression and racial management.

In the storehouses of cultural practice and the mausoleums to pillage, theft, and conquest, how do we both enter the master’s house and how to knock it down?]5 This is not only a question of how the house is built and who holds it up with their labor and lives, but also of the geophysics that is required to sustain it as a geologic entity and a cultural imaginary. By asking where a building begins and ends, architecture can resist perpetuating dominant imaginaries of extraction. Extending architectural thought through geophysical process shifts understanding, towards a camaraderie of exile with the earth that colonial geo-logics of extraction has made. Understanding that the fire is now, the collective task is to reimagine other architectures in concert with earth processes.6

Colonialism has shaped its afterlives unequally, as well as the role of architecture within them. These rifted histories are often marked by continued processes of extraction and precarious endurances. Within the possible futures of a “common wealth,” that which is common sits at a crossroads of brutalized historicity and liberatory struggles fought for a different meaning of geologic relation. The marginalized architectures of ancestral and insurgent geographies built in the shadow of colonial exposition and extraction care for, tend to, and allow for other future trajectories to be realized by building the past differently.7