We are surrounded by countless cities of rubble and dust: Grozny, Homs, Aleppo, Gaza. Memory is now sheltered in the mud, in the rubble and in the dust.1
—Achille Mbembe, “On Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum” (2025)How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?... Is it possible to construct a story from 'the locus of impossible speech' or resurrect lives from the ruins?2
—Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)
Carlo Ratti, curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, opens his exhibition, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” with a myth: “From the earliest ‘primitive hut,’ human design has been led by the need for shelter and survival, driven by optimism: our creations have always strived to bridge the gap between a harsh environment and the safe, livable spaces we require.”3 While Ratti clings to a romantic image of the architect as savior, and the idea that design has the power to mitigate harsh environments, he fails to acknowledge how architecture increasingly creates them. In this sense, Ratti obscures architecture’s complicity in human-made violences such as Israeli apartheid architecture, carceral design, and the continued emergence of luxury developments that depend upon proprietary systems of displacement.4 Brushing aside the rubble and the dust, to clear the way for more promising futures, Ratti insists that architects “lead with optimism.”
In sharp contrast, the British Pavilion, “Geology of Britannic Repair,” curated by Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi, Owen Hopkins, and Kathryn Yusoff, offers a more nuanced framework of repair as a methodology for working with and through the material debris of colonialism and its contemporary manifestations. Tracing British imperial history and its afterlives through the Great Rift Valley—“a geological formation that runs from Southeastern Africa through Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia, along the Red Sea, through Jordan, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon to southern Turkey”—the exhibition confronts the ongoing complicities between architecture and colonialism, as well as the complex position of the pavilion itself.5 As Hopkins explained, “We realised there was this interesting alignment where the front of the pavilion points north-west towards the UK, while the back looks south-east towards Kenya. We began to see the pavilion as a nodal point on an axis part of which runs along the Great Rift Valley.”6 As such, the Great Rift Valley becomes a critical guide for understanding how geological formations and material flows connect histories of extraction, displacement, and resistance across multiple timelines of both apocalypse and survival in formerly colonized territories.
The exhibition’s position, suspended at the crossroads of ongoing histories, an unrelenting present, and fragile futurities, is legible upon first encounter with the pavilion’s facade, which features a hanging installation titled Double Vision—a beaded veil that “casts the pavilion’s neo-classical facade in hues of black, brown, and red, evoking the ‘other earths’ that have been displaced by systems of empire.”7 Softening the contours of the colonial architecture upon which it is draped, the veil is at once beautiful and haunting, celebratory and solemn. Briquettes made from agricultural waste hang alongside clay beads produced in Kenya that “echo traditional Maasai practices,” as well as glass beads produced in India that “recall those made on the Venetian island of Murano, which were historically used as currency for the exchange of metals, minerals, and enslaved persons.”8
Once inside, the exhibition unfolds across six gallery spaces in which each installation seems to be in whispered conversation with the next. In the pavilion's third room, Objects of Repair, designed by Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari, and Murray Fraser of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), stands within the wider Biennale as a singular address to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, making this silence all the more palpable. As Golzari noted, “The inclusion of Palestine Regeneration Team’s work in the British Pavilion’s exploration of colonial histories exemplifies the Venice Architecture Biennale’s capacity and responsibility to engage with urgent global issues.”9
Responding to the violent entanglements of racial capitalism and imperial interests that render entire populations and their built environments disposable, the exhibition draws inspiration from Gazans’ reappropriation of rubble to build new structures, proposing “fragmentary interventions” that “envision another potential reality—a world of impermanence, resilience and expression, born from architectures of accumulated small changes, healing and repair.”10 Against the fictive imagination of a “clean slate,” PART engages with destruction's material traces as both architectural material and testament to what has been lost—fragments of discourse that speak to ongoing continuums of resistance. The movement of these materials—concrete rubble, twisted metal, pulverized brick—and their engagement with the temporal passages within which they are assembled and reassembled offers a way to think through and beyond the devastating conditions of Israeli occupation. As Sharif explains, “the rubble is my family. They’re still under the rubble. Rubble isn't just there to mark what Gaza once was, the rubble is important to keep and maintain as a testament to Gaza's right to a city, a home, a neighbourhood, a street.”11
Notably, this work also points beyond the specific context of Palestine toward broader questions about architectural practice in an age of planetary crisis. As Achille Mbembe writes in Insurgent Geologies, an editorial collaboration between the British Pavilion and e-flux Architecture, “In these hallucinatory times, architecture is about rebuilding lives. It is about the restoration of livelihoods and the provision of shelter for those who, having lost everything and, having been left homeless, ‘can be at home only in their bodies.’ … Architecture becomes a rubble clearance project so that the destitute will have safer shelter as they begin to rebuild their lives.”12
Objects of Repair challenges us to grapple with the fact that the violence it addresses continues daily. It confronts Israel’s campaign as an unfolding genocide and the culmination of decades of systematic erasure. The installation’s position within the British Pavilion also forces a confrontation with Britain's ongoing complicity in Palestinian dispossession. With the inclusion of PART’s installation, the curators of the British Pavilion demonstrate an understanding that genuine engagement with colonial repair must include solidarity with contemporary liberation struggles. This urgency becomes even more clear when considered against the broader context of the Biennale, which has largely adopted what Fraser calls “a mostly spurious use of new technology,” only to reveal the ineptitude of solutions that refuse to name the problems they address.13
As the editors of Insurgent Geologies write, “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).”14 The concept of “insurgent geologies” further contextualizes PART’s intervention within longer traditions of resistance. This is not architecture as empty gesture or rubble clearance, but as urgent social practice—a way of working with and through the material conditions of contemporary ruination. As Sharif explains, “The aim of the pavilion isn't to create a beautiful object. It's to spark collisions, provoke discussion, and draw attention to a context that is constantly being made invisible.”15
“Geology of Britannic Repair” offers a model for how cultural institutions might engage seriously with the entanglements of colonial legacies and ongoing struggles for liberation. PART's intervention demonstrates the pavilion’s capacity to address not only colonial histories but the active, unfolding violence with which those histories are complicit. As such, rather than a fixed proposal, the exhibition presents an architecture in transition—an architecture of passage between form and formlessness—that allows for both spatial and temporal extension into what was, what is, and what could be.
In a Biennale that has largely chosen spectacle over substance, the British Pavilion reminds us of architecture's capacity for both violence and resistance. In refusing silence, PART's installation issues a challenge not only to the architectural profession, but to the broader structures of cultural production that would prefer to look away from the rubble accumulating at our feet. As we watch cities crumble in real time, “Geology of Britannic Repair” insists on the possibility of building otherwise—of finding, in the fragments of destruction, the salvaged material for futures that consider and address the ongoing historical and contemporary continuums of which they are a part.
Achille Mbembe, “On Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum,” Insurgent Geologies (e-flux Architecture, 2025), ➝.
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008) 1–14.
Carlo Ratti, “Introduction,” La Biennale di Venezia, ➝.
Over 90 percent of Palestinian homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks since 2023. “Reported Impact Snapshot | Gaza Strip (6 August 2025),” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“Rift Room” British Council, ➝.
Amy Peacock, “British Pavilion Cloaked in Veil of Clay at Venice Architecture Biennale,” Dezeen, May 7, 2025, ➝.
“GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair Opens at La Biennale Di Venezia,” British Council (press release), ➝.
“GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair Opens at La Biennale Di Venezia.”
Amy Peacock, “‘Architectural Profession Letting Gaza down’ Says Palestine Regeneration Team,” Dezeen, June 9, 2025, ➝.
British Council Arts (@britisharts), “Exploring The British Pavilion: Objects of Repair,” series of three Instagram photos, May 18, 2025, ➝.
Iain Akerman, “Architects at Venice Biennale Challenge Israel’s Culture of Erasure,” Al Majalla, July 12, 2025, ➝.
Achille Mbembe - On Diminishment, I.”
Peacock, “‘Architectural Profession Letting Gaza down’.”
Kathryn Yussof et al., “Editorial,” Insurgent Geologies - e-flux Architecture and the British Pavillion, May 2025, ➝.
Akerman, “Architects at Venice Biennale Challenge Israel’s Culture of Erasure.”