Architecture as an Earth practice

Join the curators of the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale as they present a lecture-performance that explores the exhibition’s central themes of repair, reparation, and resistance.

Through a fusion of storytelling, historical inquiry, and design, the curators will invite audiences to rethink the role of architecture in shaping more just and resilient futures.

About the exhibition

Entitled GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, the exhibition for the British Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2025 investigates how architecture can reverse the destructive impacts of colonial systems of geological extraction through emergent practices of architectural repair.

The exhibition is commissioned by the British Council and is a unique UK-Kenya collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team of curators – Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau; and UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff. The Great Rift Valley – a geological formation that runs from southern Turkey through Palestine, the Red Sea to Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique – provides the exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus.

Emerging from the “rift”, the exhibition comprises a series of installations by Cave_bureau, Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team / PART (Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser). Reflecting on architecture’s role in the geological afterlives of colonialism, the installations put forward different earth-based vernaculars that offer possibilities for planetary repair, restitution and renewal.

Transforming the 2025 British Pavilion into a site of reinvention, the exhibition invites the visitor to reimagine architecture as an earth practice that rebuilds the connections between people, ecology and land.

About the curators

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her award winning (Association of American Geographers, 2021) transdisciplinary research addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race, critical environmental studies and the in/humanities. She is author of Geologic Life and A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

Kabage Karanja is an architect, co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, an architectural and research firm based in Nairobi that he started alongside Stella Mutegi in 2014. He leads the research and aesthetic direction of the bureau and is currently a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale School of Architecture.

Stella Mutegi is an architect, co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, an architectural and research firm based in Nairobi that she started alongside Kabage Karanja in 2014. She heads the technical department at Cave, where she orchestrates the seamless coordination of Cave’s ideas into built form. She is currently a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale School of Architecture.

Owen Hopkins is Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University. Previously he was Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Education at Sir John Soane’s Museum and Architecture Programme Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. Alongside his curatorial practice, he is author or editor of numerous books and journals, including, most recently, Towards Another Architecture: New Visions for the 21st Century.

Photo credit: © Taran Wilkhu © British Council