If we were to position Africa as the centre—of our maps, our political imaginations, our global networks—what radical worlds might emerge? How might these reconfigure our severed relationship to the earth that has long nurtured us? By extension, how might architecture reconstitute itself in dialogue with, rather than in opposition to, the multitudinous ecologies it is placed in?

This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale purports to champion similar fertile discourses by thinking with natural systems, albeit with a seemingly misguided adherence to technology. For many participants from the Global South, this has meant an emphasis on the vibrant possibilities of vernacular design. This reorientation is perhaps most resolutely practised by the project GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, the UK's national participation at the Biennale, positioned as a collaboration between Great Britain and Kenya (a former colony of the British empire). Commissioned by the British Council, the project—awarded a Special Mention for National Participation at the Biennale—brought together a multidisciplinary team of curators, including Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio cave_bureau, UK-based curator Owen Hopkins and academic Kathryn Yusoff. Through GBR, the curatorial team hopes to underscore the notion of architecture as a geological entity, and thus to rethink the discipline as an ‘earth practice’.

The exhibition's conceptual core is centred on the Rift Valley—a geological formation that runs from southeastern Africa through Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia, along the Red Sea, through Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon to southern Turkey. Installations by a diverse set of participants emanate from these charged nodes, addressing the crucial destabilisation performed by the project’s vocabulary—‘GBR’ not as Great Britain, but a lively rift from which to imagine a world that foregrounds repair and regeneration. The curators' insistence on architecture as a discipline emerging from the spoils of the earth becomes a means to examine and hopefully refute the extractivist culture it has historically propagated and continues to perpetuate today.

Yusoff, currently professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University, London, argues that geology is not neutral, defining an ‘earth practice’ as a form of insurgent knowledge that has persisted in the wake of colonial violence and erasure. They are lively, social practices that collaborate with the earth but are marked by the legacy of the colonisers’ exploitation of the terrain. It is presumably with this intention to renegotiate neocolonial tendencies of extraction and imposition in contemporary architectural practise that GBR markedly shifts its attention from a postcolonial imaginary to one which considers planetary rubrics; from a position of ‘development’ for humans, to world-making with the more-than-human. As the curators all note in conversation with STIR, a simple return (of artefacts or to indigenous ways of being) is not possible without active engagement with the material conditions of the present.

Bearing this in mind, the rigid, neoclassical facade of the British pavilion is obscured from view by a beaded veil, serving as the first 'gentle reminder' of the earth which the curators hope to invoke in pursuit of an equitable future. Double Vision, conceived by the curatorial team and produced by craftspeople in Kenya and India, is made of beads of agricultural waste briquettes, clay and glass, reinterpreting traditional Maasai practices of shelter and enclosure. As one enters, The Earth Compass in the foyer acts as a reorientation device. The walls also document national cumulative carbon emissions of London and Nairobi, highlighting the ongoing and persistent imposition of colonising powers on the formerly colonised.

The material burdens imposed on the formerly colonised, not only through the imperative of cutting carbon and greenhouse gas emission costs in the present, but also through the obliterated histories that persist in previously disregarded material realities, become the central theme that threads through the showcase. As the curators emphasise, the earth holds the residues of human intervention, and is vital for preserving collective memories. This is most profoundly manifested in the project by Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART).

Emerging from their ongoing initiative, Atlas of Materials, Objects of Repair gathers salvaged material from the destruction in Palestine and proposes techniques with which these can be reused towards rebuilding the state. Vena Cava and Lumumba’s Grave similarly examine the burden of colonial materialities. The former, presented by Mae-ling Lokko, a Ghanaian-Filipino designer, academic and artist, and Gustavo Crembil, an Argentinean architectural designer, reimagines Palm House at Kew Gardens as a timber structure. On the other hand, Thandi Loewenson’s latter installation probes the aftermath of space exploration. Reimagining a tale of exploitation, she depicts African space programme projects, reminding visitors that other imaginaries futures—those which are not Eurocentric—have existed and can exist.

By unearthing ongoing acts of violence, oppression and continued marginalisation, the hope is to underscore the urgency for reparative action and alternative modes of world-building. This architectural disposition is especially redolent in cave_bureau’s larger practice. The African architects’ work has focused on caves as political spaces for decades, as evidenced in their proposal for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. The pair’s research subverts the commonly held notion of caves as wasted landscapes by revealing material histories of resilience. Building on this narrative, they present Shimoni Slave Cave, an undulating rattan weave structure, in collaboration with the Royal Danish Academy. The second room of the pavilion is similarly reimagined as a Kenyan Rift Valley cave, with the studio also stripping a wall of the gallery to reveal the bricklayer underneath, a literal material insurrection.

There is something ultimately hopeful in the British pavilion’s insistence on vernacular architecture and earth practices as possible (if not the only) futures for our built world. And in this, the collaboration that brings it together is particularly vital. If the pavilion is meant to be a paradigm for the dissemination of ‘British’ culture, it’s an act of radical insurgency for it to be occupied by participants from a former colony. The very people the colonial project sought to erase. However, in revitalising the architectural traditions of the 'wretched of the earth', the pavilion makes clear that the actual work of decolonisation lies with those who will build with the earth, not erode it.

Positioned in a larger discourse of emerging regenerative practices that look to planetary times and conditions, the hope for the British Council is also that this necessary work will expand in the future. Because it matters that we not only begin to question the master’s tools, but that this leads to a time when it can be knocked down entirely. That, as Karanja observes, is still a matter of unfinished business.

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is open to the public from May 10 to November 23, 2025. Follow STIR’s coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 (Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective) as we traverse the most radical pavilions and projects at this year’s showcase in Venice.