AT talks to… Owen Hopkins, director of the Farrell Centre and co-curator the British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, about how the pavilion reimagines architecture as an earth-bound, reparative practice confronting the intertwined legacies of colonialism and climate crisis.
Photos
Chris Lane © British Council
What position is the British Pavilion, GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, putting forward on post-colonialism and its relationship to architecture?
The exhibition is concerned with architecture’s fundamental status as an ‘earth practice’. At root every building is an intervention in the earth’s geology – with all building materials derived one way or another from the ground. Yet this view of architecture has long been suppressed, resulting in an active disconnection between a building and its geological and environmental impact. And of course the planetary implications of this are felt unevenly, reflecting the legacies and present realities of colonisation. So in a way we’re picking up the thread of Lesley Lokko’s contention that decolonisation and decarbonisation are ultimately the same project, while positing architecture’s fundamental relationship to the earth as the way to understand its past and present, and to re-orient its future ‘otherwise’. If architecture as it is currently constituted is at best implicated and at worst an active agent in leading us to the present planetary predicament, then, we contend, a fundamental dismantling and re-imagining of architecture is required to find ways beyond it.
What is architectures role in the ‘geological afterlives of colonialism’ and does the exhibit address who this architect should be? Following on from the above, architecture as it is currently constituted perpetuates the extractive processes that were established through colonisation, both in terms of how buildings are materially constructed and in terms of energy required to service and run them. Buildings are a conduit through which resources are extracted from the underground and then transferred to the earth’s surface and, in the case of carbon, into the atmosphere. So in this sense, the built environment is a geological layer on the world that was established through the extractive processes that colonisation was central in pioneering.
The climate emergency is a planetary condition, yet, as noted above, is felt unevenly across the world. If architecture as currently constituted exacerbates this imbalance, then it’s vital to find and support other architectures that can help reverse it and repair the damage that’s been inflicted. Central to this is that architecture can no longer be the preserve of the elite or powerful – as it has been for almost all its history – deployed as an instrument of depletion and displacement that servers connections between people and the earth. Instead, architecture must be reconstituted as a collective endeavour of reparative world(re)building.
Entrance to the British Pavilion
How does the exhibition define ‘architectural repair’?
Well, it’s not simply in terms of repairing buildings, although that is certainly part of it. The architecture that has come to define the Anthropocene and the extractive processes on which it rests has broken the deep connections that have long existed between people, ecology and land. Repair is about remaking these conditions, surfacing practices, sensibilities and traditions that have been suppressed and marginalised, and finding new processes and material streams that emerge from the geological afterlives of colonisation. We see vernaculars as central to this process: not as nostalgic or confected traditions designed to exclude and demarcate people and land, but as forms of architecture that emerge from and are tied to the earth.
How does the exhibit encourage viewers to reimagine architecture as an earth practice?
We’ve conceived the exhibition to operate through a range of registers: visual, aural, tactile, intellectual, individual and communal. The various installations explore the different manifestations and implications of conceiving architecture as an earth practice. We’re not presenting these as a series of ‘solutions’, though there are plenty of direct practical applications. It’s more about turning the pavilion into a space of reimagining architecture – and the world – otherwise.
Room 2: “Rift Room,” Cave_bureau, Owen Hopkins and Kathryn Yusoff.
Why do you think architecture has become the medium for post-colonial planetary repair? With regard to the exhibition, but also in a more general sense — What is the significance of architecture as a very visible manifestation of post-colonialism in action?
I’ve answered much of this already in talking about architecture’s perpetuation of colonialist extractive processes. But there’s also another point which is, I suppose, quite a simple one which is about architecture’s inherent visibility. Architecture defines so much of the external world and is at root a manifestation of ideals, values and imperatives of the society that created it. It’s so often the case that if a particular ideology is being challenged – rhetorically and physically – then architecture is that’s targeted first. So, it’s this combination of tackling directly architecture’s implication and in many instances complicity in fracturing worlds, and the way it serves more generally as a cypher in posing different positions, ideologies and realities – be they progressive or destructive.
Room 4: “Shimoni Slave Cave,” Cave_bureau with Phil Ayres and Jack Young, Centre for Biohybrid Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy.
Tell us about the origins of the team behind the pavilion and why you have collectively chosen The Great Rift Valley as a geological and conceptual focus?
The brief issued by the British Council in the open call for curators asked for UK-Kenya collaborations and we came together as a curatorial team as a result of that. We were interested from the very beginning in what it meant for a UK-Kenya collaboration to be exhibited in the British Pavilion in Venice. During an early site visit, we were struck by the particular orientation of the pavilion: with the front looking north-west towards Britain and the back south-east towards Kenya. We began to imagine the pavilion as a nodal point for a new axis or meridian of repair between the UK and the Great Rift Valley which runs from Southeastern Africa through Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia, along the Red Sea, through Jordan, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon to southern Turkey. The rift became our geological and geographical focus while acting as a way to theorise and enact practices that resist or evade the geological worlds, and resultant inequalities and injustices, that colonisation has brought about.
Room 5: “Lumumba’s Grave,” Dr Thandi Loewenson
The 2025 British Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale is co-curated by Sevra Davis, director of Architecture Design and Fashion at the British Council; Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Kenyan practice Cave_bureau; cultural geographer Dr Kathryn Yusoff and Owen Hopkins. Together they bring interdisciplinary perspectives that span architecture, geology, and post-colonial studies to frame the exhibition’s radical call for architectural repair. The Biennale will run from Saturday 10 May to Sunday 23 November 2025.
Source: Architecture Today
