#02 Earth and Other Works l Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi (cave_bureau)

For the second lecture in Earth and Other Works, AFI and Adjaye Associates welcome Nairobi-based Cave_bureau, the research and architecture practice founded by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi. For Cave_bureau, architecture begins with the ground, but in true form, is preceded and superseded by the earth.

Working across art, architecture, research, drawing, storytelling, construction and performance, the practice looks to caves, landscapes and geological formations as archives: places through which histories of settlement, extraction, resistance and repair can be read anew.

Their work asks what architecture might become when the earth is understood not simply as a surface on which we build, or a resource from which we extract, but as a deep record of human, ecological and political life. From their investigations of caves across Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to the ongoing Anthropocene Museum and their recent work on Geology of Britannic Repair, Cave_bureau have developed a practice in which geology and architecture are inseparable, and in which questions of colonialism, climate, memory and materiality return us, repeatedly, to the ground beneath our feet.

As part of Earth and Other Works, their lecture takes us decisively below: into earth, strata, excavation and the possibility of architecture outside of architecture, as an act of social and ecological repair with the Earth.