#03 Earth and Other Works | Inheritance to Positioning: Learnings from NAS

Earth and Other Works is a lecture series developed by the African Futures Institute in collaboration with Adjaye Associates (Accra), running from September 2026 to February 2027. The series brings together architects, designers, artists and practitioners whose work asks a fundamental question: what does it mean to make something from the conditions already around us? Organized loosely through the registers of ‘below’ and ‘above’, Earth and Other Works considers making as a movement between what is grounded and what is possible.

Join us for the third lecture in the series by Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Courage Dzidula Kpodo.

Inheritance to Positioning: Learning from the Nomadic African Studio

An inheritance is not a position. The first is handed down; the second must be taken.

Nana Biamah-Ofosu is a Ghanaian British architect, educator and researcher, and the director of YAA Projects. Her work explores African modernity, domesticity, identity and diasporic material cultures through architecture, writing and research.

Courage Dzidula Kpodo is a Ghanaian architect, researcher and curator working across Ghana and the United States. His practice examines sociocultural transformations in built and unbuilt environments, including the people, materials and ecological conditions that shape them.

The Nomadic African Studio is AFI’s experimental, pan-African architecture programme: nomadic by design, collective in practice and committed to recentering Africa within spatial education.

Both speakers taught units within the Studio. Their lecture reflects on what they learned, the contradictions that emerged and how the experience has shaped their practices as architects and educators.

Moving from inheritance to position, they ask: what does it mean for an institution focused on African futures to exist on the continent and produce knowledge about Africa? What must African practitioners, institutions and cities do to take positions that are neither inherited nor prescribed from elsewhere? And what does this demand of the models of architectural education Africa has inherited in a shifting geopolitical world?