Anticolonial art – a veil made of coal, glass and clay

Fist -sized balls made of clay and coal as well as smaller glass beads form a permeable curtain in front of the British pavilion in Venice. The installation as part of this year’s architectural biennals, which neither outdo nor does the neoclassical building offer nor freezing, is a work by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi. They are the Kenyan collective Cave_bureau, which curated the pavilion together with Owen Hopkins and Kathryn Yusoff. The choice of materials is characteristic in several ways: coal briquettes, clay and glass beads oppose the classification in an architectural history that stabilizes imperial monumental by stones and columns. However, they also turn against (neo) colonial extraction logic that deprives resources from the global south and causes environmental degradation and social exploitation.

Buildings such as the British pavilion built in 1909 stand for an imperial representation architecture, as continuing to shape the urban area in numerous former colonies. Often under monument protection, they have appeared on postcards since the colonial period. While Ephemere, architectural forms created from materials such as clay-are often marginalized-for example in the context of UNESCO World Heritals, the monumental of stone buildings continues to dominate architectural-historical perception.

The installation “Double Vision: A Veil of Carbon and Clay” (a veil made of carbon and sound) by Cave_bureau questions this dominance and at the same time opens up new perspectives on dealing with burdened architectural heritage. The clay balls show the structure through, but undermine their authoritative expression. Her fragile, organic materiality refers to local -oriented, community -oriented building practices in which architecture is visible as a social structure. At the same time, they step into a tension with historical architecture that partially overlap. In this way, the facade of the pavilion is formally preserved, but is broken visually by the curtain. This intervention does not interfere with the structural substance, but is temporarily over the building – a stratification that raises questions about the visibility of colonial past as well as the possibilities of dealing with controversial architectural heritage.

The other materials used in the installation are characterized by a striking ambiguity. Especially the glass beads, which remain unmentioned in the title of work, prove to be central to the visual structure of the installation. Blood -red shimmer between the brown clay and the dark coal balls and have evoked the history of glass production on the nearby Murano island as well as the role of Venetian glass beads in colonial interdependencies and global trading networks since early modern times.

But this appearance is deceptive: the pearls used in the installation do not come from Murano, but from India. Glass beads came to East Africa via various trade routes – from Europe as well as from Asia. Historical sources testify to the power of East African communities that actively determine the value, color and use of these objects. Numerous letters of European dealers and colonizers have been handed down, in which they report frustrated, to have reached deep into the East African interior with large quantities of glass beads – just to determine that the taste of East African communities has changed since last year. The pearls carried no longer corresponded to the preferences, their colors were now unattractive or outdated.

The boxes full of imported glass beads, which had to transport local straps over long distances, then proved to be useless – an experience that European dealers adhered to in letters. The glass beads of the installation therefore refer not only to historical trade relationships and movements of people, objects and materials, but also to the often overlooked dimensions of local aesthetic self -determination in the context of colonial power lens.

The coal balls, the third part of the curtain, are also ambiguous. On the one hand, they refer to coal as a fossil good and central material of British colonial power, which secured the drive of colonial steamer. Here coal stands for extraction, ecological destruction and colonial violence. At the same time, Cave_bureau undermines this historical semantics by making the balls made of coal produced in Kenya, which is obtained from agricultural waste. In this context, coal acts as a locally anchored material, which refers to destroyed ecosystems as well as alternative forms of resource use.

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The ecological dimension becomes central inside the pavilion. In the first room, the work »Earth Compass« by Cave_Bureau is individual countries based on their cumulative national CO₂ emissions. States with particularly high emissions (such as Great Britain and Germany) are at the bottom of the scale, while countries with low emissions (such as Kenya) appear above. This visual mapping creates a picture of global inequality, which is not exhausted in abstract numbers, but can be experienced spatially.

The pavilion has other works. “Vena Cava” by Mae-Ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil invites you to recapture the colonial symbolism of the greenhouse in places such as the London Kew Garden and to design alternative ecological future scenarios with a sustainable material experiments with mushrooms, biodlocks and flight ash. “Objects of Repair” of the Palestine Regeneration Team uses debris materials to ask questions about reconstruction and climate justice. And “Lumumba’s Grave” by Thandi Loewenson examines technological relics of space travel as an “techno fossils” of an imperial expansion and represents African space projects as a counter -narrative.

This vertical orientation from earth to space in British pavilion, which Cave_bureau renamed the British-Kenian Pavilion-Geology of Britannic Repair «, is already evident in the first room in which the star constellation of the night of December 12, 1963-the day of the Kenyan independence-appears. At the same time, Cave_bureau is working out the orientation of the pavilion, which is located exactly on the Great Britain axis (northwest of the building) and Kenya (southeast of the building). The axis appears as a line of imperial history, geopolitical power and ecological responsibility – and shows the visitors that we have never been oriented.

To be seen at the 19th architectural Biennale in Venice, until November 23rd