This studio rides on a resurgence of two mid 20th century African philosophies known as Ubuntu and Ujamaa within the present day social sciences. We will explore their ante-capitalist and ante-architecture capacities within the undercommons as theorized by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, in their book titled The Undercommons. To take the literal geo-structure of the term, after-all within the Anthropocene, the human species has long been recognised as a detrimental geological factor of the enlightenment period; what Kathryn Yusoff refers to as the plateau of imperial and colonial movements of extraction and subjugation, with Europe and North America at the epicentre. While in contrast within the rift is the larger segment of the human species, in most part indigenously black, brown and non white, proven to be more caring and geologically inert on the earth systems.
So while the inhumane genocidal cultures of race-based white supremacy and anti blackness is constantly confronted by many liberative theories such as the undercommons, the grammars of and practice with geology to reverse these structural conditions of subjectivity is seldom deployed to bolster frameworks for a ‘neu’-world architecture. The undercommons in geologic terms through radical-earth refusals by black, brown and indeed white bodies, holds unifying properties to resist the ontological structures that exist along racial, social, economic, ecological and political fault lines. In this regard, the theories of Ubuntu and Ujamaa rest on pre-industrial indigenous roots of arguably the geo-origin of post-colonial afro-pessimism, that holds in the same strata a metamorphic egalitarian optimism to generate grounds for this ‘neu’ world. A practice that Frantz Fanon may have argued might stretch the Marxist dream. However behind the idealism to do this, lies the provocation to fundamentally dismantle the unstable category of ‘human’ in the first place, as grafted by Frank B. Wilderson the III.
We will travel to the paleo-anthropological corridor or cradle of humankind, referred to here as the origin of the undercommons. The Great Rift Valley in Kenya is a geological wonder of the world where our species evolved. It stretches from South Africa, towards Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic republic of Congo, Ethiopia, right down the red sea, into Palestine, and Lebanon. It runs for 7,000 kilometres through a total of fourteen countries. It was geologically formed almost 30 million years ago along the African tectonic plate, that cuts into the Mediterranean sea, before looping up the mid-Atlantic ridge and back to Africa.
We will open you to some of the indigenous rural and urban knowledge keepers that we have been in connection with for over ten years. We will begin framing a neu datum of geophysics as more pertinent than metaphysics, as postulated by Kathryn Yusoff in her book Geologic life. To generate a new set of GPU or Graphic Processing Units of grammar for earth (re)writing through geo-aesthetic logics of metamorphic world making. We will use earth bound virtual and natural tools of reality to stretch architectural thought and practice beyond the dream that societal and climatic justice will be freely given, but instead must be taken and forged forward as much as backwards. The reverse futurism we speak of here aims to expand the material and immaterial thought of architecture across both conscious and subconscious spheres that can usurp the regressive conventions of capitalist driven acts of gratuitous building making for the few.
Our focus will not be to ignore architecture but on the contrary, to recalibrate it’s geological energies and acretive potentials that manifest through transformative cultural acts. Where for example the Mau Mau freedom fighter caves that surround the city of Nairobi, define the threshold of resistance and independence that buckled the former British empire’s settler colonial infrastructure in Kenya, without having laid a single stone. Or where our Anthropocene museum that does not manifest in the conventions of built form aspires to socially and infrastructuraly recalibrate Kenya’s neoliberalist national geothermal energy grid. So instead of speaking of program we will refer to spatial rifts, plateaus, and plains that generatively reinstate our links of origin between geos and bios as we think, draw and dream.
In many ways this studio will focus on the free radical nature of cultural space within and outside the city that buttresses almost all segments of society. We shall visit the future art district of Nairobi in the upcoming regeneration of the Go Down Arts Centre, as well as the largest so called informal settlement in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kibera. We shall read the undercommons through resident artist works and eyes, particularly how they imagine the city. Lastly on a rural sphere on mount Suswa, we will learn from the Maasai who are confronting the neoliberalist forces of energy extraction in the valley. Through this process we aim to develop and deploy neu ways to nourish the undercommons though the rigour of architecture and earth bound creative thinking.
On our Anhropocene Museum 10.0 site, we shall take you through the ancient practice of manyatta making by the Maasai women of Mount Suswa, the original architects, who were always a primary part of the planning and building of the Maasai homestead. To read the foundational origin of migratory architecture that was not so much a progression from cave dwelling and habitation but more of an expansion of their spatial practice as positive geological actors that has been rehearsed for millennia.
While on Mount Suswa, depicted on the map, and using studies of caves such as the baboon parliament above, we shall survey the geo + biosphere of a new cave that has been perennially looted of its palaeontological artefacts by tourists and corrupt experts alike. We will analyse it as a kind of archaeological crime scene, as we reflect on what outer human capacities need to emerge in this age of planetary crisis.