Conversations: Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi, and Keller Easterling

Constructs Keller, you’ve done research in Nairobi and Mombasa, right?

Keller Easterling I wrote a book called Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2014), an early exposé of the free-zone landscape in the world, and one chapter looked at East Africa before fiber-optic submarine cable landed there. I also wanted to say that I know and admire the work of Cave Bureau, and it’s fun to be in conversation with you.

C The work of both Keller and Cave Bureau envisions the future but also strives to repair the past. That’s an interesting statement on the power of architecture. How exactly do you see architecture’s potential to address the harms of the past?

Stella Mutegi The architecture and construction industries directly or indirectly produce about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing the past through design means going back to the symbiotic relationship between humankind and the earth in Indigenous and precolonial cultures, where whatever was used went back into the earth or was recycled in some way. It’s important to look at these histories, especially considering the enormous amount of extraction employed now. Learning from Indigenous methods, you extract to build but eventually return or regenerate what you’ve extracted.

Kabage Karanja Since the COVID-19 pandemic we have attempted to frame this way of looking at the world through a philosophy-in-the-making that we refer to as Reverse Futurism. It is a theory that attempts to crystallize what Stella spoke about regarding the rekindling of Indigenous practices that hold knowledge and transformative ways of being in the world. This is especially the case when looking at the detrimental legacy of the imperial and colonial times that triggered the current climate crisis, which the global Indigenous majority did not contribute to. It is a way to counter conventions of architectural thought and practice that trivialize or dismiss what might be referred to as vernacular yet are the fundamental reference points for earthrepairing practices. We choose to live critically within the trouble while reflecting on a series of iterative project exercises that partly reverse conventional ways of looking at local Indigenous practices as being front and center within the discourse surrounding a “new world” ecology that needs to be built systematically within this century.

KE I’m sympathetic with your position, and I admire the work. My work —books, research, and exhibitions—has been looking at some of the most treacherous recent surges of colonizing, capitalizing, and globalizing in the last 500 years. The most recent work I’ve been doing is trying to look back on one especially difficult chapter in the United States, in the sixties and seventies. I’m examining a longer tradition of mutualism and cooperation that was practiced following the Civil Rights Movement, when people who had gone down South to fight for civil rights stayed on to work on economic justice and land activism. I have been working on global politics but came back to the United States because these activists were working in a planetary way at a time when there was solidarity between the Civil Rights, Pan- African, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements. Their story is one I want to tell now because it is not only a story of resistance, survival, and cooperative forms recurring in the South, but also a road map for reparations. Several amazing activist groups identified land and educational assets and then developed the institutions to manage them. I’m writing to a white establishment. Black institutions have done the work, but white institutions have not. It is not the job of Black and Indigenous people to wrest the land from a white establishment. It’s the job of the white establishment to release its hold on these assets. The book I am currently researching and writing also returns to a moment in history when activists turned to their white allies and said, We don’t need your (often patronizing) allyship. We need you to go back and work on the white community. Maybe I can show you this work when you are here. It has prompted a design problem that’s impatient with the art and exhibition world. It’s a campaign to map land parcels for reparations.

KK Yeah, we’d love to see that. I really like how specific and direct your approach to an audience is—looking at those who must reflect on this history but also have a responsibility within the process of decoloniality that is being embedded and woven through cultural spaces. To your point about the problematics of exhibitions: even the Venice Biennale, a sort of world’s fair, ignores its problematic past, while museums are lethargic and slow to look at ideas of restitution and what it might mean to compensate people and communities: at a minimum to expect the return of stolen artifacts. We’ve had our fair share of confrontation with that cultural establishment, and it’s interesting, even just as a site of provocation. We think of our exhibition work as project sites of resistance and critique rather than as spaces of pure showcase. Our exhibitions originally intended to show these historical ideas. But soon there was resistance, and there was condescension. So we figured, okay, this is the site. This is where we need to act in parallel with the work we do with communities.

KE I was intrigued by your positioning of the museum in a different way. There are moments when you rub your eyes and wonder why war is a lethal act that we see on the news and climate change is just a footnote? Why isn’t the roar of fire and water what is reported first, with war a tinny, distant noise in the background? Shouldn’t we starve stupid binaries of attention?

SM It’s possible that many people in the cultural sphere have relatives in the current war zones, whereas the climate crisis may not have immediate spectacular effects on individuals. We’re putting this at the top of the agenda. The Global South and sub-Saharan Africa are really feeling the effects of global warming.

KK Bringing this back to institutions, it’s an indictment that culture sort of stopped during the pandemic; museums around the world were unable to cope, and culture was put on hold. The globalizing cultural systems that would have enabled the virus to spread further had to close. Even if the world has opened up again, this vulnerable underbelly remains. We are in a kind of stasis, as much as we would like to believe otherwise. Most, if not all, institutions are still grappling with their inability to reconcile what just happened, and what will continue to happen. This has been the scaffolding that structures our consideration of what happened in those early years of the pandemic, especially within the framework of architecture. At the very moment when culture was supposed to be a “safe space” it was silent and impotent. The real spaces of refuge became the natural systems— where we were allowed to go into parks and into the wild—which allowed a break from what was seen as unimportant. Our Anthropocene Museum project came alive with multiple sites of critique around the world and an evolution of thought surrounding cultural space in the broadest sense. Some of these questions and ideas continue in our practice and have shaped our YSoA advanced studio as an experiment to bring students back to the cradle of humankind, here in East Africa where, as Stella mentioned, the effects of climate change are visceral. We also want to reflect on how institutions including academia are responding to this from the space of our human origin.

KE The COVID-19 moment so clearly highlighted space as the carrier of both danger and survival. But it seems like the world did not really take notice. It’s still the legal, medical, technical, econometric languages that are anointed in culture. There is not enough fluency in the language of space and design. Who asks us to speak? It’s the biennials. This is a frustration for me. But as we were talking about reparations I was also thinking of Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s discussion of how—and I’m paraphrasing here—scientists have had their time to express the urgencies of climate. Maybe we should stop talking about climate consequences and reparation in terms of “parts per million.” Maybe activists speaking in terms of physical consequences should take the floor now.

KK We share this frustration. There are times when we’re invited to talk or teach, to reflect on the present, on ideas of imagination, and on our abilities to transcend this moment we’re experiencing, and we really do engage with these questions. However we very quickly come to realize that our presence in certain spaces has been more about being within the discursive trend and that no one was really interested in grappling with what we were bringing forward. It’s the nature of the world: we’re constantly barraged and violated by the capitalist systems of seasonal shifts and changes of discourse—an obsession with representing the present, the now, and the moment— and then that is sort of pivoted into something to be sold. Institutions are not immune to this. I really like what you said about how scientific presentation of the anthropogenic issues we’re dealing with is very mechanical and has been drummed into our minds for so long that we’re immune to its representation of urgency. It feels like being trapped inside a hamster wheel. Reflecting on the logics of reparations, which we’ve addressed in our work quite a bit, the British Empire’s interest in taking that dialogue to any meaningful conclusion feels like a fool’s errand. You’re better off strategizing ways to dismantle the whole system than expecting any change from returning the loot of centuries that is now dwindling to almost nothing. I think climate justice is heading in that direction because it has become clear that there is really no interest in mobilizing reparations or making the substantial changes necessary to meet climate targets within the narrow timeframe we have left. Reflecting on practice in this context, I come back to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s idea that if you take your practice seriously and build certain resiliencies. You have to protect your mind because this machine plays tricks on you and makes you believe you’re making a difference when, really, you’re on the checkerboard.

KE Reparations and climate change are inseparable—reparations for patterns of harm that will otherwise only continue. It seems that sometimes sneakiness is needed to make some massive, undeclared changes without waking up the enemy. That’s where I think a spatial language is particularly interesting because of the potential stealth in a spatial move. It’s not lexical, it’s spatial. In the United States we have the phrase “Whistling past the graveyard,” which means you’re scared to death but you’re trying to act like you’re not scared. Still, I see some sneaky things to do.

KK It’s not a lost cause by any means. I like your expression of “spatial language.” Over the years we’ve been developing this idea of geological grammars, referring to Kathryn Yusoff, among other thinkers, who look at geology in a spatial, material, and social perspective in order to dismantle subjective histories and reflect on the colonial earth and its afterlives as well as our capacity to build kinship with the geosphere and create geophysical makings that set up new modes of operating and engagement with people such as you, Keller. I think that’s really what holds the architectural endeavor: its capacity to literally hold us metaphorically, spatially, and economically. Geology has been doing that too with a system that is billions of years old. You can go beyond feelings of vulnerability when you realize that, in reality, you have an incredibly powerful system behind you— if you can master the way to think through geology as geology. So I’m really drawn to this idea of spatial language, and maybe a geospatial language. How have you developed your spatial language, and what kinships have developed as you have found opportunities to disrupt and reconfigure?

KE Yes, I was going to ask you about your curatorial partnership with Yusoff for the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale this year. She visited the MED program two years ago to give the Roth- Symonds Lecture. I’ve been trying to expose the enormous spatial changes made outside of our discipline or profession—as a critique but also to say that designers, or people who know about space, potentially have another relevance. Our skills have been defined in a disciplinary cul-de-sac. Sometimes it seems we only offer rhetorical gestures about change rather than actually implementing change. For me the most important thing now is building coalitions across disciplines, with space at the center of that coalition—not only professional architecture space, or art world space, but the space of design and governance. In addition to rehearsing different approaches to form that begin to access this space outside of our profession, I hope I am giving my students a chance to work on coalition building. I don’t think they’re going to survive without it.

C This is a big agenda. What are you planning for the students in the spring?

KE We’re working on that history I was telling you about in the U.S. South. We are considering another planetary belt of land in the United States like the one you’re looking at. Mapping that land returns to Black and Indigenous modes of mutualism, cooperation, community-making, community economies—the robust, recurring weeds in the capitalist lawn in the United States. It’s related to the reparations project we were talking about before. It is being conducted in collaboration with Yale, Morgan State, and hopefully other HBCUs.

KK We’re bringing the students to Kenya to study Ubuntu and Ujamaa GPU (“Geophysics of a Planetary Undercommons”). Ubuntu is an African philosophy created in South Africa, with a strong Bantu etymology linking to Swahili, that refers to coalition and collectivity. Stella describes it really well in our short film syllabus, where she defines it as “I am because you are, you are because I am, and therefore we are.” It should be said that following our Constructs conversation late last year, both Stella and I chose to include Ujamaa, which you brought up in our discussion, as another African socialist philosophy that is resurging within the social sciences. It is a counter-Marxist purview that we will be asking our students to look into as they travel to Nairobi, an exponentially growing unplanned metropolis. From the city we’ll take them to our Anthropocene Museum 10.0 project site, on Mount Suswa, where everything began for Cave Bureau. We’ll survey a new cave and have the students engage with the community to repair a manyatta, a traditional earthen home of the Maasai people, where women are still at the helm of designing, building, and repairing. The whole project will be viewed through the lens of the Rift Valley to read neoliberalist extraction and geological practices in counterpoint to the rogue powers that be.

SM It’s also to let the students have firsthand experience of what it really means to suffer the effects of climate change because the community we’re taking them to in the Rift Valley is going through severe aftereffects of colonial extraction and a change in the climatic patterns of the area in which they live. In the Northern Hemisphere you don’t relate so much to climate change in everyday life, but there the students will really get to see what it means for vulnerable communities and how they are trying to adapt under these circumstances. You might experience it as a lack of snow in the winter, but there it means no water at all. It’s life or death.