Geological Kinship and Resistance with CAVE BUREAU

Part of Re-possession, International Lecture Series 2021-22

‘Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos’
‘For a world in which many worlds fit’
Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Carrying the common wind of last year’s Co-liberation series from the School of Architecture, this year we look to inhabit and expand the idea of “Re-possession”.

We see possession as relating to oneself and one's place. It is both material and ethereal. It can be reclaimed and reoriented. In the spirit of social movements that seek to both take back and push forward, we refer to repossession as the struggle for an emancipated ownership: an object, state or practice of (re)produced belonging, felt as equally outward and inward, reciprocally individual and collective. It is a challenge to property : permeable and responsive to both belonging and unbelonging.

Over the course of the series we will reach into and out from the earth and the body. We will begin by excavating the relationships between geological, decolonial, and architectural practices, before exploring corporeal acts and atmospheres, somatic limitations and horizons, and the embodiment and enactment of emancipated selves and spaces. We will trace the lines that are drawn to oppress, extract and eliminate, but we will also outline the interdependencies that can unsettle colonial logic.

With these discussions we seek a practice that can harness the moments and movements that both shape space and strengthen struggle. We also nurture an intentional community, situated in the affordances of now and grasping towards a possible future. By mapping emancipatory routes between ground and horizon, we aim to “get to the heart of the matter”: to stretch out and open up where it meets, holds, and forms us, and to foreground the ideas and artefacts that build memory, militancy, solidarity, imagination, and action otherwise.

CAVE BUREAU

Cave Bureau look for sensitive ways to decode the pre- and post-colonial conditions of the city. Weaving geological, anthropological, territorial, curatorial and architectural knowledges together, they search for holistic modes of inquiry that can redefine “being and time” at a range of scales. Cave was founded in Nairobi by architects Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja, both of whom will be joining us for our inaugural lecture on Repossession at the RCA School of Architecture. This will be followed by a conversation with Charlotte Grace and Dubravka Sekulić, co-conveners of the series, in which the concept of geological kinship will be read in relation to other localities and temporalities.