2024 / Curators of the British Pavilion in Venice

Cave_bureau will curate the British Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale Di Venezia

“We are honoured to have been selected to curate the British Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2025 in collaboration with Professor Kathryn Yusoff & Owen Hopkins. Our UK and Kenya combined team intersects multiple disciplines and geographies, with a critical perspective on how to use this unique platform.

The exhibition will map architectures from across the world defined by an embedded relationship to the ground, which are resilient in the face of climate breakdown, social, economic and political upheaval; and that offer refuge and empowerment for the most climate exposed communities. To frame this, we intend to conceptually reinscribe the British Pavilion by turning it inside out and unearth what these acts of repair might look like when framing a planetary vernacular.

We appreciate the selection panel for their belief in us, and continuous support from Sevra Davis, Sandra Chege and the entire British & East Africa Arts teams”.

EXTENDED PRESS RECORD: Architects Journal | Dezeen | Archdaily

2024 / The 50 most powerful women in architecture and design

We celebrate our Matri-arch Stella Mutegi

“Stella Mutegi is a co-founder of the increasingly influential Kenyan architecture studio Cave_bureau. Over the past year, the studio's Anthropocene Musuem – "a living, roaming institution of imagination and community-based action" – has travelled around the world”.

EXTENDED PRESS RECORD: African Column

2023 / Sharjah Architecture Triennial Exhibition

Anthropocene Museum 9.0: Slaughterhouse Tour

“Elsewhere in the city, in an old slaughterhouse, Nairobi-based Cave_bureau installed the ninth iteration of their Anthropocene Museum, a research project interrogating human existence and our species’ relationship to the earth. In the exhibit, visitors are shuttled through the slaughterhouse, forced to consider consumption from the point of view of the animals we consume”. Camille Okhio. Read more here.

EXTENDED PRESS RECORD

World Architecture | Dezeen 01 | Dezeen 02 | Universes in Universe | Koozarch | e-flux |

2023 / Re:arc Institute: Practice Based Funding

Grant award to realize AM 10.0: Reversing water scarcity on Mt Suswa

“Despite the massive ecological footprint of the industry and huge transformative potential of the discipline, professional architectural practices are disproportionately overlooked & underfunded by traditional funding models. Practice-Based Funding is an experiment to work with emerging architecture studios to propose and realize self-initiated and community-led projects directly exemplifying the realization of architecture(s) of planetary well-being in practice, rooted in their own local social and ecological contexts”. Read more here.

2023 / Cave_bureau’s Architect’s Studio Exhibition

Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art

“This final exhibition in the series The Architect's Studio exhibition takes a dive underground and into the extensive volcanic cave systems of Kenya. Here the design studio Cave_bureau take a look back to the origins of humanity and examine the future, while simultaneously finding concrete solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time”. Read more here

EXTENDED PRESS RECORD

Wallpaper | Archdaily | Politiken | Dezeen | World Architecture | Art in America | World Architects | RIBA Journal | The Architect’s Newspaper | Lars Müller Publishers | AEX | Trendhunter |

2023 / World Architects Profile

Through the door of no return

“The sixth and final exhibition in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s “The Architect’s Studio” series presents the Kenyan architectural studio Cave Bureau founded by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi in Nairobi in 2014. Ulf Meyer finds it a fitting end to a remarkable series”. Read more here.

2023 / Obel Award Talks

At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Ungrounding, a conversation on architectural interventions with the design studio Cave_bureau with Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi, Tomà Berlanda, Professor of Architecture. Kate Orff, Landscape architect, and founder of SCAPE. The conversation was moderated by Aric Chen, director of the Het Nieuwe Instituut.

EXTENDED PRESS RECORD: Monocle

2023 / Pompidou Centre, Symposium

Platform For New Assemblies

The world today is changing in a way that is threatening traditional forms of coming together and prompting a search for new ways of living together. The climate emergency, crisis in democracy and digitalisation are all challenges that are opening us up to the need and desire to invent new forms of gathering. The international and multidisciplinary programme Platform for New Assemblies brought together key figures from various disciplines – art, science, cookery and architecture – to discuss various configurations of the collective and examine the way in which we do, and will, live together. They did so in a variety of forms: spoken word, concerts, performances, screenings, a "meta-siesta", listening session and exhibition of works.

2023 / Book contribution: Architecture of Migration

Mapping the subterranean morphology of Dadaab

Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement, by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. A refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. This book identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. Cave_bureau was invited to produce drawings of the refugee camp topography and subterranean geology.

2023 / Book contribution: Imagining the Future Museum

21 Dialogues with Architects by András Szántó

Szántó engages in conversations with visionary architects worldwide about what sort of “hardware” will be required for the art institution of tomorrow. Majority of the 21 respondents are emerging forces in the world of museum design – their median age is around 50 – with many years of museum-making ahead of them. The book includes an original sketch by each of the architects and photographs of selected projects by the featured studios. Read More.

2023 / 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale

Laboratory of the Future: Oral Archive (New Age Africana)

For the 18th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Professor Lesley Lokko, we celebrated the original African archives, passed down from generation to generation, using stories, songs, dance, and poetry. These archives were held together by many custodians of culture who conjured narratives and events that were both real and imagined. These were often, if not always, intertwined with the natural biosphere systems of earth, sea, and air around us. These archives kept the practice in continuous communion with caves, forests, deserts, valleys, oceans, mountains, and grasslands, as well as with the rest of life in both the seen and unseen realms across vast cosmological territories of being and existence. For The Laboratory of the Future, we presented an oral-architectural praxis, opening a film and audio archive through the display of community engagements that are often held within natural settings such as caves and forests.

2023 / Melbourne Design Week at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia

Curated by Collective Futures & The Australian Institute of Architects

Cave_bureau was part of a series of art and cultural events that took place around a number of venues in Melbourne such as the National Gallery of Victoria where we gave a lecture and celebrated the diversity of the city’s creative communities. Read more.

2023 / Cultural Vocabularies, Melbourne Australia

Vitu Vya Saana by Footscray Community Arts & Collective Futures

Footscray Community Arts presented Cultural Vocabularies: Vitu Vya Saana, a creative conversation curated by Collective Futures and presented by Cave_Bureau: a Nairobi-based bureau of architects and researchers charting explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature.

2022 / African Voices, Change Makers

Using Kenyan caves as a model for design

“Two architects from Nairobi, Kenya, Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja, draw inspiration from natural landscapes to design buildings of the future”.

2022 / Culture Summit

East African Futures Panel Discussion

We had the pleasure to present our work on day 1 of the fifth edition of the Culture Summit in Abu Dhabi 2022. We were among many respected organisations, cultural institutions and well-known names in the art and cultural sectors, taking part in informative discussions, film screenings and musical performances.

Our conversation was moderated by Cher Potter, a curatorial director of the Future Observatory at the Design Museum. The panel included Christian Benimana, director of Mass design group & Kabage Karanja of Cave_bureau who spoke about our Anthropocene Museum research and practice and how the entire human project is in both climatic and cultural crisis, but where imagination and healing will be at the heart of the solutions we must come up with. You can watch the recorded discussion below.

2022 / University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture reviews

GSA Lecture series

As part of the GSA lecture series in October, Cave_bureau’s Kabage and Stella were invited to give a lecture about the ongoing Anthropocene Museum research and practice that continues to be deployed across multiple territories and institutions around the world. The lecture was complemented by their participation at the International Critics week where they reviewed African students who recently came out of the COVID 19 Pandemic lockdowns, producing critical and intelligent work.

2022 / AFI African Futures Institute

AAIR - Architecture in Africa's International Relations Workshop: Keynote Speech by Kabage & Stella

Architecture in Africa's International Relations Workshop organised by the AFI, co-sponsored with the African State Architecture, SOAS and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

Buildings are often associated with domestic politics as expressions of power or identity, but they also play an important role in international relationships. For example, architecture can be used to project a specific image of a country abroad, through airports, sports stadiums televised in international events, and in embassy buildings that act as state proxies in foreign capitals. There are also more nebulous uses of architecture in the international spread of norms and ideas, seen for example in the ways aesthetics and techniques are taken up and adapted in different contexts, carrying with them ideas of culture and expertise from one part of the world to another.

We delved into the nebulous discourse surrounding caves, as structures of architectural influence and power, while offering a more structured approach to reading their morphology and histories.

2022 - 2023 / Sharjah Architecture Triennial

The Beauty of Impermanence, An Architecture of Adaptability

The second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial scheduled for October 2023 will be curated by Tosin Oshinowo & made possible by the President of SAT Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi. The theme titled above is described as being centred on an investigation of design solutions built from conditions of scarcity that illuminate a pathway forward to reorient our conversation on sustainability, the 2023 edition of the Triennial prioritises contextual solutions, resource sharing, and waste re-use.

Cave_bureau will participate at the triennial. Both Kabage and Stella visited Sharjah for the first time, experiencing the breathtaking natural environment and of course the rich cultural heart that is Sharjah. We were invited to speak on a panel in September that you can watch via this Link.

2022 / Teaching at Columbia University

The Anthropocene Museum 5.0: Reinscribing New York City

This summer Kabage and Stella were invited to teach at Columbia University’s GSAPP, (Graduate School of Architecture Preservation and Planning). Their syllabus titled above was part of the ongoing Anthropocene Museum research and practice that operates in parallel with their current advisories at Museums in different parts of the world. Here they intersected an academic standpoint to expand on the ongoing discourse to re-asses, re-evaluate, re-dress and re-imagine museum mapping and making in this, our putrid and wretched age of the Anthropocene. A time of crisis when everything is being put to question, including our geological age itself.

They set out with students to survey the social-geological rumblings of two seemingly innocuous Native American caves, the first in the heart of New York’s Central Park, “The little know, nor celebrated, Ramble Cave that predates the Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s park design, and the city itself. A cave that is currently walled and closed off, shrouded in a dark history of suicides, murder, assault, with seemingly lost and muddled records of native American habitation, all just left historically and culturally open-ended, more so, troublingly in Museology. Secondly and in equal significance, the Indian Cave of Inwood Hill Park of the Lenape people, where artefacts were stolen, sacred burial grounds desecrated, spaces also walled off, but where the Lenape and other immediate native peoples still pilgrimage, to rekindle practices of importance.

Students then begun thinking of ways to geologically read this anthropogenic evidence and impacts while imagining new ways to adopt architectural propositions of pushback, touching on subjects such the misogynistic topographies of Manhattan, dismantling of the national Museum of the American Indian, a more-than-human modular reading of the Ramble cave, among many other exciting investigations that you can review via this Link soon.

2022 / PRADA Frames Symposium

The Anthropocene Museum 6.0 Freedom Forest

Running in parallel to Milan’s Salone del Mobile / Milan’s Furniture Fair, Prada Frames was a multidisciplinary symposium by the fashion powerhouse PRADA that delved into the complex relationship between the natural environment and design. The program was curated by Formafantasma, a research and design studio based in Milan and Rotterdam.

In line with the progressive and increasingly significant relationship between environmental studies and all fields of knowledge and culture, Prada Frames brought together the valuable contribution of scholars and professionals, such as scientists, architects, designers, artists, activists, anthropologists, and law experts. Cave_bureau had the honour to present the Anthropocene Museum 6.0. Freedom Forest, showcased in the short film format below. Read more.

2022 / Farrell Centre & University Of Newcastle

Open Virtual Lecture

As part of the Farrell Centre’s open programme of lectures, exhibitions and public events, we were invited to present our studio and Anthropocene Museum research and practice.

2022 / Prague Quadrennial Symposium

Where are we … Charolais Charbray: Keynote Speech by Kabage & Stella

The Prague Quadrennial is globally known as a two-week event taking place every four years since 1967 in Prague, Czech Republic. This model has been evolving. More and more designers now understand PQ as a platform: a continual stream of activities and collaborations happening across the globe with many different partners, creative professionals, artists, researchers, and theorists. The PQ symposium that preempts the quadrennial took place in May to introduce the theme next year, RARE. The symposium took place between the 4-6 of May at the Prague Market, a former slaughterhouse site, that will be home to the quadrennial in 2023.

Kabage and Stella were invited to be keynote speakers at the event, challenging both the audience members to consider a more than human vantage point, as they provoked a debate about inviting cows and other livestock to participate at PQ 2023. They presented a moving image deconstruction of the Charolais Charbray bull sculpture by the artist Čeněk Vosmík. Imagining the bull taking a separate path away from slaughter, away from trauma, and into a renewed relationship. You can watch talk by clicking on this live Link.

2022 / RIBA Essay publication

Working at The Intersection | Architecture After the Anthropocene: With essay from Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi

Exposing the narrow perspectives that dominate architectural discourse and practice, this volume edited by Harriet Harriss, and Naomi House sets the table for inclusive architectural engagement during a time circumscribed by pandemic, climate change and inequality. Comprised of a group of international voices Kabage & Stella prepared an essay titled ‘The Anthropocene Museum: A Troublesome Trail of Improvision towards the Chthulucene’ where they delved further into the inner workings of their research and practice that operates on multiple sites and scales across the globe. Their essay also highlights the bureau’s work that is synonymous with tracing colonial trauma, and the resistance of oppression, while seeking new modes of healing on multiple socio-geologic and architectural fronts.

2022 / Architectural Association Public Lecture

A New Model For Architecture in an Age of Trauma, Resistance & Healing

New Models is a lecture series run by Manijeh Verghese, the head of public programmes at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. This programme invites practitioners from different disciplines to discuss how their work can change the models around which society is organised. These conversations will address how we can shift power structures, socio-economic forces and structural inequalities present in society today to give us new tools to rethink the world around us.

Kabage & Stella were invited to speak about the practice and specifically the Anthropocene Museum research to introduce how they position and operate Cave_bureau in this deeply fractured and inequitable world.

2021 / Dezeen at 15 Festival

Maasai Cow Corridor | Urbanism to heal the trauma of colonialism

Dezeen celebrated its 15th birthday on the 17th of November 2021. Rather than looking backwards, they invited 15 creatives to propose ideas that can change the world over the next 15 years. Cave_bureau used its research into caves, which we describe as "the root of architecture", to formulate a proposal for a new form of urbanism designed to heal the trauma of colonialism.

The Maasai Cow Corridor would allow tribespeople to safely herd their cattle through Nairobi, helping restore ancient rights that began to be eroded during the colonial era.

"We look at architecture for an age of trauma, resistance and healing, which has its roots in our deep past," Kabage and Stella discussed the project in a live interview from their studio in Nairobi. Read more.

2021 / Essay publication

Slow Spatial Reader | Chronicles of Radical Affection: By Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi

Slow Spatial Reader edited by Carolyn Strauss, offers a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-four countries on five continents. Each one brings distinct philosophical and disciplinary approaches—from ‘spatial’ fields like architecture, sculpture, and installation, but also performative, somatic and/or dramaturgical practices—, exploring how we think about and engage with space at a range of scales, tempos, and durations. Kabage and Stella prepared an essay titled ‘The Anthropocene Museum, Tracing our decolonial Architectural Movements of Resistance in Africa’.

2021 / Awards of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale

A Special Mention | Anthropocene Museum Exhibit 3.0 Obsidian Rain.

We are humbled to announce that the international Jury of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia composed by Kazuyo Sejima (president, Japan), Sandra Barclay (Peru), Lamia Joreige (Lebanon), Lesley Lokko (Ghana-Scotland), Luca Molinari (Italy), decided to award Cave_bureau with a special mention for the Anthropocene Museum Exhibit 3.0 “Obsidian Rain” that was on display in 2021 at the Giardini, Galileo Chini dome in Venice Italy.

2021 / RELAY by Fiction Feeling Frame

RELAY, curated by Fiction Feeling Frame, was a durational conversation, a ritual in circumferential publicness, a performance becoming telegraph, current, message. RELAY is a 24-hour global conversation hosted by the Biennale Architettura 2021. RELAY chased the hour between noon and 1pm around the planet in a global act of transfer— holding time and space for one another, passing ideas on, and on, and on— moving across time zones while continually staying in the present.

Cave_bureau joined the RELAY on Saturday the 17th of July 2021 from 10:00 EAT, where we were first hosted by Sasha Shestakova and Anna Engelhardt who engaged on the grounds of confluence between their decolonial work and ours, thereafter in return we engaged Urok Shirhan and ruangrupa oscillating between discussions about songs of revolution, urban art, archive, to artefacts of public interaction among many other tangents of conversation .

2021 / ACSA & EAAE Conference

Cave_bureau’s keynote address. At the Teachers Conference and forum for dialogue & debate on Curriculum for Climate Agency: Design (in)Action.

The construction industry is responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions and architecture and other design professions have willingly, or unwillingly, sided with an uneven development that has consequences expanding from food insecurity and nutrient deficiency to imposed displacement due to collapsing ecosystems. Countries and communities that are least responsible are feeling the impact of the decisions made on the opposite side of the world, a trend which will exacerbate in the future as new portions of our shared earth industrialize. As we move out of our current global health emergency and confront the next very real crisis of climate alteration, should architecture’s agenda be to rally forth in action, or can architecture construct a new type of agency in the processes of inaction?.

2021 / Dezeen Article

We should allow an African curator to turn the whole thing on its head

Cave_bureau’s first counter criticism article on dezeen addressed the haughty dismissals of the 17th International Architecture exhibition, Venice Biennale by western critics overlooked the welcome involvement of African architects … “It can be said that nothing important or thought-provoking lacks controversy. The 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale served it in plenty if we go by the criticism directed at the curatorship of professor Hashim Sarkis and his team as well as the many works produced by a diverse range of participants”.

2021 / Exhibition …

17th International Architecture Exhibition

La Biennale di Venezia “How Will We Live Together”

Cave_bureau participated at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, where they were recognised as the first recorded contribution from Kenya”. The exhibition was initially scheduled to open in May 2020, however due to disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID 19 Pandemic, the exhibition ran between the 22nd of May to the 21st of November 2021.

Harshim Sarkis the curator of the biennale posed a seminal question "How will we live together?", which was terribly timely when thinking about how the world continues to be disrupted by the pandemic. May we continue to be mindful and caring for each other during these difficult times, and our prayers go out to all those who have lost loved ones and those recovering from the virus.

2021 / Article by Ginanne Brownell …

An Early Fascination With Caves Leads To A World Stage

“This week Cave_Bureau will become the first Kenyan firm to make its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition “Obsidian Rain” in the central pavilion”. For the show, 1,600 obsidian stones gathered from Gilgil, Kenya, were hung at precise heights from a timber-and-net structure to replicate a section of the roof of the Mbai caves “Paradise lost” on the outskirts of Nairobi”, Continue reading the main story

2021 / Cascades Essay

MAAT & E-flux | Cave Canon | By Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi

Cascades was a collaboration between MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology and e-flux Architecture. It was an editorial series of newly commissioned fiction that brought together prolific writers, artists, architects, philosophers, and scientists to reflect upon and make tangible the lasting effects of contemporary and future geopolitical upheavals.

As a complement to X is not a small country, an upcoming exhibition at MAAT curated by Aric Chen with Martina Muzi, Cascades sought to question what it means to speculate at a time increasingly defined not by linear narratives or logics, but rather transactional opportunism, black swan events, climate breakdown, cascade effects, and unintended consequences.

2021 / The Architectural Review | Cave_bureau in practice By Kabage Karanja & Stella Mutegi

In this article published in April 2021, we spoke about how we reuse architectural spaces of slavery at the Shimoni caves in Kwale, Kenya, that brings African and Black narratives of enslavement back to the surface in the Anthropocene. It also delves into our Anthropocene Museum 2.0 exhibit, a site of inquiry to engage with the local Swahili community of Kwale county, who have remained custodians of these caves for centuries.

2021 / The World Around Summit 2021 | The Anthropocene Museum - Shimoni Slave Caves

We are excited to have taken part in The World Around Summit on the 30th January 2021, celebrating the now, near and next for architecture and design. Marking the launch of a year-long residency at the @guggenheim, The World Around Summit 2021 live-streamed new and under construction work from 14 global cities and institutions around the world including Johannesburg, Abu Dhabi, London, Yucatán, Burkina Faso, Nairobi, Melbourne, Monterrey, Shanghai, Stockholm, Tigre Delta, New York, and Tokyo. We introduced our work and our Anthropocene Museum curation 2.0 where we were on location at the Shimoni slave caves, and the Three giant sisters cave, in Kwale county, Kenya. Read more.

2020 / Istanbul 74 Podcast | “How can we all make it into the future” | Moderated by Gabriel Kozlowski

In this episode of '74PODCAST Series "How Can We All Make it into the Future?", organised by Istanbul 74 we spoke to Gabriel Kozlowski, architect and assistant curator for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2021, about colonialism in relation to the current social and political climate, the rich history of caves in Kenya, the ways how our project categorization resemble the lifecycle of a Kenyan as well as our work at the Anthropocene Museum.

2020 / FOLIO Book | An Allegory of Urbanism in Africa

Caver Kabage’s essay titled “An Allegory Of Urbanism in Africa” is featured in FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, Noir Radical, published by the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, edited by Professor Lesley Lokko. The essay falls under the subject Radical Development, defining what it might mean in contemporary African cities. ‘Radical’ as departure from tradition, as acts and practices which challenge dominant (Western) readings of urban space and notions of success, progress, and development.

2019 / LISTEN | Sounds of Nairobi at the Goethe institute

Cavers Kabage and Stella were invited to speak at the Goethe institute, part of an exhibition introducing “Sound of Nairobi” curated by Lorna Ng’eno and Sophia Bauer. We spoke about the Anthropocene Museum project and our research surrounding informal griot spaces that we map as a means to decode Nairobi’s colonial city grain. Dr. Ciira wa Maina, senior lecturer at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology spoke about his work recording sounds of species in nature as a living taxonomy that can monitor life. Also on the panel was Joseph Kamaru a sound engineer who shared his beautiful work.