am 0.0 — cave

Anthropocene Musuem | 1.0 - 10.0

Welcome to the Anthropocene Museum, a living roaming institutions of imagination and community based action that begun in the land of our collective ancestral origin in East Africa. It is where our human species evolved in a place of natural – and by disjointed extension – architectural beauty of cultural and mythical power. A territory where our distant ancestors first lived, and where many of us still remain within the rich biosphere of land, water and air, framed by free radical states of cultural consciousness that connect both scientific and spiritual modes of being on the planet. It was in these interlinked natural states of existence we thrived, as a multitude of communities and civilisations, and yet it is where the imperial and colonial machinery was at its most effective at attacking our collective human ties to the Earth and its systems of replenishment and healing. In simple terms AM looks into ways to reverse this by generating architectural modes of repair.

This planetary map of museums and monuments below highlights the concentration of these structures and institutions to the north of the globe. It marks the territory of operation and critique, and a site we focus our research-practice of architecture, through an exploration of what Édouard Glissant the philosopher and poet called a rural revivalism.

As a roaming institution, unconstrained by four walls, in operation since 2017, we curate museum programmes primarily framed outside cities, where we prepare exhibitions, publications, workshops, oral archives in film, student reviews, teaching syllabus, writings, performances of resistance, among other platforms to confront this wretched age of ongoing extraction, subjugation and settler colonial occupation.

In partnership with Louisiana Museum of Modern Art we published a catalogue of the entire archive from AM 1.0 - 10.0.

To mark Cave_bureau’s ten years of existence, signed copies of the book pictured to the left will be available from July 2024. We thank the Maasai community of Suswa, people of Shimoni and Tswaka, from Kwale county for their trust and generosity.

Background origin

“In our own lifetime, however, we have become aware that the background is no longer just a background. We are part of it, acting as a geological force and contributing to the loss of biodiversity that may, in a few hundred years, become the sixth great extinction. Irrespective of whether the term is ever formalised or not, the Anthropocene signifies the extent and the duration of our species’ modification of the earth’s geology, chemistry, and biology.” Dipesh Chakrabarty

We conceived of The Anthropocene Museum against this background from a geological perspective, as an institution brought into existence by our decimating deposits and extractions on land, ocean and air that have reconstituted the planet. Human beings, predominantly of the fairer kind, have generated a new so-called technosphere, the biosphere’s evil twin, which is perpetually altering the Earth system to our own detriment and the rest of life on this planet. We find it myopic, and overly human-centred, to embody this reading of an already living museum of the Anthropocene in a single, self-gratifying building, which would be part of an industry that contributes over 40 percent of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. We resist this seemingly inevitable by-product of architecture as though there is nothing wrong with the Anthropocene in the first place. In this regard, we challenge the dominant Western conception and operation of the Anthropocene, and architecture from an African Indigenous perspective that relies less on a physical manifestation of the new proposed age, but harkens back to our beyond-zero carbon heritages of indigeneity; also looking at generating institutional means and programmes driven to imaginatively reverse it, and drastically thin it out at the same time.

We seek to ground an oral archive in reference to the American historian Saidiya Hartman’s work on a critical fabulation, as described in her seismic essay Venus in Two Acts, where the sites of our deepest trauma and erasure become the sites of our deepest healing.

Anthropocene Musuem | 1.0 - 10.0

Background origin

AM Register: 2019 - 2024

AM 1.0: Suswa Mountain & Cooper Hewitt | “Of Steam & Struggle”

AM 2.0: Guggenheim Museum & TWA | “Shimoni Slave Caves”

AM 3.0: Venice Biennale | “Obsidian Rain”

AM 4.0: Dezeen at 15, London & Nairobi | “Cow Corridor”

AM 5.0: Columbia University | “Reinscribing New York City”

AM 6.0: Prada Frames, Milan & Ololua Forest Nairobi | “Freedom Forests”

AM 7.0: Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art | “New Age Africana”

AM 8.0: Suswa Mountain, Kenya | “Steam Harvester”

AM 9.0: Sharjah, UAE | “Slaughterhouse Tour”

AM 10.0: Re:arc Institute | “Reversing Water Scarcity”