SURROUNDING THE BUSTLING CITY of Nairobi is a miles-long network of caves formed thousands of years ago when lava hit groundwater and quickly cooled. The earliest humans used them as homes, and there is evidence―the salted walls at Kitum Cave, Maasai drawings in the Suswa caves―that local tribes used various spaces within the vast subterranean network to eat and access water, and as hideouts and shrines until they were forced out by British colonizers.
These caves fascinated architect Kabage Karanja as he was growing up. “I experienced sleeping [there] when I was a teenager and it always stayed with me,” Karanja said over Zoom. “Just hearing all the sounds … caves are extremely visceral and they impact your senses.” In 2014 Karanja parted ways with the corporate architecture firm where he’d been working, and found himself dissatisfied with the state of the field, particularly with architecture’s complicity in ecological and imperialist catastrophes. “Because of its impact and capacity to cause so much destruction on the earth,” Karanja said on a panel last year, “as much as it is a tool of shelter and … a fundamental human right … [architecture] is, by its very nature complicit against the biosphere, and the earth systems.”
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A colleague who’d also left the firm, Stella Mutegi, shared his feelings, not only about architecture, but about the caves. Together, they convened a small group of architects and researchers that they called Cave_bureau, to explore the caves as the origin of architecture. The group draws on local indigenous knowledge; they are interested, Karanja said, in “going back to the first human shelter.”
Karanja and Mutegi join a growing group of architects and historians who are interested in caves. Last year, an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in New York, titled “In Praise of Caves,”focused on Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by architects Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain that likewise turn to the wisdom of these formative structures. Spyros Papapetros’s book Pre/Architecture, out this November, argues that interest in pre-architectural spaces like caves often reemerges in times of conflict—WWI, WWII, now––as spaces that suggest history’s paths not taken.
Karanja calls this pivot toward architecture’s origins the “indigenous renaissance,” a return to a time of earlier tribal life with its own “cyclic reality,” a time when our species’ existence was carbon neutral. Through their work over nearly a decade, Cave_bureau has shown that such ecological issues go hand in hand with decolonization, and they’ve recently extended their practice into an effort to repatriate African cultural artifacts. The great number of museums found throughout the Global North is the outcome, Karanja has said, of a “history of deep extraction. Where the global north raped, pillaged, and pulled all the resources out” of the Global South. Karanja and Mutegi ask, what if you could redefine the idea of the museum away from its Eurocentric concept of ownership and legacy of removing objects from their context? What would a museum model look like that is indigenous and unique to Africa?
THE FIRST CAVES Karanja and Mutegi explored were the Mount Suswa lava tubes east of Nairobi, which feature several levels of caverns and passages crafted by lava flow. There, they created 3D and 2D maps, then reproduced elements from those maps in bronze so that they could reflect on and exhibit their findings. They consider these scans a kind of “reverse architecture” that serves as a starting point for discussions with local residents, and draw attention to modern and ancient uses of the spaces. In 2016 they surveyed the Mbai Caves northeast of Nairobi, which Kenyan freedom fighters used during the 1952–60 Mau Mau uprising, an armed rebellion against British colonial authorities. The caves are full of artifacts, and their blackened walls bear traces of the Mau Mau fighters who lit fires at night as they hid there.
Although the Kenyan government declared the site a national monument in 2003, the cave remains primarily a tourist recreation site yet to be formally recognized as a museum; Cave_bureau has proposed that the government make it one. In Anthropocene Museum, a 7-minute video that narrates the history of the fighters and maps the caves where they hid, Mutegi contends that “the Anthropocene Museum already exists … It exists around the world as everyday sites. Like artifacts within the landscape.”
For the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, Cave_bureau hung 1,700 pieces of Kenyan obsidian from the central pavilion’s dome at precise heights to replicate a section of the Mbai Cave ceiling. They named the project Galileo Chini Dome, after the artist who designed the dome’s Art Deco frescoes. The simulated cave created just as contemplative a space as the frescoes, which begged the question, Why don’t we bring the kind of attentiveness typically reserved for viewing art to the world outside, where humans have been leaving traces of history and culture for thousands of years?
Last year, Cave_bureau released their film Anthropocene Museum 2.0 “Slave Caves” (2022), in which they tell the story of the Shimoni caves, located on the nation’s southern tip. These caves served as holding chambers for slaves on the East African coast until ships came to collect and transport them to Zanzibar, home to the main slave markets, and then on to the Arabian peninsula. The history of West African transatlantic slave trade is well documented; less is known about trade from the East African coast, which the Portuguese and the Arabs led with aid from some locals. In an essay for the Architectural Review, Karanja and Mutegi imagine the horror and discomfort the prisoners must have felt as they packed into these dark humid caves, recalling the emotions that they themselves felt when they began their research. The name Shimoni comes from Swahili for “the place of the hole,” and many slaves attempted escape through the cave’s myriad tunnels, which extend 3 miles from the coast.
The film sets images of the Shimoni caves alongside historical photographs, stories, and footage showing artifacts that remain in them. Today, remnants of metal chain can still be found in the caverns. In one scene, the two architects sit with a curator named Nyamwami Ramadhan from the National Museums of Kenya, and elders Sheikh Omar Malago and Hassan Juma, officials elected by the community to be the caves’ custodians. The elders describe in Swahili (a hybrid of the local Bantu language and the foreign Arabic) how their ancestors used the Shimoni caves as spaces of ritual and healing, with chambers dedicated to the local shamans. “It seems to us,” Karanja and Mutegi wrote in the April 2021 issue of the Architectural Review, “that the Shimoni caves are what a ‘museum’ on the African continent should be.”
A RETROSPECTIVE of Cave_bureau’s work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark that runs through November 26 includes all previous iterations of the Anthropocene Museum project—which combine video, sculpture, and installation—as well as the premiere of a new video. “The Louisiana has given us the opportunity to actually sit back and look at, where is this Anthropocene Museum?” Mutegi said. The exhibition is conceived as a partnership between the two museums: the Louisiana Museum helped Cave_bureau coordinate the exhibition of a painting by American artist Bernard Safran that was donated to the Anthropocene Museum. The 1959 portrait of Tom Mboya, one of the founding fathers of the Kenyan Republic, resonates with African freedom movements. When the exhibition concludes, the Louisiana Museum will help ship the painting to Kenya, where Cave_bureau plans to build a structure to display it.
Mutegi and Karanja want to act as a resource for repatriating cultural objects to Africa, in a process they call “reverse curation.” “There’s a lot of restitution talk which is all about these artifacts that guilt-ridden museums feel they need to return very slowly with compensation,” Karanja said. “We feel their avenues to do this are limited, and we think that we can generate and creatively assist in bringing these artifacts back.” They don’t want objects to come back into another warehouse of things, or another Western-style museum. Instead, they want to build infrastructure to assimilate them thoughtfully into the communities that were most affected their loss. If those communities feel the need to ban or destroy those objects, that’s fine: the sentiment that objects must be cordoned off and pristine is a Western construct that, in many cases, overrides the object’s intended use. It is not a universal value.
For Anthropocene Museum 10.0, they will premiere their first physical manifestation in Kenya, a project they’re now beginning to design. Although their projects rarely adopt a physical structure, they are excited to have a site for this iteration. “It won’t be in the conventional sense of OK, this is where the audience or the visitors park their cars. They walk into this grand architecturally designed building and then experience the artifacts as this sort of static objects that don’t really do anything,” Karanja said. “We’re flipping that completely.” Sometimes the building is a distraction from their real intentions, they contend, and now that they have developed a more robust software for their version of the museum, they feel ready to venture into the physical realm.
“There needs to be a reversal,” Mutegi said. “Not only in terms of reflecting on indigenous lifestyles and modes of existence and being that were always here, but finding ways to leave minimal impact on the planet. We have no other option but to go back to our cave states of reduced presence on the earth.”