The 2025 British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale has been radically reimagined—not as a monument to empire, but as a platform for decolonial repair. Titled GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, the exhibition is a product of a powerful Kenya–UK collaboration, led by Nairobi-based Cave Bureau and British scholars Owen Hopkins and Kathryn Yusoff. At the heart of this curatorial vision is a bold assertion: that architecture must return to the earth, not as resource, but as relation, as archive, and as witness.
This year marks a historic shift in how the British Pavilion speaks to the world. With Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave Bureau as co-curators, the pavilion pivots away from Eurocentric frameworks toward an architecture deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge, African memory, and environmental justice. The exhibition uses geology as both metaphor and method—digging beneath Britain’s colonial architecture to expose the extractive systems and silenced histories buried within.
The Rift as Archive
Cave Bureau brings to Venice its decades-long inquiry into the Great Rift Valley—one of Earth’s oldest scars, and for them, a metaphor for colonial disruption. Their installation, the Rift Room, features a bronze cast of a cave in the Rift known as the “Baboon Parliament.” This site, once used by colonial officials and now reclaimed by local storytellers and thinkers, becomes an index of what was taken, what survived, and what can be reimagined.
Through this architectural intervention, Cave Bureau places African geographies at the center of global architectural discourse. The Rift is no longer a frontier to be mapped, but a compass pointing toward planetary repair.
Zimbabwe’s Thandi Loewenson: Drawing Resistance
Adding another powerful African voice is Thandi Loewenson, the Zimbabwean architectural designer and researcher known for her fiercely political work. In Lumumba’s Grave, Loewenson draws with graphite to create haunting visual essays on imperialism, resistance, and memory. Her pieces invoke the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba—not as a closed chapter of African history, but as a continuing struggle against colonial afterlives.
Loewenson’s work insists that architecture must confront its complicity in violence. Her drawings become acts of defiance—slow, careful excavations of truth that architecture often buries.
Mae-ling Lokko: Interrogating Botanical Empire
Also featured is Ghanaian-Filipino architect Mae-ling Lokko, collaborating with Argentine architect Gustavo Crembil on Vena Cava. The installation is a visceral response to Britain’s imperial plant archives—specifically the Palm House at Kew Gardens, a Victorian greenhouse built with labor and resources drawn from the colonies. Lokko deconstructs the building’s tropical glasshouse aesthetic, interrogating how plants, people, and architecture were made to serve empire.
Lokko, whose work spans bio-material research and community design, offers an alternative: architecture that grows, breathes, and decays in rhythm with the earth. Her installation not only critiques the colonial gaze but also proposes restorative futures rooted in indigenous ecologies.
Decolonial Collaboration at the Core
That this exhibition is led in part by an African practice—Cave Bureau, working alongside a UK institution—is significant. It signals a long-overdue shift in how global narratives are constructed in major cultural spaces. This is not a token inclusion, but a reorientation. The African curators are not responding to the West—they are setting the terms.
The curatorial dialogue between Nairobi and London acknowledges the deep entanglement of these geographies—from the minerals mined in Kenya to build Britain, to the memories encoded in the architecture of power. In GBR, architecture is no longer a neutral container. It is a site of struggle, healing, and story.
A Pavilion Transformed
From the outside, the pavilion is wrapped in “Double Vision”, a beaded clay veil made from agricultural waste in Kenya and India. It embodies a tactile, earthen resistance to architectural permanence. Inside, the installations span continents and timelines, but remain rooted in a shared ethos: that architecture must listen to land, remember its wounds, and build with care.
This year’s British Pavilion does not celebrate national pride. Instead, it dismantles it—layer by layer, stone by stone—and invites us to rebuild with humility, with soil under our fingernails, and with voices from the Rift leading the way.
Photography by Chris Lane
