At the Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana in Accra, black shade net stretches between slender steel poles and tensioned cables, moving from the gallery into the courtyard and towards the historic W.E.B. Du Bois Centre for Pan African Culture. Rather than creating another enclosed room, the intervention establishes a porous architecture in which the boundaries between institution, landscape and public space remain deliberately unsettled.
Titled At the Interstice, the exhibition by architecture practice TAELON7, led by architect Juergen Benson-Strohmayer, is on view from 6 to 31 August 2026. Through a site-specific spatial intervention accompanied by sculptural fragments, photographic research and speculative architectural drawings, the project considers architecture as an unfinished civic system shaped as much by occupation and adaptation as by design.
Between Gallery and Courtyard
At the centre of the exhibition is a 19-by-15-by-five-metre installation constructed from shade net, steel cables and steel poles. Lightweight rather than monumental, the structure creates a sequence of permeable enclosures that redirect movement through FCA Ghana and alter how visitors encounter the relationship between gallery, courtyard and surrounding cultural complex.
Shade net is particularly important to the project. Commonly used as an economical means of controlling sunlight and creating semi-enclosed spaces, the material allows air, light and partial views to pass through it. TAELON7 transforms this familiar material into an architectural membrane: simultaneously screen, enclosure and source of shade.
The intervention also works directly with the existing architecture. Gallery walls have been removed to expose the perimeter wall behind them, while marginal spaces are temporarily opened and reorganised. Rather than concealing the building, the installation makes its edges more visible and available for occupation.
This is where the exhibition’s title becomes significant. An interstice is a space between things. TAELON7 treats that condition not as residual territory, but as somewhere architecture and civic life can emerge.
From Kumasi to Accra
The project has its origins in Kumasi, where At the Interstice was first realised in 2025 at crazinisT artisT studiO (TTO), the multidisciplinary space led by artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi.
Responding to a site characterised by continual adaptation, overlapping uses and conditions of social and political precarity, TAELON7 developed a lightweight intervention using the same fundamental vocabulary of shade net, steel poles and tensioned cables. The structure extended the institution into its surrounding landscape while remaining intentionally provisional, adaptable and reversible.
In Kumasi, this flexibility allowed the architecture to support changing forms of occupation rather than dictate a single programme. The canopy could provide shelter during the day and projection surfaces at night, creating infrastructure for gathering while retaining the possibility of being altered or removed.
The Accra exhibition does not simply reproduce that structure. Instead, TAELON7 translates its underlying principles into FCA Ghana’s institutional setting, retaining an emphasis on openness, reversibility and transformation.
That distinction is important. Architecture is approached less as an object designed for replication and more as a spatial system capable of changing according to its site and users.
Everyday Space as Architectural Knowledge
Beyond the main installation, At the Interstice reveals some of the research behind TAELON7’s architectural thinking.
Sculptural assemblages made from found materials sit alongside photographic studies and speculative architectural drawings documenting spatial conditions encountered across compounds, workshops, markets and everyday constructions in Accra and Kumasi. These environments are examined not simply as references but as sources of architectural knowledge.
Among the accompanying works is Let It Become What It Needs to Be, a spatial model of crazinisT artisT studiO made from salvaged tarpaulin. A 4.5-metre-long photographic research installation traces research in Accra and Kumasi alongside earlier iterations of the project, while TTOX I and TTOX II translate speculative architectural illustrations into screenprints on salvaged tarpaulin.
Together, these works expand the exhibition beyond a single installation. They show how TAELON7’s architectural language develops through observation of environments where limited resources, incremental construction and collective negotiation continually reshape space.
It is a familiar condition across Ghanaian cities. Verandas become workplaces or shops; courtyards accommodate domestic, social and commercial activities; temporary structures extend buildings into surrounding open space; and construction continues incrementally as resources and requirements change.
Rather than reading such adaptations as departures from formal architecture, At the Interstice considers them forms of spatial intelligence.
Architecture Without Finality
This approach connects the exhibition to TAELON7’s broader practice. Operating between West Africa and Europe, the studio works across buildings, exhibitions, spatial installations and civic infrastructure, developing adaptive systems responsive to climate, material economies and collective occupation.
Earlier this year, similar concerns appeared in Limbo Engawa, TAELON7’s intervention at Limbo Museum in Accra, where lightweight structures and salvaged materials explored the threshold between an unfinished building and its surrounding landscape.
At the Interstice brings that investigation into another context. This time, the threshold belongs to an established cultural institution.
What makes the exhibition compelling is how little architecture is required to change the reading of that institution. There is no monumental pavilion. Instead, shade net, poles, cables and selective alterations transform circulation, reveal previously overlooked boundaries and create new possibilities for gathering.
The project consequently challenges architecture’s conventional relationship with permanence. Its spaces are intentionally provisional, reversible and capable of acquiring different meanings through use. As the exhibition proposes, the territory between inside and outside, permanence and ephemerality, and architecture and everyday life need not be resolved. It can instead become productive ground for new forms of civic space.
In Accra, TAELON7 offers a deliberately modest proposition: civic architecture does not always require monumental construction. Sometimes architecture begins by creating enough shade, permeability and flexibility for people to occupy a place differently.
At the Interstice is on view at the Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana, Accra, from 6–31 August 2026. The exhibition is supported by FCA Ghana and the Austrian Cultural Forum Accra, with research supported by the Hans Hollein Project Grant awarded by Austria’s Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport.
