● ■ Lost Knowledge Systems
coordinated research and wrote the script for Adjaye Associates’ exhibition for the Venice Biennale Architecttura (2023)
The 360 film projection, located in Giardini della Biennale Central Palvilion’s
entrance hall, narrates Adjaye Associates’ pedagogy rooted in ancestral
knowledge systems from the African Continent.
“What we call history is perhaps a way
of avoiding responsibility for what has
happened, is happening, in time.”
—James Baldwin
The deep acknowledgment of these systems unearths stories rooted in our collective memory—stories that have been erased voluntarily and involuntarily, silenced intentionally or unintentionally. These are stories that form an archive of empathetic ways of enchanting materials—earth, timber, stone, and thatch—to re-examine the nuances of our sense of place.
The film meditates on how architecture can co-create models that engage, emancipate, and reshape our histories, giving us agency within the contemporary material conditions of our existence.
By re-telling these material technologies through a set of framings—geography, performance & stewardship, and form—the film proposes that architecture can challenge colonial narratives of our past, actively memorialize what we have lost, and reposition this knowledge as living systems.
By unearthing and becoming deeply intimate—despite the scars of geographic dispossession—architecture can respond to a changing, globalized landscape in ways that contribute to emerging networks of public infrastructure that support social and cultural life.
The film makes legible these invisible systems within Adjaye Associates’ projects—systems that weave between material, people, and spirit—not through literal representation, but through an orchestrated memory for our collective being.