The British Council presents ‘GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair’ at the British Pavilion for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025, running from 10 May to 23 November 2025.
This year’s commission aims to examine the relationship between architecture and colonisation as parallel, interconnected systems. The exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus stems from the British Pavilion’s pivotal alignment along an axis that runs between Britain to the north-west, and Kenya and the Great Rift Valley to the south-east.
The ‘GBR – Geology Of Britannic Repair’ exhibition is a unique UK-Kenya collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team of curators: Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau, UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins, and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff.
Making a case for architecture as an earth practice, the curators and their collaborators hope that the exhibition will help to dismantle the prevalent and often unquestioned concept of architecture and rebuild it as a non-extractive practice geared towards repair, restitution and renewal.
Talking about the exhibition, the curatorial team said:
‘GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair’ aims to re-centre architecture’s fundamental relationship to geology, shifting how we see its past and present and re-orienting its future otherwise. With the Great Rift Valley as the exhibition’s geological and conceptual focus, we have brought together a series of installations that propose ‘other architectures’ defined by their relationship to the ground, their resistance to conventional, extractive ways of working, and that are resilient in the face of climate breakdown and social and political upheaval. Turning the British Pavilion inside out, we hope the exhibition will become a vital site for reimagining the relationship between architecture and the earth.