The Pan-African Biennale presents a programme of talks, panels, provocations, and public activities exploring architecture and spatial practice across the African continent.

Hosted in Nairobi, the inaugural edition brings together different perspectives on how places are designed, remembered, repaired, imagined, and connected.

Shifting the Centre

Shifting the Centre opens the programme by examining how architectural knowledge and spatial practice are shaped and understood. The theme challenges traditional ideas about where authority and expertise in architecture come from. It gives greater attention to perspectives, experiences, and practices developed within African contexts.

The discussion also considers how local knowledge can influence contemporary approaches to design and the built environment. By bringing different viewpoints together, the theme encourages a more diverse and balanced understanding of architecture.

Ecologies of Repair

Ecologies of Repair explores the connections between architecture, environments, resources, and communities. The theme looks at repair as more than restoring damaged buildings or physical structures. It considers how landscapes, materials, existing spaces, and community relationships can be carefully maintained and renewed.

The discussion also highlights approaches that work with existing conditions instead of relying entirely on new construction. Through this perspective, spatial practice can support more thoughtful and sustainable relationships between people and their surroundings.

Living Archives & Embodied Knowledge

Living Archives & Embodied Knowledge turns attention toward memory, heritage, skills, and forms of knowledge carried through places and people. Architecture can preserve stories through buildings, streets, landscapes, construction methods, and everyday activities.

The theme recognises these elements as valuable sources of knowledge while highlighting skills and understanding passed through making, practice, observation, and community experience.

Imagining Otherwise

Imagining Otherwise focuses on alternative possibilities for the built environment. The theme invites architects, designers, and other spatial practitioners to think beyond familiar models and consider different ways of creating places for living, working, gathering, and community life.

It provides room for speculative ideas while keeping attention on the practical realities that influence how spaces develop. New approaches to materials, technology, urban environments, and social needs can all contribute to this broader exploration.

Pan Africanism – The Centre in Motion

Pan Africanism – The Centre in Motion connects the programme to the Biennale's wider continental ambition. Instead of positioning one permanent location as the centre of architectural discourse, the concept presents the centre as something capable of moving between cities, practices, institutions, and communities.

This idea reflects the Biennale's intention to travel across the continent. Nairobi therefore becomes the starting point for a platform designed to create continuing exchanges between different African spatial practices.

The Pan-African Biennale programme brings together five interconnected themes: Shifting the Centre, Ecologies of Repair, Living Archives & Embodied Knowledge, Imagining Otherwise, and Pan Africanism – The Centre in Motion. Together, they create a wide-ranging conversation around architecture, environment, memory, knowledge, imagination, and continental exchange. The programme positions spatial practice as a field capable of connecting different places, histories, ideas, and approaches across Africa.