PROCESS
Exploring the Makings of 3 Landmark Projects in Africa
Status: Completed 2023
Location: Italy, Venice, Venice Architecture Biennial
Team: Mariam Issoufou, Ramatou Kane, Neo Maditla, Aaron C Nkhoma
Process is a site-specific installation conceived by Mariam Issoufou for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial. The biennale was curated by Lesley Lokko under the theme: Laboratory of the Future. “I chose not to reprint source material but rather to reproduce it as large-scale hand drawings to make it mine, ours. The wall drawings are an homage to the Neolithic engravings I grew up visiting in the mountains and caves of the Sahara desert. Experiencing them so early in my life gave me a deeper sense of my history and its importance. Process is in some ways about taking back control of knowledge that belongs to us but that lives in books and museums far away,” Mariam Issoufou says about Process.
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To make architecture in a context of scarcity, extreme climate, and economic vulnerability, a process to bring local narratives to the fore, translating dispossessed identities and history into architectural form. This approach is called Process.
Mariam Issoufou Architects’ exhibition foregrounds the precedents, narratives, and ideas that sit at the core of their work. Their location in Niamey, Niger, with the ecological, economic, and cultural characteristics of our context, and the erasure of traditional building techniques from the public consciousness, provides us with a laboratory from which to make thoughtful architecture that is inspired by the past while innovating towards the future.
Through models, videos, and hand-drawn plans, Process is a journey into a laboratory of the future in Niamey. By choosing to draw the plans onto the walls herself, Mariam Issoufou inscribes herself into the narrative of this year’s theme, drawing attention to the complexity in simplicity and treading lightly on the earth. -
Model Maker
Boyd and Ogier
Design and Curation
Mariam Issoufou Architects -
