Shifting the Center from Fragility to Resilience

Shifting the Center from Fragility to Resilience:

Pan-African Biennale Pre-Launch Event

Curator Omar Degan

Mark Gardner_ Parsons | Jaklitsch/Gardner

With panelists:

Gary Bates_ Pratt UA | Make Make

Yetunde Olaiya_Pratt UA

Ifeoma Ebo_ Pratt Urban Placemaking and Management

Africa was the origin of life, not only biologically, but culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. Its centrality must now be reclaimed in shaping global futures. For toolong, Africa’s built environment has been viewed through an external lens— shaped by colonial occupation, redefined by Western development ideologies, and systemically excluded from the dominant narratives of architectural modernity. This Biennale marks a decisive shift. It repositions Africa not at the periphery of global architectural discourse, but at its centre — not merely as a recipient of models and technologies, but as a site of spatial intelligence, epistemic innovation, and future-making. At the core of this curatorial vision is the concept of fragility — not as a passive state of vulnerability, but as a spatial and historical condition shaped by colonization, displacement, economic extraction, and environmental precarity. African cities and communities, from informal settlements to postcolonial capitals, are deeply marked by these layered forms of fragility. Yet within this condition lie profound acts of resilience: Adaptive vernacular practices, cultural continuity under erasure, and the reinvention of urban life in contexts of abandonment. This Biennale asks: How can we design through fragility?