Pan-African Biennale 2026: Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience

Pan-Africanism was never a geography. It was a political and intellectual claim, born in the diaspora, carried across oceans, forged in the encounter between colonisation, displacement, and the refusal to be defined by either. It asked what becomes possible when a scattered world insists on its own continuity. Does African architecture exist? Pan-Africanism was never a geography. It was a political and intellectual claim, born in the diaspora, carried across oceans, forged in the encounter between colonisation, displacement, and the refusal to be defined by either. It asked what becomes possible when a scattered world insists on its own continuity. This book asks that question through architecture. The manifestos gathered here were written by the practices of the inaugural Pan-African Biennale 2026 in Nairobi – local, diasporic, and extracontinental voices from Nairobi and Dakar, Khartoum and Johannesburg, São Paulo and Port-au-Prince, New York and London, Kingston and Cape Town, and beyond. Each was asked to respond to the curatorial question from within their own conditions: their ecologies, their histories, their materials, their spatial urgencies. What emerges across these pages is not a definition. It is a field of situated knowledge – plural, contested, and irreducibly grounded – that reframes the terms of a conversation architectural discourse has held for too long without these voices at its centre. To shift the centre is to move the ground of the conversation itself. From fragility to resilience. From erasure to reclamation. From the periphery to authorship. These are not abstract positions. They are spatial realities, lived and practiced across the continent and its diaspora, now made legible on their own terms.