School's Out! #52 with Kenny Cupers
School's Out! #52 with author Kenny Cupers. A lecture on his historical and collaborative research in Kenya, exploring the planetary politics of design, the coloniality of infrastructure, and African worldmaking. Followed by a short film, drinks and tunes. Friday 27 June 2025, 19:00 - 22:00. Tickets available for 5 euro here
School's Out! #52 - Kenny Cupers
Every last Friday of the month the Independent School for the City celebrates the start of the weekend with a public lecture. For this evening we've invited Kenny Cupers, Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where he co-founded and leads the Urban Studies division since 2015. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and historian, he works on the relationship between built environments and social change in African and European contexts.
Kenny Cupers talk explores Kamĩrĩĩthũ Afterlives.
In 1976, Kenyan workers and peasants came together to build an amphitheatre and stage a play that soon attracted huge audiences from across the country and beyond. Written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, the play “Ngaahika Ndeenda” (“I Will Marry When I Want”) became a powerful means by which the community confronted the enduring legacies of colonialism after Kenyan independence. A world-famous initiative in African decolonisation, the Kamĩrĩĩthũ theatre takes a prominent place in literature and performance studies, yet its architectural and environmental dimensions have been neglected.
To reconstruct how the people of Kamĩrĩĩthũ creatively reimagined, reclaimed, and rebuilt their environments in the wake of colonialism, this lecture draws from a collaboratively produced archive (www.kamiriithuafterlives.net) grounded in five years of research with Kenyan theatre performers, activists, and literary scholar Dr. Makau Kitata. This research, including oral histories, community workshops, theatre reenactments, digital three-dimensional reconstruction, and walking ethnography, foregrounds the voices and experiences of Kamĩrĩĩthũ’s original actors and maps its legacies of art and activism in a rapidly urbanizing Kenya. Methodologically refocusing architectural history on historical redress, the lecture traces the architectural horizon of planetary justice in the era of African decolonization.
Programme
18:00 Doors open, drinks bites and tunes
19:00 - 20:15 Presentation by Kenny Cupers + Q&A
20:15 - 20:30 Short film
20:30 - 22:00 Drinks and tunes
About Kenny Cupers
Kenny Cupers is Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where he co-founded and leads the Urban Studies division. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and historian, his research and teaching focus on the relationship between built environments and changing societies in African and European contexts.
He is currently working on two book projects, grounded in historical and collaborative research in Kenya. The first examines how workers and peasants mobilized arts and architecture to unmake the plantation system. It draws on a collaboratively produced archive with Kenyan theatre performers, activists, and literary scholar Dr. Makau Kitata (kamiriithuafterlives.net). The second project, with art historian Dr. Prita Meier, is an urban history of post-independence Nairobi that maps the ambiguous lives of liberation and consumption.
His book publications include The Earth that Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (2024), What is Critical Urbanism: Urban Research as Pedagogy (2022), Architecture and Neoliberalism from the 1960s to the Present (2019), La banlieue, un projet social: Ambitions d’une politique urbaine, 1945-1975 (2018).