The material relationship between people and land is a direct one. The body directly shapes formal manipulation of material and site.

Ancient civilisations made mounds, dug trenches, created woodland clearings and redirected the flow of water. In architectural terms, these acts of displacement equate to gravity and settlement, invisible forces which leave behind a physical imprint on matter. There is a potential for the role such natural processes can have in integrating energy and matter towards deriving intrinsically interconnected forms that are of their place, and consequently energy neutral in their output.

The AA Visiting School Energy and Matter takes the Karura Forest in Nairobi, Kenya as its site, examining the potential of post-colonial landscapes as repositories for local tacit knowledge. We are interested in the interface between the body and its ability to make visible the latent qualities of site towards a physical output.

Working in response to UNESCO’s 2021 objectives of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage – and recognising the disproportionate impacts of climate inequality on vulnerable ecologies – our ambition is to quantify the losses incurred to both tangible (the caves, the river, the woodland and the air) and intangible material cultures (Indigenous knowledge and oral histories) to date, both of which are undergoing rapid decline.

Our methodology will borrow directly from Indigenous mark-making and land art practice to create a series of site-specific sculptural works.

Over a period of two weeks, we will research and record the site through a series of embodied surveys, using plaster casting and etching as our primary methods of recording our first encounters.

Working directly with the body, and in collaboration with local makers, these recordings will subsequently be translated into a series of site-specific works.

Memorials to the landscape, the intention is that these will give visual form to the invisible loss incurred. Counter to a culture of extraction, our made objects will remain on site, energy neutral in their conception and output.