Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has lengthy been generally known as “the inexperienced metropolis within the solar” due to its mixture of forest and grasslands among the many city sprawl, but it surely all is determined by the place you might be viewing it from.
Seen from one of many metropolis’s snug house blocks or properties, then sure, maybe – from considered one of its densely packed slums, then no.
There, life will be characterised by poverty and ecological catastrophe, reminiscent of flooding and lethal landslides.
However an artwork collective – Kairos Futura – has been making an attempt to take what would possibly appear to be among the metropolis’s extra dystopian parts and create a imaginative and prescient of a utopia, or not less than how that is perhaps achieved.
Their exhibition Hakuna Utopia options the works of seven artists exploring themes of apocalypse and resilience – some in fairly summary methods – as they reply to the each day challenges endured by Nairobi’s six million residents.
One of many collective, Stoneface Bombaa, grew up in Mathare, the capital’s second-largest casual settlement.
He has overcome nice odds to grow to be an artist and desires to make use of his work to handle the best way that folks in Mathare reside – typically missing jobs, housing and training.
Bombaa says they endure a “hand-to-mouth financial system”, by no means positive the place their subsequent meal will come from.
“Persons are actually offended,” he says, however via artwork, he feels he can “channel” his group’s anger into one thing optimistic as “artwork unites”.
Bombaa got down to create from the exhibitions “micro-utopia” websites dotted across the metropolis.
He known as it the “jungle room” and hoped to get folks to attach with nature from inside Mathare itself, in an try to bridge the ecological divide.
Paradoxically, the constructing he had recognized as a potential website was demolished by the authorities to make means for a highway.
Undeterred, he has been taking youngsters from his group, typically caught residing in unimaginable city squalor, to expertise Nairobi’s verdant parks and expose them to inexperienced areas.
“There are not any bushes or inexperienced areas in Mathare,” Bombaa says.
However by considering the concept of utopia, he believes that he can think about what it will be like if folks in his group really had unrestricted entry to town’s inexperienced areas.
On this means, folks in his group can declare a proper to entry nature that’s denied to them just because they’re poor.
Bombaa additionally complains about how peculiar Nairobians, typically scrabbling to make a residing, need to pay to enter a few of their metropolis’s most lovely areas such because the arboretum or Karura forest.
The Kairos Futura staff are additionally drawing inspiration from nature to make use of their creativeness in tips on how to tackle pressing environmental points.
For instance, Coltrane McDowell has utilized this to structure.
In his work Invisible Cities, he was impressed by termite mounds to reimagine what structure would possibly appear to be sooner or later.
One other artist within the present, Abdul Rop, recognized for his mesmerising woodcut prints and work, says that with a purpose to “obtain utopia”, Nairobians must work collectively.
“That is why the younger persons are agitating proper now for change,” he says, suggesting they’re pissed off by a corrupt political system that hems of their potential.
Gen Z have been on the forefront of protests this 12 months in opposition to new tax measures, which noticed the federal government make an embarrassing U-turn.
Rop argues that by interested by utopia via the lens of artwork, younger folks might discover inventive methods to combat for his or her future.
Slightly than being far-fetched, he thinks that it might probably assist think about a bolder and extra equal future for his metropolis.
“The second to behave for the long run is now,” he says.