Opening at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi in September 2026, the inaugural Pan-African Biennale brings together practitioners from all 54 African nations for the continent’s first architecture biennale conceived, convened, and led from Africa. Under the theme Shifting the Centre: From Fragility to Resilience, it reframes conditions shaped by colonization, displacement, extraction, and environmental precarity as grounds for spatial intelligence, collective repair, and future making. The Centre in Motion records this gathering through exhibition documentation, commissioned essays, talks, panels, and workshops, with Nairobi activated as a curatorial site. Following the Biennale’s three curatorial strands—Ecologies of Repair, Living Archives and Embodied Knowledge, and Imagining Otherwise—the publication carries the event’s form, voices, and debates. It preserves architectural history from African ground as it unfolds, ensuring that what was built, shown, said, and contested endures as evidence rather than recollection for audiences across the continent and its diaspora.

Omar Degan, lead curator, is an internationally recognized architect, curator, and academic, and founder of DO Architecture Group, the first internationally recognized architecture practice from Somalia. His work focuses on architecture in fragile contexts, advancing design as a tool for resilience, identity, and justice. Over the past decade, he has worked across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas on projects spanning humanitarian design, displacement response, and cultural reconstruction, collaborating with organizations including UN-Habitat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Save the Children, the European Union, and the Italian Agency for Cooperation. An expert on fragility, he treats it as a condition producing knowledge, not a deficit. He studied at the Politecnico di Torino and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, taught at Auburn University, and is a 2022 Obama Foundation Leaders Africa fellow. His TEDx talk was selected for TED.com, and his work has been covered by The New York Times, Reuters, and the BBC. He is the author of Mogadishu Through the Eyes of an Architect (2020) and the Pan-African Biennale official curator’s catalogue, Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience (DOM publishers, 2026).

The Pan-African Biennale is a continental institution dedicated to architecture and spatial practice, convened and led from Africa. Held every two years in a different African city, it gathers practitioners, thinkers, and communities from across all 54 nations under a curatorial framework built from within the continent. Its founding premise is that the spatial intelligence produced across Africa—its building cultures, material knowledge, ecological systems, urban logics, and inherited forms of collective life—is not supplementary to global architectural discourse but constitutive of it. The Biennale does not seek to add African practice to an existing canon; it proposes a different architecture of knowledge, one in which Africa is the author of its own spatial knowledge, its own discourse, and its own futures. Through exhibitions, publications, and public programs, it gives that authorship form, publics, and permanence.