Future
(Photos by Sulton Somjee, courtesy of George Kabonyi; Cupers & Kitata; African Digital Heritage)Together with community stakeholder and institutional partners, we are reimagining the Kamĩrĩĩthũ open-air theatre and are reactivating performance arts for social and environmental justice in Kamĩrĩĩthũ and beyond. Our research and filming has led to an increased awareness of the importance of this erased and demolished heritage amongst a range of stakeholders, and has facilitated the creation of a community-based organization in Kamĩrĩĩthũ. Together with this group, we held a performance and remembrance workshop at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ polytechnic on 8 February 2024. Together with the Social Justice Traveling Theatre, we held a follow-up workshop at Dandora (Nairobi) on 26 April 2024. This workshop explored the relationship between Kamĩrĩĩthũ theatre and contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice through art and performance. The transformative intergenerational encounter set the agenda for our work ahead.
Based in collaboration with these stakeholders, our future heritage project may include a combination of fragmentary reconstruction of the original theatre, a space to memorialize struggles for social and environmental justice, and the programming of new performances and events in Kamĩrĩĩthũ and beyond.
Our starting point in all these initiatives is to recognize the capacity of collectives as both history-makers and future-makers. We aim to engage these capacities to build a project that activates the past as a way to chart a more just future. Following this ethos, our project will be guided by a participatory process to support the community to develop the appropriate strategies for honoring the heritage of the Kamĩrĩĩthũ open-air theatre on its original site. We understand community participation as emerging through dialogue and exchange of knowledge and experience amongst diverse actors—across generations and lines of class, gender, and race. This process will form the basis to reactivate the site. Mobilizing the digital reconstruction of the theatre in conjunction with new design practices will help us develop a range of potential scenarios. This open-ended, creative process will be crucial for the project to be sustainable over the long term.