Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

In conversation with Ida Bjerga & Osmo Hadad-Lange
Written by Ida Bjerga

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a name that resonates profoundly within the global contemporary art world. Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1977, he is an acclaimed art curator, author, and biotechnologist. He currently serves as director and chief curator of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and as chief curator of the 36th São Paulo Biennale. He’s also the founder and former artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary and leads the Spatial Strategies MA programme at the Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin. Bonaventure’s interdisciplinary trajectory brings together institution-building and curatorial practice, with a focus on performativity, installative, sonic and visual arts, alongside critical theory.

Amidst his many titles and commitments, Bonaventure found time to speak with us about poetic listening, the ways architectural elements carry collective memory, and how the ordinary appears from a non-Western perspective. What follows are seven texts shaped from our conversation in July 2025. They have been carefully edited for clarity, flow, and readability, and are presented in the first person. Each text was reviewed and approved by Bonaventure and his team before publication.

MBANDA

in my grandmothers house
where we spent a lot of time
during long summer holidays
in cameroon
it was a very rudimentary house
made of adobe
the house had two rooms
a living room and a bedroom
in the middle of the living room
which also served as the kitchen
there were three stones
and there was always a pot cooking
or something frying
the heat that emanated from that pot
along with the soot from the fire
rose towards the ceiling
underneath the ceiling was a proto ceiling
called the mbanda
this was a space where
grains
meat
and vegetables
that needed to be dried were kept
it was a kind of storage

whenever there was a harvest
the food for the season
would be put aside
the rest would be kept
on the mbanda
for the next year
for planting
for eating
for rainy days so to speak
so the mbanda served several functions
it was a place for storage
it conserved food through heat and soot
and it was also a kind of hiding place
if you could make your way up there
you could hide and no one would find you
when the tax collector came
and searched for you
you could simply hide in the mbanda
and they would never find you
fast forward many years
or even just the shift from rural to urban life
the kitchen is now separated
from the eating room
from the sitting room
from the bedroom

the phenomenon of the mbanda
has disappeared
now to conserve your food
you need a refrigerator
to store something
you need a storage room
instead of a mbanda
the mbanda was a lot of things at once
storage
chemical preservation
thermal preservation
hiding place
and much more
it was as ordinary as it was important
if we think about how
architecture has changed
in the past hundred years
based on the imposition of a certain notion
of colonial or modern architecture
one of the elements that has been lost
is the mbanda

THE DELUSIONS OF CARE

When the African continent was colonised, it was done under the premise of care. When Otto von Bismarck invited the so-called fourteen great nations to come to Berlin in 1884, the argument was: we need to care for these people; we need to bring them civilisation. Well, we know what happened. It is not everyone who says they care for you who actually cares. Some people would say: look at all the bridges they built, all the railways, all the highways. But the highways were never built for you, nor the railways. They were built to carry the resources they extracted inland to the coast, to transport their own facilities and wealth more easily, to exploit the people and the land. What is care there?

On one of the largest plantations in Cameroon that still exists, the CDC (Cameroon Development Corporation), they built homes for the workers right on the plantation. These were standardised structures, placed close to the work sites. “You are given a house because we care for you,” they were told. But who profits? What is care there? The people who worked on the cocoa plantation never tasted chocolate in their lives. But they were told the house was a form of care. The price they received for their cocoa was, and remains, a ridiculously small fraction of the value compared with the chocolate sold after the cocoa is processed. Ridiculously. And for this, they destroyed massive amounts of land and forest to plant cocoa. That was called care.

There is a beautiful essay by Chinua Achebe called Africa is People (1999). In it, he writes about an invitation from the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development in Paris. When he arrived, he found bankers and politicians from around the world discussing the imposition of economic regulatory measures on African and other non‑Western countries. Normally, when an African country is in crisis—and, as Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), African countries have been made to be in perpetual crisis—Achebe writes about attending this conference and hearing people say: “you give them loans so they become indebted for the rest of their lives, and when they cannot pay, the ‘radical measure’ is devaluation.”

I remember growing up in Cameroon in the late 1980s and early 1990s during a massive devaluation. I remember my parents waking up one day to discover that the loaf of bread they bought for 100 francs yesterday now cost 200 francs. A 100 percent increase overnight. That devaluation was carried out, in part, so that France would be able to fit into the European currency, the Euro.

And that, too, was sold as care.

THE IMPOSITION OF MATERIALS

One of the issues with the imposition of Western architecture across a vast part of the world is the imposition of materials as well.

My grandparents’ generation built with mud. Today, I am part of a group of over forty young architects from Cameroon, and sometimes we have conversations where, whenever someone suggests using adobe, others respond: oh, that is not modern. By that they mean it’s too cheap. Although, ironically, adobe has now become more expensive than cement. But what they mean is that it looks cheap. Which is to say, you are expected to build with cement and glass.

But what does it mean to build with cement or glass in a place where the temperature outside is 35 degrees? Build with these materials and the temperature indoors will rise to 45 degrees, because cement and glass have no natural cooling capacity. That is the problem. It is not a question of decolonisation, or whatever one chooses to call it—it is simply rational thinking.

And that is just one element.

If you build with adobe… I remember visiting a building in the palace in Bandjoun, in Cameroon’s western province. The temperature outside was 35 degrees, yet inside it was around 23 or 25 degrees. A delta of 10 degrees. That is massive. Massive. This building must have been… who knows how old, but it was built with adobe, and it was an attached house. The air circulation was very thorough, and so on, but the mud bricks regulated the indoor temperature naturally.

So why would people insist on building with cement in such places?

This is nothing new. Hassan Fathy was already writing and complaining about it in the 1940s and 1950s. Even the Egyptian state was opposed to his use of adobe, because there was business to be made from the big cement factories. Coming back to the question of a building’s respiration: not only the ventilation, but the respiration of a building.

How do we make architecture that actually breathes? In many tropical areas, the humidity is very high. In Douala, for example, the humidity is 90 to 95 per cent. It is like the rain has been paused mid-fall. That is the humidity level. It is very humid. If you do not have a sophisticated ventilation system, what you will have is mould on the walls. This leads to an epidemic of respiratory illnesses. Yet very few people make that connection to architecture. Very few people. But of course, you get mould on the wall—the cement cannot breathe.

Returning to Hassan Fathy: in the 1970s, in the brilliant film about him It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor (1978)—the title of the film being a reference to his book Architecture for the Poor (1969)—Fathy said that architects no longer build houses for human beings. They build houses to sell air-conditioning devices, and perhaps also fridges and other appliances. So my question is: what if we actually thought of houses for human beings? Not for the companies that have to sell this and that, but for human beings. Houses where we think about space, think about the energy that can be harnessed in that space, think of optimizing light, think of natural cooling, think of ventilation, think of materiality.

Now, there is a generation of architects in which I am quite interested. They are thinking through these issues: the generation of Francis Kéré, but also the generation after Francis Kéré, coming of age in the 2010s. People like Mae-Ling Lokko, for example, who recently built a pavilion in Berlin. She returns to the question of materiality. She went to Ghana, where she is from, and looked at the process of working with coconuts and all the leftovers that are usually thrown away. She transformed these into building materials—organic materials that can be used in architecture.

That, in my opinion, helps us think about the ordinariness of these materials and how they can be used in architecture—rather than the sophistication of glass, cement, plastic, and other materials that have clearly shown us over the past hundred years that they are not friends of humankind.

THE TRUMPS OF THIS WORLD ARE TRYING TO BE

The ordinary, to me, is the quotidian.
The ordinary is what we all are.
The ordinary is what the world is built around.
The ordinary is the foundation.

There is no such thing as the extraordinary. And every effort to be extraordinary, in my opinion, might actually lead to a denigration of what is ordinary.

These efforts, intended to lead to the extraordinary, have resulted in the world we see today. They have driven massive political shifts to the right, and many of the so-called phenomena you have mentioned—climate collapse, capitalism, exploitation—are consequences of trying to be extraordinary. The Trumps of this world are trying to be extraordinary.

EXTRAORDINARY

I am reminded of a brilliant documentary by Ali Mazrui that I watched in the 1980s. Mazrui, a Kenyan scholar who went on to teach as a professor in the US, created a twelve-part documentary called The Africans: A Triple Heritage. It was broadcast on television all over the world. In it, Mazrui spoke about Africa’s “triple heritage”: Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African cultures, and how these shaped African peoples.

In the documentary, he drew a contrast between the people who lived on the coasts—who were interested in going out to do what was necessary for their sustenance, but who had a certain contentment in what they had. A contentment with the ordinary, I would say. He contrasted them with the colonisers, who were not content with what they had and who felt compelled to go out and conquer the rest of the world, to make their ordinary “extra.” Mazrui called this geography the mother of history.
So, to understand all the things we are going through now—the birth of capitalism is the idea of going beyond your geography to conquer other geographies, to take people, to enslave them. Let them work on plantations that are extraordinary. Because the ordinary is the multiplicity of beings. The ordinary is the fact that in nature, plants of different kinds grow together. There is no forest in the world with only eucalyptus trees or only palm trees. Nowhere. The extraordinary is to destroy the ordinary and create monoculture, planting just one kind. And that leads, inevitably, to the destruction of the soil, to erosion, and to massive environmental problems. All of this is connected. It comes back to the necessity, or perhaps the inability, of truly appreciating the ordinary.

It would do us good to try to understand what the ordinary is, and to find our place within that. It is like understanding what it means to be human. We want to be ‘extra human’ and ‘ultra human’ without even having understood what it means to be human in the first place. I believe it would help us to first find a way to understand what the ordinary is for us. Because, like everything, the ordinary is a spectrum, and we all need to find our place within that.

Extraordinary—if there is even a need for that?

I don’t know.

THE PHENOMENON OF THE WINDOW

Hassan Fathy once wrote about the phenomenon of the window. Or rather, what is called a window in European architecture, which, he argued, is actually a combination of many functions. He explained that in Egyptian, North African, or Arabic architecture, the functions that a window performs are divided across several different structures.

For example, when you build a house in Egypt, you might put a small structure designed purely for wind circulation—for ventilation. It is usually adjacent to another structure on the opposite side of the building and in direct relation to the door, so air flows. That function, ventilation, is something a European window would fulfil.

Now, if you want to look out of the building to see what is happening outside, you might also use a window in Western architecture. But in Arabic architecture, there is another structure, dedicated to that.

THE CONSEQUENCES WE LEAVE BEHIND

The first time I met the Austrian artist Sam Auinger must have been ten, maybe thirteen or even fifteen years ago—I don’t quite remember. I was giving a talk at Transmediale, so it must have been about thirteen years ago. After my talk, which was about the sonic, Sam came up to me and said he would like us to meet. I said okay, let’s do that. And he set the meeting.

He said he would like us to meet at a particular spot: Alexanderplatz in Berlin. When I met him there, he took me across the road, and we stopped at a specific point. And he said:

Listen this way

Listen that way

Listen like this

It was about listening to the city—the way its architecture could be listened to, the way the houses were built. He talked about the impact of sound in architecture, or rather how architecture affects the sonic and its effect on people’s wellbeing. He also discussed how people of a lower class are often placed close to the highways, where noise levels are very high, because that is the only housing they can afford, while the rich retreat to the suburbs where not even a car passes by.

We spoke a lot about that.

We also spoke about the impact environmental manipulation has on the world. A few years ago, Sam created a work in which he recorded the sounds of a farm growing genetically modified plants. Seeds that were genetically manipulated. He then made a recording on another farm nearby with normal plants. I think it was corn.

Because genetically modified corn tends to grow uniformly, with all leaves having similar forms, or actually often the same shape and size, the sound was radically different from the field of natural corn, where the leaves varied—some smaller, some larger.

Sound, after all, is simple: it is the interruption of airflow. When the wind flows through these plants, uniform leaves create one rhythm, while diverse leaves create another rhythm. That is the flow of air.

And that is the point—being conscious of our environment and of the consequences left behind by the technologies we produce. The idea of genetic manipulation is an attempt to be extraordinary.

POETIC LISTENING

Poetic listening. This idea of attentiveness, of being content, or perhaps simply the attentiveness to signs, to knowledge, to the things overlooked, unheard, unnoticed.

I think poetic listening has to do with being present. Being conscious of one’s presence. Being conscious of what surrounds you. And listening, not just seeing, but listening to everything around you: to the sound of plants, and the sound of stones, and the wind, and so forth.

Hassan Fathy was once invited to build on the historic site of New Gourna in Egypt. They wanted him to design a modern building to relocate the residents of Old Gourna. Fathy’s approach to architecture was deeply rooted in understanding the local environment, and he insisted on first understanding the vegetation of the place and where the water came from before proceeding with any design. Similarly, the famous Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, renowned for his sensitivity to local climate, water sources, and environment, has said that the first thing he does when asked to build is to understand the natural elements, especially water.

Both examples illustrate a profound attentiveness to the natural environment, as if holding a divining rod revealing where the water lies, and then starting from there. To me, that is a deep practice of listening: understanding that without water, perhaps one shouldn’t build at all. Because the question is: how will you sustain yourself in that space?

So, in answer to your question, poetic listening is the possibility of listening—to the politics of the world and of nature. Maybe another way of putting it is to be in tune. In tune with what surrounds you. Now the question is: how does one do that in a world full of noise? All these cars, all this white noise, all this computation, all these distractions… How do we actually listen?

That is the tricky part.

And that is what we need to do.

THAT IS WHAT WE NEED TO DO.

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

The issue was produced by students from the Aarhus School of Architecture:
Ida Bjerga, Osmo Hadad-Lange, Alexander Skovgaard Bagger Hadi, and Birke Langkjær Jakobsen.

The non-profit project was supported by The Dreyer Foundation.

Image credits: 1) Dale Grant/HKW, 2) Jana Edisonga/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 3) Muhammed Fardeen Finos, 4) Dale Grant/HKW, 5) Víctor Hugo