Karin Voogd

Everybody is building on Lamu, an island on the east coast of Kenya. Lamu town is a Unesco World Heritage Treasure with impressive architecture and well-preserved old buildings. I was immediately taken with the outside-inside aspect of Swahili houses. There’s no need for protection from rain, so traditional houses do not have glass windows and feature large open areas and open stairs. Everybody on Lamu seems to know  how to build. A little bit of money will buy a heap of stones or chalk, which can be used later. Meanwhile, walled plots with the outlines of a house might look abandoned, donkeys roam in future rooms and plants are emerging through the coral-stone walls. Just when you think the owners may never take up building again, they do, digging into the hardened chalk heap and transforming a virtual ruin into a room or two. The wife and her children start cooking and playing, watching television, maybe planting a Mbirimbi tree or doing needlework on the porch, waiting for the second round when the husband might build a second floor or finish the walls with fine niru, the smooth, soft-coloured stucco. Exhibition 2017 Leiden African Studies Centre