INHERITED GROUNDS: Architecture, Agency, Identity, and Spirituality in Ghana

What happens when we stop looking at architecture through a Western lens and start listening to the land, the spirit, and the community?

Join us this Saturday, December 20th, at Mobius Architecture for a symposium that traces architectural works, interventions, and explorations across Ghana, developed in different moments and shaped by distinct yet interconnected cultural, political, and spiritual motivations. From three perspectives, we will bring into conversation building approaches that span academic inquiry, professional practice, and vernacular knowledge systems. Shared themes will emerge across scales and contexts, drawing connections and revealing mutual logics that might otherwise remain unseen.

Courage Dzidula Kpodo will open the conversation by by sharing insights from his work in the Eastern Region, which challenges colonial and extractive land practices through a plural, spiritual, and communal approach to architecture in a cocoa-growing landscape. Through a shared harvest-path and collective action, the project, which is also his MIT Master of Architecture thesis, imagines futures beyond capital-based value systems. This will be followed by a talk by Erandi de Silva on the work of Ghanaian-Scottish architect Alero Olympio, who established a progressive, female-led, sustainable practice in Accra in the early 1990s. Her globally informed work incorporates Caribbean and South Asian references, including the work of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa and technologies developed at South India’s Auroville Earth Institute, while remaining rooted in local materials and methods. And finally, Kojo Derban will discuss the living architectural legacy of the Nankani people of Ghana’s Upper East Region, focusing on living in regenerative circles shaped by land, climate, spirituality, and communal knowledge.

This symposium creates space for architectural conversations that are often denied within Western architectural discourse, discussions grounded in multiple forms of indigenous knowledge and spiritual frameworks that span the ancient cultures of West Africa and South Asia. It is an invitation to engage while resisting extraction, spectacle, or translation for an external gaze.

Will you join us in Accra this Saturday?
This is a call to resist extraction and spectacle. It is an invitation to inhabit the grounds we have inherited with a new sense of responsibility and pride.