Monika Emmanuelle Kazi transforms domestic architecture into a shifting archive of diasporic memory in ‘terrain meuble‘ in Paris.
21 September 2026
In ‘terrain meuble‘, Monika Emmanuelle Kazi considers how the spaces we inhabit continue to live within us. Drawing on memories shaped between Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo and Paris, the artist transforms the Centre culturel suisse, in Paris into an architecture of movement, material and remembrance.
At the centre of the exhibition is a structure of mobile wooden panels that unsettles the gallery’s stability. Walls become porous surfaces through which family histories, childhood memories and wider narratives of colonialism, economic exchange and the circulation of natural resources begin to emerge.
Kazi pays particular attention to the materials that build environments. Cement, introduced across parts of Africa during the colonial period, becomes a starting point for considering architecture, climate, and inherited systems of construction. Traces of condensation and moisture are reimagined as drawings and crystallisations of memory, while tropical woods exported to Europe return through intricate marquetry. Pyrography, sapele wood and fragments of wallpaper further layer intimate histories into the installation.
Moving between the domestic and the transcontinental, ‘terrain meuble’ asks what materials might remember about the histories that have passed through them.
This exhibition is on view at the Centre culturel suisse in Paris until 1 November 2026.
