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Nairobi, Kenya’s bustling capital, is often referred to as “the green city in the sun” because of the unique blend of urban development and natural landscapes. Yet, this can be a misleading nickname since beauty is not experienced uniformly throughout the city by its residents. While some people enjoy lush greenery from their comfortable homes, others in the slums of high-density and ecological disasters like flooding and landslides experience poverty.
Enter Kairos Futura, an art collective of creatives determined to take on Nairobi’s dystopian elements and reimagine them as utopia. Its latest exhibition, Hakuna Utopia, brings together works from seven artists who, with the themes of apocalypse and resilience in mind, respond to the day-to-day struggles of life in Nairobi for six million citizens.
Stoneface Bombaa is one of the members of this collective and grew up in Mathare, Nairobi’s second-largest informal settlement. He is an artist now, using his work to tell the story of struggles Bombaa has endured in the community. According to him, Mathare people survive on a “hand-to-mouth economy,” never knowing where their next meal will come from. Bombaa converts all the anger in his community into something positive through art, believing that art can unify and inspire change.
Bombaa’s vision for the exhibition includes sites of “micro-utopia” around the city. One such project – the “jungle room” – sought to connect people with nature at Mathare. The building he identified for this project was demolished by authorities to pave the way for a road. Not one to give up, Bombaa still takes children from his community to Nairobi’s verdant parks as a way of introducing them to green spaces they hardly get to see.
Another artist, Coltrane McDowell, uses termite mounds to reimagine the architecture of the future. His work, Invisible Cities, is about how buildings can grow organically with nature. Meanwhile, Abdul Rop uses his dazzling woodcut prints and paintings to highlight that community effort will be required to attain utopia. He believes young people, frustrated by a corrupt political system, can find creative ways to fight for a better future.
The exhibition also highlights the things that ordinary Nairobians have to pay for to enter, such as the arboretum or even Karura forest. Kairos Futura’s artists are committed to harnessing their imagination in favor of urgent environmental issues and inspiring collective action.
It's more than just an exhibition, it is a wake-up call for Nairobians to dare to envision a braver future; more equal in every single direction. As Bombaa sums up: the time to act for the future is now.
