Photo : © Monika Emmanuelle Kazi, 2022
Exhibition: Monika Emmanuelle Kazi at the Centre culturel suisse
Forget static exhibition spaces and immerse yourself in an evolving landscape where personal stories intertwine with colonial legacies. Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reimagines the raw power of building materials, creating an unstable yet captivating installation that breathes, shifts, and speaks through every pore of its structure.
Centre culturel suisse Paris (Paris 3rd)
About
From September 19 to November 1, 2026, the Centre culturel suisse hosts terrain meuble, an exhibition by artist Monika Emmanuelle Kazi. The installation turns the venue into a shifting architectural space, using mobile walls and materials like Congolese mahogany and sand to examine colonial legacies and the global movement of resources. This immersive project, which explores personal narratives and history, is free for all visitors. The exhibition kicks off on September 19 with an opening event featuring live music curated by Radio Nova, starting at 20:00. Located in the 3rd arrondissement, this exhibition offers a unique look at memory and architecture.
SAT 09.19: Opening
Radio Nova invites the public to continue the evening at the CCS stage with two concerts. Free admission from 8:00 PM +
With terrain meuble (loose ground), the artist transforms the CCS into an architecture permeated by memories. A structure of mobile partition walls occupies the space. The walls become projection surfaces where family narratives, traces of childhood, and broader stories related to colonial legacies, economic exchanges, and the flows of raw materials and resources emerge.
At the heart of the project is a special attention to construction materials and what they tell us. Cement, introduced to the African continent during the colonial period to build "permanently," gradually replaced vernacular materials better suited to local climates. By hindering the natural circulation of air and humidity, it allows condensations and halos to appear on the walls, which Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory. Conversely, tropical woods exported to Europe reappear in her works in the form of marquetry, revealing other circulations of materials, values, and histories.
The title terrain meuble evokes both the mobility, instability, and humidity of a soil in perpetual transformation, inscribing her mobile-furniture installation within this same ecosystem. Composed of mobile wooden panels, it is traversed by details, traces, and layers of memory. By opening up the partition walls, the artist reveals their framework and lets sand flow through the interstices. Pyrography, sapele marquetry (Congolese mahogany), and fragments of wallpaper inscribe intimate and transcontinental narratives into this moving architecture.
Our take on this event
Artist Monika Emmanuelle Kazi transforms the Centre culturel suisse with terrain meuble, a project that treats construction materials as historical storytellers. By utilizing mobile partition walls, Kazi explores the physical and emotional impact of colonial-era materials like cement—which often replaced local building techniques—and the circulation of tropical woods such as sapele. These elements are reinterpreted to reveal layers of memory, with condensation stains and architectural fragments serving as canvases for intimate and transcontinental narratives.
The installation itself is designed to be mobile and unstable, reflecting the shifting nature of the ground and historical memory. Visitors will encounter intricate pyrogravures, marquetry, and wallpaper fragments integrated into a structure where sand flows through the gaps of the wooden frames. The exhibition is open to the public free of charge from September 19 through November 1, 2026. The opening evening on September 19 will feature a special program on the center's stage, with Radio Nova presenting two live music performances starting at 20:00.
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