CONSTRUCTIVE RUINS

Standing tall and ghostly on the bank of the Labadi Township in Accra, Ghana, is La Beach Towers, a residential development that came to a screeching halt in 2016 amid a flurry of rumors questioning its structural and financial integrity. All concrete floors and jutting rods, it is, according to Limbo Accra — the spatial design studio run by the couple Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip — the city’s “very own equivalent to the Empire State Building in New York City.” The comparison is just as ironic and brilliant as the “BLACK EXCELLENCE” graffiti on the wall separating the 17-story failed plot from the shores of the South Atlantic Ocean. Limbo Accra’s practice focuses on these seemingly failed, incomplete, and dismissed sites like La Beach Towers, which fleck the African continent and make up a third of Ghana’s entire built environment. Petit-Frère and Grip regard them as, “one of the most significant architectural typologies in Africa,” and work to witness, document, and “activate” them through physical exhibitions and virtual renderings that create new, speculative narratives for the structures. As Petit-Frère and Grip have begun to expand their practice by documenting and cataloguing these structures with Into the Void — an extensive digital (and eventually physical) archive backed by a grant from The Obel Foundation — the frozen-in-time La Beach Towers was the first artifact in their collection.

Founded in Ghana’s capital city in 2018, Limbo Accra’s name is a play on its relationship to the liminal — Limbo — and its place of origin — Accra. The duo had originally moved back to the land of Petit-Frère’s mother’s family to conduct research for their respective graduate and undergraduate theses. And it was there, in the wake of the modernization efforts that have rocked many countries of the so-called Global South, that Petit-Frère and Grip took notice of the state of Ghana’s built (or, perhaps more accurately, unbuilt) environment. “We realized that half of the city was more or less unfinished,” Petit-Frère says. “You have this amazing place full of so much creative energy, potential, and opportunity without the actual space to accommodate that.”

With a shared “curiosity for the built environment and the future of our surroundings,” Petit-Frère and Grip have endeavored to reframe this unfinished architecture through site-specific interventions, installations, and exhibitions: “a collective re-imaginative effort into seeing what these spaces can be utilized as,” Grip says. Their 2018 activation of a semi-finished mansion in Adjiringanor, an affluent neighborhood in Accra, where they staged an exhibition of works by nine local artists, was the studio’s first project, but many more collaborative efforts have followed. In 2021, they designed their first built project: the community-led Freedom Skatepark, which Virgil Abloh helped to fund. Last year, the pair participated in the second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial with SUPER LIMBO, an installation of interlaced and occasionally tied and knotted swags of calico cotton fabric designed and installed in collaboration with artist and architectural designer Anne-Lise Agossa and Super Yaya designer Rym Beydoun.

There is a unique sensitivity in Limbo’s approach, which is especially perceptible in their use of language. While one could easily see such unfinished, ambitious, concrete structures as brutal, under the watchful and tolerant eye of Petit-Frère and Grip, they become “unsure,” “unaware,” “hesitant and purposeless,” and “trapped.” Limbo Accra innately seeks to redefine by repositioning — not the structure or its state, but the viewer and their perception of it. It is this perspective that transforms caretakers of incomplete buildings and tracts into “stewards of the land.”

This modus of reframing of preconceived narratives is apparent in Limbo’s respect for African oral traditions, which many diminish as an impediment to the continent’s development and facilitating its cultural erasure, as well as their consideration for biodiversity. Nature is typically disposed of in Ghanaian development projects, with sites notoriously wiped clean before the start of any construction project — “Has the land been cleared?” is a common refrain heard among speculators. Limbo, however, embraces local ecosystems, seeing beauty in the opportunity that the state of incompletion provides for the natural world to take over.

After spending the last half-decade drawing awareness to these incomplete structures, Petit-Frère and Grip now want to resurrect them from Limbo in a Dantean sense — the First Circle of the Inferno, the borderland, the Limbo of the Unbaptized — as they bring forth Into the Void. Using the idea of an open-sourced, communal history as the basis for their digital archive, Limbo Accra looks to sites like Twitter, Reddit, and even YouTube to showcase the work of “everyday Africans [who] are already taking their cameras, going to these sites, and documenting them,” as Petit-Frère says. In the Limbo way, everyday people become authors in the studio’s practice. Petit-Frère and Grip scan these communally sourced photographs and use photogrammetry to reconstruct the world in a “skeletal-carcass” form. They use crowdsourced audio recordings as background noise in their videos, and embrace the public’s ideas of what these buildings could be. In this world-building exercise marrying sound, image, and language, Limbo insists on the value the pre-existing — a total subversion of much of the contemporary impulses of modern architecture and material culture at large, which is concerned with, if not infatuated by, the idea of making — the more, the new, the total, and as a result, the labeled, the certain, the fixed.

Petit-Frère and Grip hope this living archive will encourage people to further engage these sites and imagine what they could be. After all, the pair have often emphasized the importance to their practice of the idea of Afro-utopia: the grand African future marked by “prosperity, opportunity, inspiration, and hope.” Limbo’s otherworld, as they imagine it, concrete and unfinished, occupied and ‘activated,’ is uncanny: the future come to a halt. It’s the end-of-this-world, beginning-of-another-type romance, one filled with a sense of radical optimism amongst the concrete; a copper-colored spill leaking the metallic future of a dream.