Courage Dzidula Kpodo

Born in 1999 in Accra, Ghana, Courage Dzidula Kpodo is an architect and artist. He studied at the Department of Architecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, where he met Ibrahim Mahama, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

In his practice, Courage D. Kpodo takes on the role of an archeologist of 20th-century material heritage, particularly of the architectural movement known as Tropical Modernism, which developed in West Africa following independence and then evolved thanks to local architects who adapted Modernist principles to the tropical context. Courage D. Kpodo has fashioned a critical reflection around this movement.

For the creation of the installation known as Our Early Plans, the artist dismantled a cocoa farmer’s house built from laterite—a type of red earth characteristic of Ghanaian soils—in the rainforest north of Accra. This house attests to an agricultural and architectural model that transformed the country. Passed down from generation to generation and restored over the decades, it was gradually abandoned in the 1980s. Here, Courage D. Kpodo takes a step away from the monumental buildings traditionally depicted in archives, heritage restoration policies, and architectural education to celebrate vernacular architecture.