A visitor to The House We Dreamed begins in a virtual garden with five doors. Each leads to a question: how will people eat, play, dream, pray or love in the future? Beyond the doors is the life of an imagined family in Abuja in 2063, assembled through panoramic city views, animated collage, woven images and performed voices. Pierre-Christophe Gam’s installation does not offer a single forecast of Nigeria’s capital. It gives the viewer a structure for entering a future shaped by dreams gathered from African communities.
Gam is a French-born conceptual artist whose heritage spans Cameroon, Chad, Egypt and Congo. He works across moving image, installation and participatory design, bringing architectural training to forms that audiences can move through. His platform TOGUNA WORLD describes an approach integrating Afrofuturist thought with Indigenous knowledge and decolonial world-building. His SANKARA project has also been read through the term Afropresentism, with its political memory brought into the present. The works ask audiences to enter, to listen, to remember, and sometimes to supply an answer.
The S+T+ARTS project page identifies dreams gathered across African communities as the material behind The House We Dreamed. That starting point changes the usual relationship between artist and public. The artist designs the architecture and narrative form, but the question of what a desirable future feels like does not begin with him alone. The five doors organize contributions into domains of life that nearly everyone knows, yet no one experiences identically. Food is a matter of nourishment and land. Play can reveal what people are free to do together. Love concerns the arrangements of family, kinship and care. The speculative house becomes a way of making differences in those desires visible.
Rooms for a future family
Each door opens onto a distinct environment with a panoramic city window. In the S+T+ARTS description, collage-tapestry animations give the windows scenes of daily life. The choice of a window is more consequential than a spectacular skyline might suggest. A family looks outward from a room they inhabit. The city is seen from the scale of living, not from the privileged aerial view common to architectural proposals. Gam asks how a future city might appear to people eating breakfast, caring for one another or returning home.
Performed audio dramas carry the family’s voices through the virtual environment. A speculative urban image can be full of buildings but empty of residents. Sound makes inhabitants present even when the viewer’s first attention goes to the architecture. The family members are not anonymous silhouettes inserted for scale. They speak from within the imagined place. Their voices connect the panorama to the rhythms of ordinary living and prevent the work from becoming only a showcase for digital rendering.
The project also has a physical form: large-scale tapestries carry the virtual panoramas into the exhibition space. Augmented reality activates the textiles as interfaces with the digital story. This is a careful material crossing. A tapestry occupies a wall and asks a visitor to stand before it; an animated city can change and move on a screen. Joining them means the future is neither a disembodied file nor a static picture. The visitor can pass between a tangible image and its animated layer, experiencing the distinct demands of each medium.
The tapestry has another consequence. It refuses the assumption that digital futures must displace material images. The textile remains present when the augmented animation is switched off; the moving layer introduces another duration when it is switched on. Gam asks the two to occupy the same surface. The result is a future city that can be encountered as an object and as a changing scene. The technology adds movement to something tangible instead of requiring the visitor to leave material culture behind.
The audio dramas perform a related crossing. Their voices carry a story across a panorama, which a viewer might otherwise scan as information. A speaking family member can direct attention to a routine or relationship that the broad city view cannot convey on its own. In this way, the work combines the architectural scale of a metropolis with the smaller scale of conversation. The future is built in both registers.
The project’s date, 2063, is close enough to the present that its family might plausibly include descendants of people alive now. That proximity gives the questions urgency. Eating in 2063 is not an abstract science-fiction premise; it could depend on today’s decisions about food production and climate. Playing may depend on which public spaces exist and who can use them. The installation does not settle such questions. Its design lets viewers recognize that every imagined detail of family life rests on social choices being made already.
Gam’s architectural training helps explain the work’s organization. Five doors, a garden and windows are familiar spatial devices. Their familiarity makes the speculative setting navigable. Rather than requiring viewers to master a fictional cosmology before entering, the work begins with the gestures of a house: approach, choose a threshold, look out, hear someone inside. The design makes possible futures intimate enough to inspect.
A sanctuary of five questions
The House We Dreamed grows from Gam’s earlier The Sanctuary of Dreams, a 2025 video installation and participatory environment presented by the Onassis Foundation. The 44-minute work joins film, experimental animation, sound and mixed-media collage within a temple-like setting. An avatar guides visitors through the same five questions about eating, playing, dreaming, praying and loving. The sanctuary does not treat a dream as an image that appears while one sleeps. It treats dreaming as a practiced way to articulate a shared desire.
The five questions have an unusual effect when placed together. They move from the bodily need for food to social pleasures, imagination, spiritual practice and relations of care. None can be designed responsibly in isolation. A city with abundant food but no place to gather would be an incomplete future. A society that celebrates imagination while denying people care would be another. Gam’s structure does not claim that five prompts exhaust human life. It gives participants a workable set of openings through which the larger question of living together can be explored.
In Athens, the sanctuary appeared within a public exhibition. Later in 2025, the Yenwa Gallery presentation in Lagos brought it to the African continent. The gallery describes large photographs, drawings, a hand-woven tapestry, film, VR and AR as parts of the environment. The move in location mattered to the work’s meaning. A participatory artwork that invites visions of African futures should meet audiences on the continent as well as in European institutions. Gam described the Lagos presentation as a return toward ancestral knowledge and present-day tools.
The sanctuary’s methods also challenge the assumption that futures work belongs only to specialists who produce forecasts. A participant may enter with no training in planning, technology or policy. They can still speak about how they hope to eat, love or live in relation to others. The installation gives that speech a ritual frame. In a standard exhibition, the audience often receives the completed artwork. Here the invitation to reflect and respond becomes part of the work’s life.
Gam’s MIT Open Documentary Lab interview explains his research interest in how people of African descent envision the future. It is a broad question, but the sanctuary gives it an embodied method. Rather than asking participants to choose between a list of technological predictions, it begins with desired conditions of life. The artist’s use of digital tools follows the question instead of determining it. Film, avatar and virtual space make the ritual shareable across sites, while the responses remain grounded in human concerns.
Afropolis and the invented everyday
Gam was building inhabited speculative worlds before these recent installations. His Afropolis project imagined a cosmopolitan African city, with a fictional couple, the Affogbolos, as hosts. A 2015 account in Le Monde Afrique describes a vibrant visual language that joins fashion, music-video graphics and African and Asian references. The couple helped give an imagined urban culture an everyday scale. A viewer could enter an invented home rather than confront a grand statement about “Africa” as though a continent had a single style or future.
The fictional household is a clever device because domestic choices are never merely decorative. Furniture, dress and images suggest what people buy, preserve, admire and pass on. The imagined couple let Gam stage those choices without claiming to document a real family. A visitor can see a possible African modernity through the texture of a home. The future appears in habits of living, not only in machines or monumental architecture.
In the 2015 London presentation described by OkayAfrica, the couple’s home became a framework for contemporary art, design and craft from Africa and the diaspora. The project challenged the familiar display in which objects from different places are gathered under a broad regional label but kept apart from a living setting. Fiction created a room where they could be placed in relation. That room was imagined, but the cultural forms within it were real work by makers with their own practices.
This early emphasis on the lived environment continues in The House We Dreamed. The later project gives its future family voices and panoramic windows, while Afropolis had a couple whose life organized an exhibition. In both cases, Gam resists the empty futuristic city. A world has to be inhabited. The choice of host or family tells a visitor where to stand and whose routine can reveal the larger system.
Recalling Thomas Sankara
Gam took a different approach to time in SANKARA: The Upright Man, a body of work about the Burkinabé revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara. ART AFRICA’s account describes photography, pixel art and other digital and material techniques arranged around three movements: miracles, betrayal and resurrection. The series returned to a historical figure rather than placing an invented family in a future city. It asked what memory of political possibility could do in the present.
The title’s resurrection is an artistic device, not a literal historical claim. Sankara’s life and death are matters of record; his continuing symbolic life is the work’s subject. Pixel art can give a contemporary visual vocabulary to an older political history. Photography can hold traces of places and people. By bringing those forms together, Gam avoids presenting history as a sealed archive. He asks how an image of revolutionary action might remain active for those confronting their own moment.
The ART AFRICA essay uses Afropresentism to describe the project, emphasizing the presence of future-making in today’s use of inherited political ideas. That term makes an important distinction from the easy treatment of every African speculative image as Afrofuturism. SANKARA draws energy from a particular historical person and a particular project of national change. Its imagination is directed toward what remains possible in the present after a leader’s death. The work does not need to place Sankara in an invented century to make his ideas relevant to a future.
Gam’s shifting methods show why one movement label cannot explain every project. SANKARA works through political memory; The Sanctuary of Dreams organizes collective imagination; The House We Dreamed gives that imagination an inhabited setting. The movement between archive, ritual and world-building is deliberate. He treats memory as raw material that can be activated differently depending on the audience and the question.
The future as a shared room
In The House We Dreamed, the visitor has to choose a door. The choice is simple but changes their position from distant spectator to participant in a structure of possibilities. They may enter through food or love, through the mind’s work of dreaming or the body’s need for play. Inside, a family’s voices and a city’s panorama prevent the question from remaining general. The imagined future belongs to people who have meals, relationships and memories.
Gam’s work has a useful parallel in Krull’s conversation with Josephine Marie Godwyll of the Ghana Hackers Club. Godwyll works within present-day technology and community practice; Gam builds speculative spaces where communities can name the conditions they want. Both make clear that technology is shaped by choices about participation. A device or digital environment gains meaning through the people invited to use it and the purposes they bring.
The virtual garden, then, is less an escape hatch than a place to begin asking. A city window shows a possible Abuja, but the sound of the future family makes it a place someone has to live. The woven tapestry can hold that city in a material object, while augmented reality lets it move again. Gam’s strongest gesture is to refuse to leave the future as a picture completed on behalf of others. He builds a house with doors, and the work stays open to the dreams that enter.