Annotations cc: Dominique Petit-Frère

Dominique Petit-Frère is the founder and director of Limbo Museum, a decentralized cultural institution operating within unfinished and abandoned structures, with its origins in Accra. Through architecture, art, and curatorial practice, she reframes incompletion as a site of possibility—where existing spaces can be reactivated to hold questions of spatial justice, collective imagination, and future inheritance. 

Anoe: Your work sits between disciplines and places. I’d like to begin by inviting you to introduce yourself, in your own way.

Dominique: I am a first-generation New Yorker, born to Ghanaian and Haitian parents. From a young age, I traveled frequently to Ghana, and during those visits I witnessed the country’s rapid urban growth alongside the many unfinished buildings left in its wake. I became deeply aware of how development was unfolding physically, often in fragments. Wanting to contribute to socioeconomic progress across Africa, I went on to study international development. While conducting research in Ghana for my master’s thesis, I began to question the dominant narratives around development, which often felt disconnected from lived realities on the ground. I started looking at the city through a spatial lens, asking how incomplete structures could be reimagined rather than erased. That shift led me to spatial justice and to architecture as a tool for development. For me, architecture is not just about building. It is about creating equitable, culturally grounded spaces that enable community, agency, and long term transformation.

A: I intended to ask how your background and lived experiences have shaped your work, and hearing your response, it’s clear how deeply they  have. You’ve spoken about engaging with incomplete spaces, which is reflected in how Limbo Museum sits within the city. It sustains absence as an intentional condition.

D: When people think of the built landscape in Africa, it is often framed as a place of scarcity. It’s defined by vernacular traditions and hyper-modern projects that demand immense capital and resources. I am interested in shifting the conversation from scarcity to abundance—valuing the materials, structures, and spaces at hand.

In Ghana, public spaces are limited, and when they exist, they are often inaccessible or poorly maintained. Abandoned or incomplete urban sites, however, become vital gathering points. At Limbo, we use art as a form of soft power to reveal that potential, helping people imagine what these spaces could become, and opening new ways of inhabiting and engaging with the city.

A: Limbo Museum operates with a deep trust in its surroundings. A trust that  extends beyond the physical space: it affirms the capacity of communities to reimagine their environment, cultivating  practices of care, experimentation, and collective possibility. How does the museums’s program bring these ideas to life?

D: Limbo Museum is a global site rooted in Accra, and in many ways we are radical in rethinking what an institution can be. We do not rely on traditional markers such as doors, windows or a fixed collection. Our approach is decentralized, emphasizing the abundance of potential sites across the city rather than a single location.

The museum operates on two main tracks. First, a residency program where invited artists respond directly to the museum’s architecture, developing exhibitions that emerge from the local context. Second, a teaching lab developed with the AA Visiting School, which introduces a new form of pedagogy. It engages local students and practitioners in experimental approaches to design, architecture and spatial practice, centering learning through making, dialogue, and site-specific inquiry. Together, these programs activate spaces, cultivate creative agency and reveal the latent potential of the city itself.

A: This aspect defines the museum in architectural terms as a public space, and in a social context as a responsive  cultural institution—a living site in direct contact with climate, topography, and local rhythms. Has that been challenging?

D: Working in a ruin means working in conditions that are inherently precarious. But that is also the strength of it. The beauty lies in impermanence. What might be seen as failure becomes opportunity, a material and conceptual tool for invention and radical imagination.

A: As the founder and director of Limbo Museum, you’re also shaping its curatorial narratives. Where do you see your responsibility as a curator?

D: Limbo Museum has a founding curatorial director, Diallo Simon-Ponte, who leads the visiting artist program, and we work closely with him. At the same time, the museum as a site carries a strong curatorial premise of its own. I do not come from formal curatorial or architectural training. My background is in international development, and my practice is guided intuitively in understanding how communities can act as agents of change, shaping their environments and creating new civic infrastructures. Growing up in New York, I inherited a city layered with decades of cultural history, from the Harlem Renaissance to the mid-century abstract expressionist movements in Manhattan, through the emergence of hip-hop, and the SoHo art movements. When I look at Accra, I ask what the next century will look like and what we are putting in place now for future generations to inherit.

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Limbo Museum, 2025; On the Other Side of Languish: Reginald Sylvester II. Curated by: Diallo Simon-Ponte. Photography by: Edem J. Tamakloe

Sharjah Architecture Triennale, 2023; Super Limbo: Site-specific intervention by Limbo Accra, founded by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip, in collaboration with architect Anne-Lise Agossa and Rym Beydoun, founder of textile brand Super Yaya. Curated by Tosin Oshinowo. Photography by: Danko Stjepanovic

Portrait Photography by: Erica Ayree

Text: Anoe Melliou