About us

Kirea is a non-profit cultural organization founded in 2025 designing architectural projects to promote sustainable development.

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We build spaces. But first, we build relationships.
Kirea develops architectural and cultural projects through a process based on three steps: 

Encounter:
We actively engage with local communities, keeping an open and curious mindset.

Research:
We listen, investigate, and deepen our understanding of social and cultural dynamics through interdisciplinary research and cultural studies.

Action:
We design and build in collaboration with local communities. Our work is not about delivering ready-made solutions. It is about co-creating meaningful, lasting outcomes.

All Kirea projects are made possible through donations and collective support.

Kirea started from a few minutes of encounter on a road. Today it has become a process that connects people, resources, and places. Because sometimes change does not start from a plan. It starts from an encounter and the decision to build something together.

In June 2023, I met Keriworna.
It happened along the path that leads to the churches of Lalibela.
It was not a planned encounter.
It was not an expected encounter.
It was one of those encounters that simply happen.

Keriworna was a curious child.
I was a curious traveler.
We looked at each other, we talked, we laughed.
We did not share the same language, but we shared something simpler: curiosity.

That encounter lasted only a few minutes,
but it left something much greater behind.

I asked Keriworna for her family’s phone number, and that very evening I invited her mother to the hotel where I was staying.
Acting as a bridge between us was Habte, who helped with translation.

That evening I discovered Lalibela through the eyes of Keriworna’s family.
They told me about a life made of simplicity, spirituality, and community.
Keriworna, instead, mostly talked about school.
She talked about her dreams.

I returned to Italy.
And I kept telling that story.
To friends.
To family.
But above all, I kept telling it to myself.

Because within me a question grew:
What happens when two worlds truly meet?
Not when they observe each other.
Not when they judge each other.
But when they meet with curiosity.

Three years passed.
Three years of exchanges and reflection,
of steps forward
and steps backward,
but always with enthusiasm.

And that was how Kirea was born.

But what was Kirea’s identity?
To understand it, I returned to the root.
To that moment.
To that road.
To that encounter.

Because in that encounter there were three very simple things:
emotion,
curiosity,
and openness.

There were no schemes.
There were no expectations.
There were no prejudices.
Only two curious people.

And I understood something very simple:
difference is not a distance.
Difference is a richness.

This was the essence of Kirea.

Antonio Agresti, Founder and President of Kirea.