Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow: Design Histories between Africa and Europe 9783839442012

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Flow of Forms Forms of Flow Design Histories between Africa and Europe eds. Kerstin Pinther & Alexandra Weigand

transcript Verlag Bielefeld

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Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and Europe

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Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

Forms of Modernity Transform(n)ation Forms of Cooperation / Participation Material Morphosis Speculative Forms Ladi Kwali, Michael Cardew and a Tangled Story of ­ African Studio Pottery

27 41 55 67 83 96

Susan Mullin Vogel

Design, Development and its Legacies: A Perspective on 1970s Design Culture and its ­Anthropological Intents

110

Alison J. Clarke

Between Favela Chic and Autonomy. Design in Latin America

124

Gui Bonsiepe

The Politics of Design in Postcolonial Kenya

134

Daniel Magaziner

On the Flows of Architectural Design: The Context and Making of an Exhibition

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Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

Jules Wokam’s Aesthetics of Permeability

164

Christian Hanussek

Tracing the Quiet Cultural Activism: Laduma Ngxokolo and Black Coffee

170

Erica de Greef

Cheick Diallo: Design between Politics and Poetics

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Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

Designers’ and Artists’ Biographies Authors’ Biographies

194 202

Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and Europe Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

As a teenager, I spent my time wondering why in sci-fi movies, every ­landscape, every object I could see was Western or Asian based. I’ve finally understood that somewhere our legacy had been locked in the past, that we couldn’t be “futuristic” in the eyes of our fellow Europeans. [...] We have to look behind our shoulders, get back to our traditions, seize the best of them and shape a future with it. This without forgetting we are part of the world, totally, ­ ­unquestionably. The future is for me not only a matter of dialogue with the past, but and beyond everything a dialogue with the rest of the planet.



Kossi Aguessy

Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow takes this statement by the late Kossi Aguessy as a starting point to focus on design and design practices in Africa from a perspective of entanglements. Like many other designers, Kossi Aguessy was part of the expanding design cultures within African cities and its diasporas mainly in the UK, France and the US. What many of these designers seem to have in common is their awareness of an interconnectedness driven by education, travel and movement, as well as by digital media and the felt necessity to (re-)connect, to build upon and update local techniques, materi­ alities and aesthetics to create viable designs for the future. Contemporary product, fashion, textile and architectural designers working on the contin­ ent as well as in the diaspora rely heavily on the ability to move and mediate between places and cultures. Hence, Afropolitanism, understood with Achille Mbembe as a form of cosmopolitanism with African roots, relates the designers to the wider world, while at the same time offers a way of locating and seeing oneself.1 To speak of “Africa” within the historical and theoretical perspective on ­design is a challenging task. How is it possible to adequately capture the design developments of such an extremely heterogenous continent with its fifty-four countries, a continent also fragmented historically and culturally? How can one escape the danger of producing just another essentializing master narrative of “African Design”? Given that “traditionally” direct linguistic and conceptual pendants rarely exist, what definition of “design” can be relied on? How can narratives of design be located in a broader and larger context which, on the surface, seems national and individual? And finally – how can one make sense of the many entangled yet often asymmetric and sometimes ambivalent histories of form-finding processes between “Africa” and “Europe”? 4

Global Design Histories Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow is informed by and adheres to the recent “global turn” in design history. Whereas design, especially in the past, was solely understood as exclusive to Western Europe and the United States and fuelled by modern industrialisation, a global perspective offers a different approach.2 According to Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello and Glenn Adamson, global design history is a methodology, “one that acknowledges that design as a practice and product exists wherever there is human activity, on axes of time as well as space, and recognises the importance of writing histories that introduce the multi-sited and various nature of design practices”.3 Such a perspective does not necessarily lead to a blurred or haphazardly ­augmented design field as it is not meant to “simply” address Gestaltung activities worldwide, and thus produce another overarching meta-narrative. In keeping with the premises of a global history approach,4 it rather offers a change of ­perspective on entanglements and networks, leaving container-based paradigms of the past behind. In our case, to focus on the mobility of people, objects and ideas – on flows between Africa and Europe as well as on a south-south axis – allows for multiple yet necessarily fragmented design histories to be recognised. In this understanding, the aspect of flow refers to movement, transfer, translation, interaction, as well as a material morphosis. Our observations thus not only focus primarily on the aesthetic effects ­generated through the networking, overlapping and blending of forms, but also on the social and political dimensions of design. We consider form finding processes as the result of mutual exchanges – without dismissing the complexity and the historical depth of Africa’s many linkages within the continent and across its various contact zones over oceans and deserts. In this process, national narratives of design are also integrated into larger contexts and reveal their “global” entanglements.5 Present design practices in Africa suggest expanding the understanding of design to include practices developed from mixed economies and traditions (informal and formal, handicraft and industrial production) as well as cooperations between trained designers and the various “traditional” metiers. Such an expanded notion of design is also proposed by Vilém Flusser in his short essay About the word design.6 He considers design as a bridge between ­different fields of knowledge. According to him, design is situated between the arts, handicraft production, technology and society. Building on a linguistic philosophy, he shows that the “words design, machine, technology, ars and art are closely related to one another, one term being unthinkable without the others […]”. Such a perspective not least posits a desirable direction for research, namely investigating “traditional” notions, classifications and concepts of artefacts and design activities.7 With this research interest, we connect with contemporary debates on the artistic creativity of Africa and its diaspora. However, while previously the 5

focus was first and foremost on the fields of the visual arts, architecture and urban planning, in recent years design practices in Africa have received ­considerable attention, a development due in part to exhibitions and publications in Africa as well as in Europe and the United States either spotlighting design or seeking to present design within the context of contemporary art exhibitions.8

Emerging Platforms for Contemporary Design in Africa Although there were some early activities to promote design across the ­continent, for example, two editions of the Nigerian New Culture magazine on Art and Technology and Selby Mvusi’s contribution to the FESMAN colloquium in Dakar (1966) on the necessity of industrial design,9 the major activities and (temporary) platforms for design can be traced to the 1990s. Until today, Dak’art, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Senegal, is among the leading art events in Africa. Founded in the early 1990s, the ­second edition in 1996 already included the first Salon du design et de la créativité textile. Initiated by individual artists and designers, it presented works and products by a total of 13 designers from countries including Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Guinea. The Association des Designers Africains (ADA) was also founded in that same year. In 1998, two years later, together with the French organisation Afrique en Créations, the ADA was one of the hosts of the second Design Salon in Dakar with, among others, Cheick Diallo, Oumou Sy and Kossi Assou. Until 2004, other editions were dedicated to the topic of récuperation, the exploration and re-mixing of discarded­ material into new items, presenting works by designers including Valérie Oka (Ivory Coast), Ola Dele Kuku (Nigeria), Bounama Sall Ndiaye (Senegal) and ­Zoarinivo Razakaratrivo (Madagascar), Cheick Diallo (Mali), and Balthazar Faye (­Senegal/France). In the Design 4 People exhibition staged for Dak’art 12, Bibi Seck and Fati Ly took up this theme again, this time focusing on the kinds of informal arrangements and architectures visible in the streets of ­Dakar.10 In Europe, the Cité du Design organised the Saint-Etienne I­ nternational Design Biennale in 2004, one of the first major design events with a focus on Africa. Design: Made in Africa brought together the work of more than thirty designers from a total of 14 African countries.11 Also in the 1990s, Cape Townbased Design Indaba was launched as an annual festival and conference, linking design developments on the African continent to global design trends; from 2001 to 2011, this was complemented by the Design ­Indaba print Magazine (from 2011 onwards as an online publication) edited by Katie de Klee.12 Since then, design in Africa and its diasporas has been widely docu­mented in research and various publications as, for example, in Design ­Indaba’s recently edited volume Africa Rising. Fashion, Design and Lifestyle from Africa.13 In the introduction, de Klee tries to define some characteristics of African design “that is relevant, contextual, resourceful, expressive, and bold”.14 Stereotypical notions of African craft and design do not seem repre6

sentative of the new. One of the main concerns is fashion, an ever growing and diversifying field of design in Africa.15 Probably the most comprehensive exhibitions on design and Africa was shown in 2010 in New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-­ Hammond, The Global Africa Project explored a broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design and craft around the world.16 “Through furniture, architecture, textiles, fashion, jewelry, ceramics, and basketry, as well as selective examples of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation ­ work, the exhibition actively challenges conventional n ­ otions of a singular African aesthetic and identity, and reflects the integration of African art and design without making the usual distinctions between ‘professional’ and ‘­artisan’.”17 The exhibition was organised around several thematic ideas identified as characterising creative perspectives in Africa in the twenty-first ­century: Intersecting Cultures, Competing Globally, Sourcing L ­ ocally, Transforming Traditions, Building Communities and Branding Content. With, for instance, kimono designs from wax prints by fashion designer Serge Mouangue, originally from Cameroon and living in Japan, the show priv­ ileged approaches that represent transcultural transfers and new fusions. In a comparable way to Tapiwa Matsinde in her book Contemporary Design ­Africa,18 the Global Africa Project curators also underscored the continent’s creative output by pointing to the global circulation and adaption of African forms, patterns, and aesthetic premises. While Matsinde evokes the potential of creative traditions from Africa as a sheer “endless source of ­ideas across the world”,19 Stokes Sims and King-Hammond address, for example, by includ­ ing Hank Willis Thomas’s Scarred Chest (2003), the issue of the unquestioned exploitation of resources and motifs by international brands and businesses. In terms of the number of exhibited projects and their diversity, the Vitra Design Museum’s Making Africa. A Continent of ­C ontemporary Design also sought to present a survey of contemporary creative practices. With its f­ ocus on a young generation of African entrepreneurs, thinkers and designers, it aimed at reading Africa “as a hub of experimentation generating new approaches and solutions of worldwide relevance – and as a driving force for a new discussion of the potential of design in the twenty-first century”.20 In contrast to those exhibitions taking a broad perspective, Matsinde’s Contemporary Design Africa focused on product design and the key question of how contemporary design in Africa relates to older visual practices and ­processes of developing innovative designs.

Formflow. The Project Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow explores design histories between Africa and Europe.21 Here, the perspective of global design histories emphasises the approach of exploring historical entanglements. Taking an expanded concept of design opens up the view to diverse culturally informed design practices, also including those far removed from industrial processes. This book 7

is ­organised around five thematic strata. On a temporal axis, those periods where design played a significant role as an expression of social change are investigated in more detail. To begin with the focus is on the influence of “foreign” objects on modern design in Europe as well as the transfer of reform movement ideas in a colonial context. The years of African states ­becoming independent from the late 1950s to the 1970s are characterised by the process of design giving a form to social and political freedoms. Here, the focus shifts to the political and emancipatory aspects of the design ­activities, as well as the question of the designs produced by a nation in transformation. At present, new technologies, materials and production methods as well as transnational networks and alternative infrastructures are fuelling societal visions and speculative forms of the future, revealing both the potential for a paradigm shift as well as the downsides that may accompany technological developments. An axis exploring issues of design cooperations and the significance of the material forms a prioritised transverse trajectory to these main chronological areas. The focus on cooperations ­elucidates the social and political dimensions of design, considering designs produced through cooperation, exchange and dialogue and the flow of ­concepts, ideas and practices, while material morphosis and material as a bearer of meanings are considered as a key principle in design.

Material Matters While, for a long time, the phenomena of material morphosis in a European context were largely negatively connotated – as mere imitation, sham or Ersatz22 – they do reveal a principle underlining the meaning of “material” as a subject. Even if such associations were not unknown in Europe and are presently being updated through diverse changes in materials and media as well as skeuomorphic designs in the digital area, it is not solely due to such recent re-evaluation that it seems reasonable to privilege material (over form) but above all because the focus on “material” as an oral tradition, as a substance as well as in the textile sense appears to resonate more with classifications in Africa. Objects and artefacts there are frequently sub­ ­ divided more by their material and semantic aspects than by design.23 Non-­ material qualities are bound to material ones, certain materials are reserved for privileged groups or people, and skeuomorphic principles can be found, for instance, in wickerwork, various weaving techniques and architecture.24 That material morphosis has a particular impact in contact zones is illus­trated, for example, by Afro-Portuguese ivory works dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through contact between the West Africa kingdom of Benin or Sierra Leone and the court in Portugal. Here, the material morphosis is twofold: salt cellars, spoons, hunting and signal horns evidence, on the one hand, material translations of what were most likely metal and wooden prototypes into ivory, a new material in Europe, and, on the other, iconographic links to local “African” subjects in, for instance, various human and animal forms.25 8

In this way, materials in the widest sense represent a form of archive­ inscribed by the “historical and contemporary making, unmaking and remaking of relations between people, things, and the institutions that govern them”.26 This comprises memory and identity on a national level just as much as cultural and economic entanglements on a global level. Material mor­ phosis in this context can be read as a marker for and indicator of changes which, for example, accompany societal change, technological advances and/or new “contact zones”. In modern and contemporary design especially, material morphosis is a common principle. Such exchanges are an ­expression of modernisation, democratisation, ennoblement and re-evaluation; yet also reference innovations in materials, new production techniques and design practices in a global, transcontinental context.

Giving Form to Modern Times Forms of Modernity looks at how design movements and “foreign” things mutually influenced each other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historically, these developments can be associated with imperialism in its most intense phase. While the age of expansion fuelled new flows of goods and people, colonialisation was certainly bound up with the exploitation of new raw materials and opening up new markets. In this context, the World Fairs and colonial exhibitions provided one vehicle for the expression of industrial capitalism and imperialism. Not only did these exhibitions offer an arena where industrial nations could compare industrial production internationally, but also displayed the “Other”, often in a primitivising ­manner, and at the same time provided a starting point for advancing debates in ­aesthetics and design theory.27 While, generally speaking, even today the ­history of design in German-speaking regions assumes the autonomy of ­innovation in design – from the historical decorated form to “unadorned functional design” – some studies, in particular in France though also in England, have addressed the appropriation of African designs.28 Exhibitions such as Art Deco 1910–1939, for example, illustrate the direct influence of African models on contemporary design, with the former’s colours, geometric and abstract shapes, and exotic materials such as animal hides and furs, tropical woods, ivory and much more, not only inspiring domestic interiors, but also decorative fabrics, carpets, ceramics, jewellery and furniture.29 Thus, in relation to the World Fairs, and especially the colonial exhibitions, Victoria Rovine talks of two simultaneous impulses, “the desire to civilize (Westernize) colonial subjects, and to draw on their ‘primitive’ practices in order to enrich French culture”.30 In Die Gestaltung der Dinge and Die Polyvalenz des Primitiven, Regula Iselin traces the importance of objects and artefacts from outside Europe for the history of European design as far back as the late eighteenth century.31 In these works, she illustrates their effects on design in Europe even before the 9

first World Fairs. From the mid-nineteenth century, with expeditions in the colonial context leading to an explosion in the material and visual cultures of things, not only were non-European objects and artefacts entering the collections of the newly founded ethnological museums, but could also be found in the sample and model collections of museums of applied arts. The latter, together with the craft schools affiliated with them, were regarded as institutions for the formation of “taste”. Their exhibitions, emphasising aesthetic rather than ideological aspects, juxtaposed contemporary Europeans craft work with objects from non-European cultures, often highlighting those artefacts from outside Europe as artistically superior and exemplary of sensitivity to materials, design and the use of patterns and models.32 In Hamburg’s Völkerkundemuseum (Ethnological Museum), rubbings taken from Kuba-­ vessel evidence the appreciation and particular interest in surface design. Munich, moreover, offers an example of the close interlacing between the ethnological museum and the reform movement. Here, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnological ­Museum) took over the tasks of an applied arts museum by establishing, for instance, a room for displaying drawings and organising a design study room. In this process, the museum worked closely with the Deutscher Werkbund. This ­cooperation’s highpoint came with the 1931 special exhibition on African art, designed by renowned Munich architect Walther Schmidt, a member of the Werkbund, and staged in the New Objectivity style.33 While it is frequently impossible to prove a direct design adaption from ­African models, the Department of Ethnology at the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, today’s Brooklyn Museum, provides an especially significant example. In 1923, an exhibition was held on African art from the Belgian Congo which presented woven raffia artefacts juxtaposed with contemporary works by American designers – textiles, ­embroideries and clothing by New York producers inspired by the exhibits as well as “Congo Style” furniture from the museum’s own workshop. This transfer of exotic historical models into contemporary design was embedded in a movement intended to drive forward the independence of American textile industries from Europe. From 1916, together with the Metropolitan ­Museum of Art, the American Museum of National History and others, Morris De Camp (M.D.C.) Crawford, editor of the Women’s Wear Daily fashion journal, as well as its publisher E. W. Fairchild were committed to improving the training in industrial arts with the help of ambitious series of lectures, exhibitions, special tours for artists, technical skills courses and, last but not least, a textile design competition.34 Between 1916 and 1922, the resulting “­Designed in America” campaign involved several hundred artists and textile manufacturers who worked in close contact with museums to develop ­designs inspired by ethnographic objects and artefacts.

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Arts and Crafts in a Colonial Context While artefacts from Africa influenced reform movements in Europe calling for a shift to modernity, the arts and crafts ideas migrated above all along a colonial matrix to Africa, where they later resonated in the work of, among others, Margaret Trowell (1904–1985) in Uganda and Herbert Meyerowitz (1900–1946) in the former Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. In various ways, ­Trowell and Meyerowitz had both become familiar with reform movement ideas, the former through studying at London’s Slade School of Art and, especially, in her later classes with Marion Richardson, a pioneer of the child art movement, and the latter in his training at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts).35 Trowell, as the founder of the School of Fine Arts in the ­Uganda Protectorate in 1937, as well as Meyerowitz, who moved from the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town to Achimota College in Accra, Ghana, shared reform movement ideas and transferred some of them into the African context, in particular, the appreciation of “traditional” craftwork.36 Margaret Trowell, especially, rejected every kind of avant-garde art, seeking instead to rediscover the “natural” interlocking of art, life and spirituality which had shaped the Middle Ages. As she wrote, “the modern African background has still much in common with medieval Europe”.37 Hence, not least since she saw the local culture in a state of decline and regarded ­machine-made goods as inappropriate, she called for introducing the teaching of arts and crafts in Kampala. By 1953, she had established “studios for painting, design, sculpture, graphic design, pottery and life drawing”.38 From her published writings and some of the accompanying photographs, one can only indirectly deduce the style of the arts and craftwork produced there. The ceramic vases decorated with geometric or figurative shapes and domestic textiles, such as curtains of painted barkcloth, suggest a functional design, taking new residential contexts as their point of reference.39 In the 1950s, the Calico Printers Association (CPA) in Manchester accepted textile designs – e ­ vidently produced with some sort of hand-block printing technique – to be produced for the East African market under the trade name Makerere.40 Herbert Meyerowitz initiated a similar development, though in the field of ceramics, seeking to adapt local craft skills to modern techniques. His ­handcraft industry was intended to mass produce the pottery needed in British West Africa, especially by its colonial army. He designed a scheme to establish the West African Institute of Arts, Industries and Social Sciences and was able to open a pottery and a glazed tile production ­department in ­ ichael Cardew, Alejo, close to ­Achimota, in 1943.41 This was headed by M later director of the Abuja Pottery workshop which is the subject of a critical ­reappraisal in Susan ­Vogel’s contribution. She considers the work of Ladi Kwali, its most pro­ minent female potter, whose clay vessels translate ­“traditional” ceramics into modern expression, and discusses her gute Form as a mass-produced ­handicraft. 11

Margaret Trowell may be regarded as a highly ambivalent person, with her approach to art education in Uganda as “one aiming at the extension of colonial governmentally into the aesthetic realm”.42 Nonetheless, she was among the first western artists and writers to acknowledge the sophistication of what was then called “objects of daily use”. In writings such as African Arts and Crafts in 1937 or African Design in 1960, she brought together information and often detailed illustrations and sketches of various craft techniques, from braiding and wickerwork, textiles, pottery and embroidery to objects used for hunting or daily life.43 Her call for viewing the diverse crafts as equal was at odds with the very limited western European perspective on African art at that time. After all, as is widely known, the interest in African artefacts during colonialism was directed especially to ritual objects, such as masks or sculptures, whose special aesthetics were borrowed and appropriated by European avant-garde artists. With the exception, as mentioned above, of the reform movements, there was no interest in woven textiles, pottery ­vessels or everyday objects and ceramics, and these were only c ­ ollected as material culture with regard to ethnological theory formation. Quite some years later, Roy Sieber, one of the first African art historians in the United States, set out to identify marginalised artefacts and looked at textiles, furniture and household objects.44 His observations on the transfer and translation process in stool design are fascinating, for instance, as in his discussion of the akonkomfri from Ghana which imitates the design of a folding chair. The chair was modelled on European folding chairs as used since the seventeenth century. The Twi name akonkomfri means “praying mantis” and alludes to a special technique for a wooden joint. Sieber’s thoughts on a “mission-inspired style” as crystallised in furniture design in British West ­Africa, and then translated into many local forms, anticipates recent ideas on material morphosis and a “politics of furniture”.45 It is never a case of mech­anical replicas, he wrote, but “the models are always reinterpreted and translated into the local idiom”.46

Forms of Independence – Transforming the Nation In many parts of the African continent, the late 1950s and 1960s in particular marked a departure from colonial control and patronage and a turn towards agency and self-empowerment. Forms of freedom were being articulated in the arts and design and, especially in the fields of fashion and architecture, a new spirit was emerging and new alliances forged – for instance, within the Non-Aligned Movement or in design or architectural partnerships with (Scandinavian) countries which had no colonies in Africa.47 New trends in city ­planning and architecture sought to integrate rather than segregate local inhabitants, as had been the case in colonial urbanism. International airports and hotels were displays of independent achievements, and were even ­regarded as urban icons. A prime example is the Hôtel de l’Amitié in Bamako, Mali. 12

Fig. 1 Naira Spraycans, 2016. Special Edition by Karo Akpokiere for Kunstraum München on the occasion of the exhibition.

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Fig. 2 Cool Spot, 2016. Special Edition by Karo Akpokiere for Kunstraum München on the occasion of the exhibition.

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Fig. 3 If your Eye be Single, 2017. Special Edition by Karo Akpokiere for Kunstraum München on the occasion of the exhibition.

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Built in 1965/66 by Egyptian architect M. Ranzy Omar as a ­ result of a south-south cooperation between Modibo Keïta, Mali’s socialist president, and his Egyptian counterpart Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hotel Amitié was equipped with all the hallmarks of international standards in the 1960s – a swimming pool, casino, large park-like grounds, a congress centre and a luxurious interior design – just like other large-scale hotel complexes from the Ambassador Hotel in Accra/Ghana to the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria and the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan, renowned as an architectural icon far beyond the Ivory Coast. These and similar hotels targeted tourists as well as local elites and European expatriates. As a technopolitical project and a means of ­cultural diplomacy in the years of the Cold War,48 the media in both countries followed the construction process of the Hotel Amitié and commented on the result. Historic film footage from the Mali state broadcaster not only shows the Hotel Amitié, but also offers an almost epic insight into its ­production and the country’s industrial evolution. The footage highlights, among other things, Mali’s development and construction of its own shortwave radio broadcaster which, as a medium, has a strong legacy of dissemin­ating governmental politics and educating the masses.49 The 1960s in Mali as elsewhere were a decade of transformation, urbanisation and c­onsumerism.50 Other countries, for instance, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, were also keen on fast-track industrial development. The need for a unifying identity, which ­often went hand in hand with the call for Panafricanism, materialised in new fashion designs. Fashion pioneers such as Juliana Nortey’s “Chez J­ulie” in Accra51 or Shade Thomas-Fahm in Lagos re-evaluated older and r­ egional textile techniques, linking them to new cuts and forms and so ­mixing “African” and “Western” dress codes. Shade Thomas-Fahm opening her ­boutique – Shade´s Boutique – in the Federal Palace Hotel again underlines the import­ ance of modern hotels as meeting points and flagship venues. Aside from a new appreciation of local cultures of design, Shade Thomas-­Fahm was also seeking to establish and promote a domestic (textile) ­i­ndustry. Although little research has been conducted so far on genuine product ­design during the independence era in Africa, it is interesting to note how designers were then strongly asserting claims for an “industrial” design. In the New Culture journal which he co-founded, Demas Nwoko, sculptor, painter, architect and designer from Nigeria, defined the necessity and ­ premises of own industrial design. After a long period of being dominated by outside influences associated with the devaluation of own cultural production, he argued, artists, designers and their recipients need to be r­ e-educated: “Most contemporary African artists have found themselves strangers among their own people, because they have learnt to speak in strange tongues, articulating foreign cultural values and aesthetics.”52 A re-generation of ­ ­African art and aesthetics, Nwoko continues, must be based on older but reinvigorated artistic traditions. His affirmation of design creativity as directed to ­solving localised problems with local resources anticipated emerging design attitudes. Daniel Magaziner’s comments in his contribution to this 16

catalogue on design politics in Kenia and Selby Mvusi’s role there can ­similarly be ­applied to Demas Nwoko. With a view to a design “relevant to the new African society”,53 as called for by Nwoko, and designers working for and with newly established factories, both designers and design theorists strongly asserted the need for industrial design. Whereas Mvusi took over the position at the newly created design section at Nairobi’s University of East Africa, Nwoko founded his own institute, the African Designs ­Development Centre, in Ibadan in 1971. Images in the New Cultures issue on Art and Technology show the newly created workshops for metal and ­furniture production, as well as the first prototypes of furniture by Demas Nwoko himself. Rather than his “knocking down colonial touring chair” solely representing a clear rejection of colonial campaign furniture,54 its production just as much Nwoko’s ­experiments with materials, especially in architecture, were also ­informed by the desire to leave colonial dependences behind.

Touching the Social and Political Dimension of Design In the 1970s, design experienced another turn to the social,55 with the focus on such concepts as sustainability and design for the “developing world”. The critique in Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. Human Ecology and Social Change already anticipated the idea of social design. By calling for democratising design and aligning design solutions with “true needs”, he challenged mainstream commercial design. From both a moral and ethical perspective, he argued, we have a duty “to help the poor countries” since “we are all citizens of one global village and we have an obligation to those in need”.56 One of the objects reflecting his design theory is the Batta-Koya – the “talking teacher” – described in Alison Clarke’s contribution as a lowtech design aimed at supporting communication and educational processes in polyphone Nigeria and Kenia. Papanek’s interest in anthropology and vernacular design, evident in an extensive research library as well as a large collection of anthropological objects, bear witness to his “knowledge of ­alternative ecologies in design”.57 In Clarke’s contribution to the anthropological turn in design in the 1970s, she also outlines the institutionalisation of the one-time grass-roots movement leading to, for example, the founding of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the 1979 Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development. In a similar approach to Clarke’s discussion of India, Gui Bonsiepe’s contribution on South America supplements design histories with the development of design in the global south. Here, he elucidates the development of design in the former “periphery”58 as a dis­ cipline between, on the one hand, political instrumentalisation and, on the other, the possibility of empowerment – processes that could have been ­observed in the African context as well.

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Claudia Banz addresses social design as a “parallel history of design”59 more strongly bound to social and political crises than economic success. Crises call for reflecting on the designer’s responsibility, power relations and ­relationships of dependency as well as the value of design in itself. Active resistance against existing systems then culminates in new forms of design practices and fuels shifts in dealing with resources, production, consumption and social interaction, clearly indicating the social and political dimensions of design.60 Exhibitions such as Massive Change (2004) or Design for the Other 90% organised in 2007 by the New Yorker Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum illustrate that those d ­ esign activist positions are currently being reshaped for the twenty-first century.61 The actors in the latter ­exhibition are dubbed “social entrepreneurs” who “by actively understanding the ­available resources, tools, ­desires, and immediate needs of their potential users – how they live and work – can ­design simple, functional, and ­potentially open-source objects that will ­ enable them to become empowered, self-­ supporting entrepreneurs in their own right”.62 Through its emphasis on social and participative approaches building on Papanek’s Design for the Real World, the exhibition marked a turning point in contemporary design. In ­Design as Politics, Tony Fry also emphasises the key role of design as a p ­ owerful agent of change in overcoming the present unsustainable state of the world. However, in his view, design does not only have to be liberated from its economic function and framed politically, but requires a radical r­ ethinking, above all, in regard to the anthropocentric “nature” of the present. Here, he argues, ­design could offer a ­decisive and vibrant form of political activism.63 As Design for the Other 90% showed, forms of (development) cooperation have long ceased to be solely created on the North-South axis with the one-sided alignment dominant in the past. Instead, connections along southsouth axes are steadily growing, as are transnational networks inside Africa itself. These include, for example, the Association des Designers A ­ fricains, co-founded by Cheick Diallo, or the Kër Thiossane, Villa for Art and Media in Dakar, Senegal, opened in 2002, which additionally launched the Afropixel festival held since 2008. “The collaborative model,” as Sims and King-Hammond point out, “has certainly been instrumental in preserving t­raditional techniques and encouraging innovation, providing a market for artisans.”64 In its manifesto, the African maker movement offers a clear statement of its independence: “We will remake Africa with our own hands”.65 The movement, initiated by Emeka Okafor with the Maker Faire Africa, was established as a transnational network in 2009, with the fair held in a number of African cities by 2014. More recent cooperations include The Nest Collective, a multidisciplinary collective based in Nairobi, Kenya, which addresses a spectrum from fashion to the visual arts, music and film, and has long ­established an international network. Moreover, the cosmopolitan location of many designers such as Cheick Diallo or Jules Wokam, whose cross-genre design is the subject of Christian Hanussek‘s contribution, is already evident in international educational careers and the design exchange between Africa and Europe. 18

Dreaming New Spaces: Speculative Forms and African Futurism Speculative design, which relies on the potential of design to fuel the imagin­ ation, has been proposed and advocated in the writings of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.66 Here, the aim is not to read design in the sense of problem solving (as was still the case in the social design of the 1970s) and create the related objects, but to use design as a vehicle to imagine how things could be different and posit possible futures.67 The new perspectives this opens up facilitate a critique of accepted approaches and attitudes as well as a future that is merely a linear extension of the present. Speculative design aims to challenge the status-quo of social conditions and to bring into existence something hitherto seemingly unreal: “The skill is making links between ­today’s world and the suggested one”.68 In an African context, speculative design merges with Afrofuturism, a techno-­ cultural movement originating in the 1950s and aligning itself with futuristic approaches to music, literature and art. The historical experiences of a black diaspora in North America materialised in science fiction, cyber culture, and in a futuristic aesthetic and iconography interlinking androids and aliens with African mythologies and cosmologies. Afrofuturism deals with specula­ tive futures, opening up new spaces for its own historical location, emancipation and empowerment.69 For some years now, Afrotech or African futurism70 has attracted greater attention on the African continent itself. In this frame, there has been a rediscovery of an earlier enthusiasm for space travel, as in the Zambian space programme conceived by Edward Manuka Nkoloso and updated by designs such as Kossi Assou’s Triangle Table (2003), which through its very peculiar triangle shape fuses the practice of sitting at a low height with a space-age design. In addition, after Afrofuturism’s migration to the “motherland”, new topics have emerged such as sustainable futures or ecological debates. Here, as works by Jean Katambayi Mukendi or Michael MacGarry show, speculative design can also take the form of a critique of a predatory exploiting of nature and the exploitation of raw materials by international companies. Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) is an especially poignant example of Afrofuturism translated back to Africa, and its own rich and diverse practices of storytelling. In her view, Afrofuturism has always been part of (East) African cultures, especially through its divination techniques and fortune-telling in this sense not only influences the present, but also imagines possible futures.71 In terms of the (Western) idea of technology being the key to social and ­evolutionary progress, the twenty-first century has much to offer. In 2008, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Design and the Elastic Mind explored the future potential of such innovative technologies as nanotechnology, robotics, bio technology, genetic engineering, and computer-controlled ­ ­fabrication technologies, including 3D printing. The exhibition highlighted “current examples of successful design translations of disruptive scientific 19

and technological innovations, and reflects on how the figure of the designer is changing from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality”.72 Given that the history of design is very much characterised by technological innovation, speculative forms can also be linked to the ­maker movements and the potential of 3D printing. Bearing in mind the weak industrial production in many parts of the African continent, could we ­expect a 3D-printing “revolution” – a radical change equivalent to the ground-­ breaking advent of video technologies and cell phones in the 1990s? Here, then, speculative forms are forms of empowerment and emancipation often bound to existential requirements and emerging strongly where urban infrastructures are lacking. In response to the continent’s ­growing digitalisation and connectivity, new technical devices, apps and other digital solutions are produced.73 In this context, smart devices are launched as democratizing devices and, hence, are designed to instigate social change. Other works speculate about the future of materials and new circuits of resources, e ­ nergy, and alternative economies. What they have in common is a strong wish for authentic agency and real self-empowerment, which according to Achille Mbembe “engenders a return to local knowledge systems and at the same time incites a willingness to experiment”. African-­inspired future thinking also takes into consideration former cultures of technology as m ­ anifested in the Ifa oracle of the Yoruba in Nigeria and other divination systems, or ­fractals as self-similar scalings in architecture and city layouts in West Africa, or the “performed mathematics” in sand drawings by the Chokwe of Angola.74 In this sense, African futurism aims to link t­raditional knowledge with ­hypothetical considerations of the future. In her contri­bution, Erica de Greef reads the design approach of South African fashion labels Laduma Ngxokolo and Black Coffee as linked with inner space rather than bound to other space – design as cultural activism setting out to make one’s own cultural heritage and knowledge fit for the future. The potential of design thus does not solely lie – in Flusser’s image – in building a bridge between various spheres of knowledge and disciplines, but also between the past, present and future.

Acknowledgements The Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and ­Europe research and exhibition project could only be realised thanks to the enthusiasm of numerous institutions and project partners. Financed by the Federal Cultural Foundation’s TURN Fund, the project was also supported by the City of Munich Department of Arts and Culture and the Friends of the Institute of Art History at the LMU Munich as well as the museums and art spaces involved. In Munich, Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and Europe was shown in the Architekturmuseum of the TU München / Pinakothek der Moderne, in the Museum Fünf Kontinente, in the 20

Kunstraum München and the rooms of the Galerie Wimmer. We would ­especially like to thank Anne Fleckstein and Uta Schnell, Andres Lepik, ­Stefan Eisenhofer and Karin Guggeis for their fruitful and constructive cooperation. Our thanks also go to Gundi Schillinger for the graphic design, and to Hanne Rung for the exhibition architecture. We would also like to thank students at the Institute of Art History at the LMU Munich, in particular Ronja Merkel, Zoe Schoofs, Mareike Schwarz, Jana Katharina Walter, Niklas Wolf and Nicola Zierhut, for the research and ­discussions accompanying the development of this project from the initial idea to the final ­implementation. Our curatorial assistants Agnes Stillger and Katharina Ehrl have contributed to the realisation of this project with ­unflagging ­enthusiasm and commitment. For their support in Hamburg, we would especially like to thank Carl Triesch, Sofia Vogelhaupt, Nadine Wagner and Julia Dombrowski. This publication has been made possible by generous funding from the ­Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung, and for his support here we would especially like to thank Thomas Kempf. This volume is published with the intention of documenting, but also augmenting the Munich exhibition; it appears on the occasion of its presentation in an expanded form in the ­Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg under the new Executive Director Barbara Plankensteiner who, with her expertise, was a valuable addition to the curatorial team for that show. We would also like to thank all those, above all the designers and artists, as well as the authors contributing to the catalogue, for their productive and inspiring cooperation. Our thanks go especially to Cheick Diallo, our project partner in Bamako, Mali. In the run-up to the exhibition, we worked with him to organise a workshop in Bamako held together with Cucula. Refugees Company for Crafts and Design. We are also looking forward to our upcoming mutual film project on Bamako’s architectural and design history.

1 Achille Mbembe 2007, Afropolitanism, in: Simon Njami et al. (eds.), Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Johannesburg, pp. 26–29 2 Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936) offers a prime example of such a linear narrative focused on individual designers. 3 Sarah Teasley, Giorgio Riello, Glenn Adamson (eds.) 2011, Introduction: Towards a global design history, in: Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, Sarah Teasley (eds.), Global Design History, London, pp. 1–10, here p. 3 4

Sebastian Conrad 2016, What is Global History?, Princeton New Jersey

5 Dipti Bhagat, though, points to the borders of the global concept and warns of over-empha­ sising “vast, abstract conceptions of the ‘global’” and “metanarratives that enfold global history into the history of the modern west” (especially when the term design is used in an eurocentric way) as “the history of Africa’s long-distance connections is older, and differently sited, than its history of connections with Europe”. Dipti Bhagat 2016, Design on/in Africa, in: Kjetil Fallan, Grace Lees-Maffei (eds.), Designing World: National Histories in an Age of Globalization, London, pp. 25–27, 29, 38 6 Vilém Flusser 2013 (1999), About the word design, in: Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design, London, pp. 17–21, here p. 18

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7 See the text on Cheick Diallo in this volume, and for the arts context Rowland Abiodoun 2014, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, New York. 8 For example, as was the case at Africa Remix. Contemporary Art of A Continent (2004), curated by Simon Njami and Jean-Hubert Martin, where the reading room was fitted out with prototype furniture by Cheick Diallo and Balthazar Faye. 9

See Daniel Magaziner’s contribution in this volume.

10 See Kerstin Pinther 2013, Design in Africa, in: Karin-Simone Fuhr et al. (eds.) Die Geschichte des nachhaltigen Designs, Bad Homburg, pp. 318–327 11 A broad spectrum of products was on display: objects of daily use – furniture, urban inventory, graphic design, body jewellery. Made in Africa was a touring exhibition and existed in a dual edition; while the exhibition in Africa was supplemented by current design positions at the sites where it was shown, the other edition toured Europe, the USA and Canada. 12 http://www.designindaba.com/about-design-indaba retrieved 12 December 2017. Apart from Design Indaba, there are a wide range of digital media platforms, blogs und websites, generating knowledge in the field: a most recent example is the IAM. Intense Art Magazine, dedicated to Art, Women and Africa with special editions so far on Senegal, Cameron and Nigeria. Also see the blog http://www.iam-africa.com, retrieved 12 December 2017. 13 Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, Vanessa Obrecht and Design Indaba (eds.) 2016, Africa Rising. Design and Lifestyle from Africa, Berlin 14 Katie de Klee 2016, An exploration of practical product design in Africa, in: Robert Klanten, Sven Ehmann, Vanessa Obrecht and Design Indaba (eds.), Africa Rising. Design and Lifestyle from Africa, Berlin, pp. 9–13 15 Since the spectrum of literature and research is correspondingly broad, only a few selected publications are mentioned here: Victoria Rovine 2014, African Fashion, Global Style. Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You Can Wear, Indiana; Helen Jennings 2011, New African Fashion, Munich et al. Jennings is also the founder of the Arise Magazine and now of the online platformhttp://nataal. com/african-catwalk/, retrieved 12 December 2017. 16 Lowery Stokes Sims, Leslie King-Hammond (eds.) 2010, The Global Africa Project, New York 17 http://madmuseum.org/press/releases/global-africa-project-explores-impact-african-visual-culture-contemporary-art-craft, retrieved 12 December 2017 18 Tapiwa Matsinde 2015, Contemporary Design Africa, London 19 Ibid. p. 9 20 https://www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions/detailpages/making-africa.html?desktop=1%255c%2527a%253d0; Mateo Kries, Amelie Klein (eds.) 2015, Making Africa. A Continent of Contemporary Design, Weil am Rhein 21 This present volume is the result of the eponymous research and exhibition project organised by the authors and financed by the Federal Cultural Foundation’s TURN Fund and with the support of the city of Munich’s Municipal Department of Arts and Culture and the Friends of the Institute of Art History at the LMU Munich. 22 This dates back to the discussion on the “lapse of taste in the arts and crafts” often associated with the ersatz system which had its heyday in the late nineteenth century. Gert Selle 1994, Geschichte des Designs in Deutschland, Frankfurt, p. 51 23 See, for example, the film In and Out of Africa (1991) by Christopher B. Steiner, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor. See also Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammon on the importance of the “cultural assemblages of various materials” in contemporary design. “The choice of materials and their particular configuration was not gracious and could have a content and significance that went beyond face value”; see Global Africa Project, p. 15, for more details, pp. 21, 23, 26 24 Jan Vansina 1984, Art History in Africa, London, pp. 56, 83. Among other things, he refers to incised calabashes imitated in wood. In her study on Anatomy of Architecture. Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression Suzanne Preston Blier (1984) discusses skeuomorphism as one among other ”devices“ used to transport cosmogonic narratives or, in general, abstract cultural beliefs. 25 William B. Fagg 1959, AfroPortuguese Ivories, London and Ezio Bassani and William B. Fagg 1988, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory, New York 26 Nina Sylvanus 2016, Patterns in Circulation, Chicago, p. 5 27 See for example Gudrun M. König 2009, Konsumkultur. Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900, Vienna et al., Jonathan Woodham, Images of Africa and Design at the British Empire Exhibitions between the Wars, Journal of Design History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1989), pp. 15–33 Saloni Mathur 2007, India by Design. Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley et al. One of the few emancipatory and critical project at a World Fair was W.E.B Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes. African Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. His exhibition showed, among other things, 32 modernist-like handmade charts and infographics. See Eugene F.

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Provenza Jr. 2013, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes. African Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, New York et al. 28 On the history of design in Germany and the major strands in the reform movements, Gerd Selle 2007, Die Geschichte des Designs in Deutschland, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 78, 95, 99 29 Ghislaine Wood 2003, Collecting and Constructing Africa, in: Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, Ghislaine Wood (eds): Art Deco 1910–1939, London, pp. 203–204. See also Hanna Kiefer 2006, Art deco – Afro Deco – Black Deco, in: Tobias Wendl, Bettina von Lintig, Kerstin Pinther (eds.): Black Paris – Kunst und Geschichte einer schwarzen Diaspora, Wuppertal, pp. 198–223 30 Victoria Rovine 2009, Colonialism’s Clothing: Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion, Design Issues 25/3, Design in a Global Context (Summer 2009), pp. 44–61, here p. 45 31 Regula Iselin 1996, Die Polyvalenz des Primitiven, Zürich, as well as 2012, Die Gestaltung der Dinge, Hamburg, pp. 14, 20 32 The introduction to the Flechtarbeiten exhibition in the Basel Museum of Applied Arts (1925) recommended an orientation on these foreign designs, since here “methods and forms, materials and ornamentation are mutually connected in the intimate and logical way which once formed the basis of our craft work, and which it now has to recreate with such effort” („Technik und Form, Material und Ornament in derjenigen engen und folgerichtigen Verbindung miteinander stehen, die einst die Grundlage unseren Kunstgewerbes war, und die es sich jetzt wieder mit Mühe schaffen muss”). H. Kienzle, quoted in Regula Iselin 2012, p. 85 33 Regula Iselin 1996, Die Polyvalenz des Primitiven, Basel, comprehensively discussed in Alexandra Weigand 2016, Afrikanische Kunst im Display der Moderne, Munich (unpublished MA thesis). The most recent research shows that the Werkbund too, in particular through its presenta­ tion of a “colonial farmstead“, a model farm for the German colonies at its 1914 Cologne exhibition, desired to be a part of the colonial project. Itohan Osayimwese 2017, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, Pittsburg. 34 Lauren D. Whitley 1998, Morris De Camp Crawford and the “Designed in America“ Campaign, 1916–1922, in: Textile Society of America Proceedings, Paper 215, pp. 410-414, see http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/215 35 On Trowell see Elsbeth Joyce Court: Margaret Trowell and the Development of Art Education in East Africa, in: Art Education Vol. 38, No. 6 (November 1985), pp. 35–41 and for a more critical review Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa 2014, Margaret Trowell’s School of Art. A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation, in Susanne Stemmler (ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen, Munich, pp. 101–122. 36 See Rhoda Woets 2014: The recreation of modern and African art at Achimota School in the Gold Coast (1927–52), The Journal of African Studies 55/3, pp. 445–465 37 Margaret Trowell 1957, African Tapestry, London, pp. 127/128 38 Ibid. 21 39 Ibid. 65, 46 40 Ibid. 127 41 Herbert Meyerowitz 1943, The Institute of West African Arts, Industries, and Social Science, Man 43 (Sep.-Oct.), pp. 112–114 42 Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa 2014, Margaret Trowell’s School of Art. A Case Study in Colonial Subject Formation, in: Susanne Stemmler (ed.), Wahrnehmung, Erfahrung, Experiment, Wissen, Munich, pp. 101–122 43 Margaret Trowell 1937, African Arts and Crafts, London. This book was the result of her research into the collections at Kampala Museum. See also her African Design, published in 1960 in London 44 Roy Sieber 1972, African Textiles and Decorative Arts, New York; Roy Sieber 1980, African Furniture and Household Objects, Bloomington. Even today, museums attempt to present “African design“ by showing examples of stools and chairs from Africa. These include, for instance, Sandro Bocola, Elio Bassani, Vitra Design Museum (eds.) 1995, African seats, Weil am Rhein; Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau 2012, Design en Afrique. S’asseoir, se Couchen et rêver, Paris, an exhibition at the Musée Dapper, Paris on ‘traditional’ furniture, supplemented by recent design positions. 45 Fredie Floré, Cammie McAtee (eds.) 2017, The Politics of Furniture: Identity, Diplomacy and Persuasion in Post-War Interiors. London, including on Africa Johan Lagae, Nomadic Furniture in the “Heart of Darkness”: Colonial and Postcolonial Trajectories of Modern Artefacts To and From Tropical Africa 46 Roy Sieber 1994, Möbelkultur zwischen Tradition und Kolonisation, in: Afrikanische Sitze, Munich et al., pp. 31–37, here p. 37 47 But Scandinavian countries also participated in these “development projects“, mainly in East Africa, see the exhibition Forms of Freedom: African Independence and Nordic Models, 14th Architecture Biennale Venice, 2014

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48 Mohamed Elshahed 2015, Building the Nation. Architecture and Foreign Policy in PostIndepend­ence Africa, in: Mirjam Shatanawi, Wayne Modest (eds.), The Sixties: A Worldwide Happening, Eindhoven. pp. 152–161 49 Modibo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ywz_8ffKMQ http://www.ina.fr/video/CAF93032020/mali-video.html retrieved 17 December 2017 50 Bianca Murillo 2012, The Modern Shopping Experience’. Kingsway Department Store and Consumer Politics in Ghana, Africa (82)3: 368–392 51 See Christopher Richards 2016, “The Models for Africa.” Accra’s Independence-Era Fashion Culture and the Creations of Chez Julie, African Arts 49/3, pp. 8–21, as well as Jean Allman (ed.) 2004, Fashioning Africa. Power and the Politics of Dress, Bloomington 52 New Culture Viewpoint 1979, Design in Nigerian Industry, in: New Culture. Magazine for Contemporary African Art, June 1979, pp. 1–3, here p. 1/2 53 Ibid. p. 3 54 Demos Nwoko is not that far removed from the Bengal movement as an alternative form of development as advocated / pursued by Mahatma Ghandi in the Bengal homemade campaign with its motto of self-sufficiency through small scale production. On Nwoko see John Godwin & Gilian Hopwood 2007, The Architecture of Demas Nwoko, Lagos. 55 The vision of design as capable of changing society was a determining characteristic of the modern reform movements, from the arts and crafts movement, to Jugendstil, the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. 56 Victor Papanek 1985 (first published New York 1971), Design for the Real World. Human Ecology and Social Change, London 1985 / Shenzhen 2011, S. xviii–xix 57 Alison Clarke 2010, The Anthropological Object in Design. From Victor Papanek to Superstudio, in Clarke (ed.), Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century, Vienna 58 The categories “centre“ and “periphery“ are set in inverted commas here to avoid perpetuating the unequal power relations which gave rise to them. 59 Banz, Claudia 2016, Social Design: Gestalten für die Transformation der Gesellschaft, Bielefeld, pp. 13–14 60 Claudia Banz talks of social design as design activism – which has experienced nothing short of a boom in the second decade of the twenty-first century and seems omnipresent, see Banz 2016. 61 https://www.designother90.org/about/ retrieved 17 December 2017. In the context of the exhibition, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum created the largest network yet for social design activities, see Banz 2016, p. 19 62 Cynthia E. Smith / Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum: Design for the Other 90%, Exh. Cat., New York 2007, p. 6. In the subsequent exhibition, the problematic title was altered to “Design with the Other 90%”. The participative approach is quite clear in the projects shown. Examples from Africa are, for instance, Solar Aid (p. 75) or the Pot-in-Pot Cooler (p. 79) initiated by locals and developed with those affected and/or local artisans. Other projects such as the Kenya Ceramic Jiko, launched by international aid organisations, were designed with the assistance of local women’s organisations and artisans (p. 103). 63 Tony Fry 2011, Design as Politics, Oxford, New York, pp. vii–xi 64 Lowery Stokes Sims, Leslie King-Hammond (eds.) 2010, The Global Africa Project, New York, p. 32 65 http://makerfaireafrica.com/maker-manifesto/, retrieved 30 December 2017 66 Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby 2013, Speculative Everything. Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Cambridge MA 67 Ibid. p. 2 68 Ibid. p. 2 69 Marc Dery coined the term Afrofuturism: Marc Dery 1993, Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 92. 4, pp. 735-778. For an updated discussion see Sandra Jackson, Julie E. Moody-Freeman (eds.) 2011, The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative, New York, for Afrofuturism in the arts see The Shadow took Shape, an exhibition and catalogue organised by the Studio Museum Harlem, New York in 2013. 70 Artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum argues that African futuristic approaches should be labelled as “African futurism“, since they have changed tremendously via their re-migration to the African continent and thus mirror an explicit African perspective: See Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum 2013, Afro-mythology and African Futurism: The Politics of Imagining and Methodologies for Contempor­ ary Creative Research Practices”, in: Para-doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. Africa SF, 25, pp. 119–136. For more on afro tech and the digitals arts see http://fakugesi.co.za/#blog (retrieved 22 December 2017).

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71 Wanuri Kahiu. “Afrofuturism in popular culture”, TEDxNairobi (14.09.2012). http://www.you-tube. com/watch?v=PvxOLVaV2YY, retrieved 22 December 2017 72 Paola Antonelli 2008, Design and the Elastic Mind, Exh. Cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 17 73 For more on this see Keller Easterling 2016 (first 2014), Broadband, in: Keller Easterling, Extra state craft. The power of infrastructure space, London, pp. 95–136. On Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention see the booklet of the eponymous exhibition, organised by Inke Arns and the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund in 2017. 74 Ron Eglash 1999, African Fractals. Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, New Brunswick et al., Tegan Bristow 2016, Access to Ghosts, in: Lien Heidenreich-Seleme and Sean O’Toole (eds.), African Futures. Thinking about the Future in Word and Image, Bielefeld/Berlin, pp. 207–220

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FORMS OF MODERNITY

Forms of Modernity invoke the beginning of the 20th century to correct the myth of independent form finding in modern design. While the importance of objects from Africa and Oceania for artists of the European avant-garde is widely recognised, they have been ignored within the context of applied arts until now. However, the inclusion of non-European objects in the design process can be traced back to the end of the 18th century: with the increasing expansion of industrial exhibitions, the first museums of applied arts, which also integrated non-western objects in their collections, arose in the ­mid-19th century parallel to ethnological museums. These were displayed together with contemporary designs and served as visual aids for new formal ­assemblages during educational training. Although African art and the design avant-garde in Germany are normally not considered together, r­eferences to the inclusion of African cultural heritage in the form-finding processes of modernism can be found in connection with the Deutscher Werkbund, which was founded in Munich in 1907. The Hagener industrialist Karl Ernst Osthaus played a prominent role here, not only in terms of the reception of African art in Germany in general, but also for the appreciation of (North)African and “Islamic” forms in applied art. The example of the State Museum of Ethno­logy in Munich also underlines the interweaving of ethnological museums and the modernisation of applied arts. The museum did not only assume the task of an applied arts museum during the first decades of the 20th century, but also through its collaboration with the members of the Werkbund ­contributed to the finding process of the “new” form. On the one hand, African forms flowed into the reformist modernisation movements in Europe, on the other hand, the ideas of these movements have been mirrored in Africa. Even the ideas of the British arts and crafts movement to preserve and promote traditional craftsmanship was transferred in the process of colonial art education, as with Herbert Vladimir ­Meyerowitz at Achimota College in Accra, Ghana or by Margaret Trowell at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda. Although these beginnings of an ­institutional art education in Africa represented an important contribution to the connection of market demands with local, handcrafted artistic production, today it is necessary to question the lack of self-reflection among the primarily European faculty, particularly in regard to paternalistic attitudes, primitivist guidelines, and colonial power relations. The ambivalent appropriation and transference of African forms during the time of modernism is ­often critically reflected in the contemporary design of Africa, as well as Europe. Designers refer to historical and contemporary interactions and ­ ­migration flows, but also the re-appropriation of form takes place, which ­reverses the one-sided absorption of African forms in primitivism.

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© Museum Fünf Kontinente, München

SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF AFRICAN ART, BAVARIAN STATE MUSEUM FOR ETHNOLOGY ­MUNICH (STAATLICHES ­MUSEUM FÜR VÖLKERKUNDE MÜNCHEN), 1931 The problematically titled exhibition African Negro Art and its Relationship to High Culture (Afrikanische Negerkunst und ihre Beziehung zur Hochkultur) took place in the summer of 1931. It showed the significant African art collection of the Swiss collector Han Coray, who began collecting due to his affili­ ­ ation with Dada Zürich. In addition to masks and sculptures, his collection also included textiles and everyday objects that he classified in the style of applied art collections. The Africanist and Benedict priest Meinulf Küsters assumed the scholarly ­supervision of the exhibition, while Walther Schmidt – an architect and commissioner of public works – ­undertook the exhibition design. Schmidt had been an active figure in the Deutscher Werkbund since the 1920s and by 1931 was among the most important repre­ sentatives of Neues Bauen (New Building) in Germany. Schmidt’s ­primary ­concern for the exhibition’s design was emphasising the “elem­ entary” nature of form. The direct mounting of the ­ exhibits on the white walls of the space, unframed and not placed ­ behind glass, allowed­direct contact to their materiality. Geometric linearity, the verticals and horizontals that invisibly structured the room, determined the positioning of the work. The ribbon-like hanging took up the reduced-functional lines of window hinges typical

of the Neues Bauen architecture and the principle of sequencing gestures towards the seriality of the industrial age. With the wall-filling arrangement of textiles in the first room and the tableau-like character of the hanging in the niche in the second room, the exhibition had the effect of a walk-in model-collection or sample book. When passing through the exhibition, the visitors were not only spectators, but also became physically involved in a staging of the collection, which made the nature of colour, form, ornament, ­ material and technique perceptible in its individual objects. Despite the title, the show can nonetheless be seen as a groundbreaking and ahead of its time because of its claim to connect scholarly and aesthetic approaches. In this exhibition, the ­ interconnections between ethnology and applied arts show how import­ ant the role of the Munich Mu­ seum under the direction of Lucian Scherman played in the modernisation movement. Considering the lack of a genuine applied arts museum, the “applied arts orientation” was significant. It manifested itself in the creation of a drawing room, as well as in the converted exhibition display, which showed individual objects in product groups by category, highlighted their material prop­ erties, and exposed formal design.

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© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Text: Mareike Schwarz

KARL ERNST OSTHAUS Applied Art in the Photographienund Diapositivzentrale, Photographs 1916–1924 Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921) was a patron, art theorist, and influential protagonist in the Deutscher Werkbund. He founded both the Museum Folkwang and the Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Ge­ werbe. Osthaus is regarded as a key figure for the European reception of African objects, which he began collecting at the beginning of the ­ 20th century. Influenced by Alois Riegel’s concept of “Kunstwollen”, Osthaus relied on the intrinsic, aesthetic qualities of objects and, ­ with his unreserved assessment of non-European art, was ahead of the western-hegemonically shaped perspective of his time. His contribution lies in a significant revaluation of non-European art through making his collection visible for a general public in an unbiased context. In ­doing so, he made a substantial contribution to the renewal movements of modernism and to their search for “good” form. The photographs shown here come from the Photographienund Diapositivzentrale that he founded in 1910 in collaboration with the Deutscher Werkbund and the Berlin photographer and publisher Franz Stoedtner. As a division of the Deutsches Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, the project was intended as an image archive for modern art and architecture – and therefore for the dissemination of objects of “good taste”. The material was used to illustrate exhibitions, publications, ­ and lectures organised by the ­Werkbund. The culturally ­optimistic

outlook of the young Osthaus, which he shared with his ­contemporaries at the Deutscher Werkbund, manifested itself in his commitment to modernise applied arts by gazing beyond the European horizon. ­Photographed from all sides, with a particular focus on crafted details and often in serial ­arrangement, the images should serve as exemplary visual material. The images come from the period between 1916 and 1924 and were primarily ­photo­graphed in ­ German ethnological ­museums, but also in other ­European countries. In this context, it is also important that African objects in applied arts collections are not ­ connected to and exhibited with ­ historical objects, but rather with ­ contemporary craft.

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“The earthy smell of things” (Der Erdgeruch der Dinge) was supposedly a favourite expression of Justus Brinckmann, the founding director of the Museum of Art and Design Hamburg. This emphasised the anchoring in culture and his­ tory, which he considered decisive for the understanding and study of the applied arts. With this cultural-­ historical approach, which arranged the classification of art objects according to historical epochs and not by material or technology, Brinckmann approached the customary means of presenting cultures and regions in ethnological museums at that time. He explained himself in 1894: “One will turn away from an installation that sacrifices a natural, lively connection between things in favour of artificial, technical groupings, and let us just say that arts and crafts museums are looking back on an arrangement that has long been recognised as the only right one for ethnographic museums.“ Brinckmann collected Asian and Islamic art for his museum, but included only three African works, so-called Benin bronzes, while he passed on many more to the Museum of ­Ethnology in Hamburg. He was fas­ cinated by art from Benin, whereby the works interested him primarily due to the outstanding quality of the lost form of African casting. In the newly founded Museum of Ethnology under Georg Thileni­ us, African works were presented in close succession according to geographic principles from 1912 ­ 32

in order to illuminate the culture of individual ethnic groups. At the same time, Thilenius tried through means of seriality to illustrate different stylistic formations of the same object. Rubbings of Kuba vessels testify to the appreciation and particular interest in surface design. Under Brinckmann’s successor Max Sauerlandt (1880–1934), the orien­ tation of the Museum of Art and ­Design changed from 1919. As a result of Sauerlandt’s interest in ­European Modernism, African works took on a new importance. He bought several works of non-­European art and exhibited them in 1930 with loans from the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. Thus, it followed the model of the Folkwang Museum under Karl Ernst Osthaus, which presented African and non-European art on the same level and from the same perspective as European art. © Photo: Paul Schimweg, Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, Text: Barbara Plankensteiner

AFRICAN ART AND DESIGN IN ­HAMBURG IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

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realise how much travelling and cultural exchange there has always been, especially in the 19th and at Post-Vlisco is a body of work by the the ­beginning of the 20th century. Rotterdam designer Simone Post The cultural and traditional items that creates unique textile items have always been in transit.” The through the upcycling of scrap macom­pany’s business policy remains terial from the Dutch firm Vlisco, controversial today, as its market ­ founded in 1846. Through folding dominance complicated the foundtechniques and laser cut, the mising of local textile factories in Africa. prints are transformed into multi-­ "Post"-Vlisco – which does not only coloured seat cushions, rugs, and refer here to an “after” life of fabric textile room dividers. Although the waste, but can also be understood in Vlisco originals are not immediately the sense of “post”-colonial – is the recognisable, there is nonetheless transformation process of a historic­ a reference in two respects: the inally ambivalent product into a new tensely luminous and powerful colform. The reprocessing and simultan­ours and the complex production eous revaluation of used products process. “I think,” Simone Post says, shows similarities to the concept of “it is very interesting that people récupération, an influential practice consider Vlisco’s designs as typically of artistic recycling of found and African, but big amounts of these used objects, as well as ways of allotextiles are being made in Holland. cating meaning in many places in And we actually took it from IndoneAfrica. The book accompanying the sia during the Dutch East Indies in project cites the textile factory’s the 19th century. And the same techsample book, which served as a nique came to Indonesia during the source of ideas for the design – for 12th century from India. I found it Simone Post, it serves as inspiration revealing that people tend to put ­ for the transformation from mater­ certain products into boxes or mark ials whose “worthlessness” lies only them as traditional, but they don’t in the eye of the beholder. 34

© Simone Post in collaboration with Label / Breed en Vlisco

SIMONE POST Post-Vlisco, 2015

© Formafantasma, Photo: Joep Voegls, TextielMuseum Tilburg, The Netherlands

FORMAFANTASMA Asmara, from the series Colony, 2011 The conceptual design project Col­ ony by the Italian designers Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, known as Studio Formafantasma, thematises Italy’s colonial past and its connection to the current migration and refugee movements. The three works in the Colony series ­refer to the capital cities of former Italian colonies in North Africa – Asmara/Eritrea, Tripoli/Libya, Addis ­ Ababa/Ethiopia. The mohair wall hanging gives the impression of an oversized map. Asmara is “imprinted” with a contemporary stamp from Benadir, Somalia and “stamped” with a colonial print. The map motif itself refers to a colonial city map and futuristic modern architecture in Asmara, in this case the Fiat ­Tagliero gas station by the Italian ­architect Giuseppe Pettazzi. By referencing this daring con­ struction Formafantasma empha­ sises how colonial cities were an ­experimentation ground for modern architecture and how drastic in­ter­ ventions in the cityscape were

­executed. In Colony, Asmara, those historical references are superim­ posed with current migration routes between North Africa and Europe: the impetus for the work was the 2009 Treaty of Friendship between Italy and Libya, which in return for investments from Italy expected ­cooperation on the refugee issue off the Libyan coast. Formafantasma’s works are multi-faceted: they are the materialised results of their intensive research, implemented in ma­ terials that carry their own level of meaning and refer to artisanal trad­ itions. On the level of content, they question the shifting flow of forms and people between Italy and North ­Africa: in Colony, recent geopolitical constellations are addressed within the history of colonial networks and economies.

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Black Coffee is a South African fashion label that was founded by ­ Jacques van der Watt a few years ­after the end of apartheid in 1998. The label has accomplished pioneering work in the negotiation of new forms of identities. With installation-like fashion shows in unusual or politically contested places, Black Coffee breaks through the boun­d­aries between fashion, art and ­performance. Strongly conceptually based, the themes for the collection can be found in the history of their own country: in current social phenomena, but also in a reinterpre­ t­ ation of local aesthetics and trad­ itional handcrafting techniques like woodcarving or basket weaving. The evening dress shown here from the summer collection Imprint (2013) makes references to the geometric pattern of Kuba textiles modified and applied to fragile mesh material, without lapsing into the cultural ­cliché of mere imitation. This understanding of design is reflected even 36

more clearly in the garments in the Counterpoint collection from 2011, as well as how they were ­presented. In the foreground stand ­voluminous coats, whose geometric structures take on a practically architectonic quality through complex cutting techniques and overlapping layers of fabric. Not only a cubist seeming formal language, but also the pastel toned colouring, from putty to smoke blue to skin tones, refer back to Picasso’s iconic painting Les ­Demoiselles d’Avignon. Black ­Coffee’s main interest here is the way that ­Picasso implemented the influence from African masks and how he played with fragmented layers. The rem­ design of the runway is ­ iniscent of George Braque, ­another ­r­epresentative of Cubism. Along­side his own cultural heritage, Black Coffee’s artistic work also ­reflects upon the European process of ­appro­­pria­ting African objects. Through the artistic process, a re-­ appropriation of the repertoire of forms is ini­tiated, which sets a coun­ ter­point to the presumed dis­covery of the “primitive” in ­modernism.

© BLACK COFFEE

BLACK COFFEE Counterpoint Coats, Fall 2011 Imprint Dress, Summer 2013

© Margaret Trowell, African Tapestry, London 1957

ARTS AND CRAFTS IN THE ­COLONIAL CONTEXT Rarely has European design history been corrected regarding the techniques and design premises of (everyday) objects from Africa. Margaret Trowell’s study African ­ ­Design (1960) constitutes an early attempt at giving an overview. Trowell, a ­ British artist, founded the first colonial arts school in East ­ ­ Africa in 1937 in Kampala, Uganda. Three years later, the school became affiliated with the Makerere University and became the centre of modern art in the region. Influenced by the ideas of the British reform movement, she created the first study collection about design. Also in 1930, Herbert Meyerowitz established the first Arts and Crafts Department at Achimota College in Accra, on what was then the Gold Coast. ­Meyerowitz originally hailed from Russia and was trained at the Berlin Kunstgewerbe­ schule. As in Uganda, the study of ­traditional techniques in Ghana was intended to lead the way towards industrialisation. Although these design projects in Ghana, as well as

in Kampala, had a lasting effect on the genesis of l­ocal artistic movements, they remain ambivalent and problematic because of their underlying colonial premises. Trowell sought to create a particular frame of pictorial references for her students in order to develop an “authentic African” creativity that ­ nonetheless was based on a western perspective. Thus, the retrograde ideals of the Arts and Crafts movements were set as a benchmark, which was a revival of trad­ itional craftsmanship alone. Transferred to the African context, it was meant to preserve a potentially ­dying cultural heritage and to protect it from mixing. Both Trowell and Meyerowitz proved to be ignorant of cultural translation processes, ­although processes of intertwining had already materialised in the artefacts of African culture regionally and transcontinentally for centuries and had led to independent design.

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NEGROPHILIE

other side of the Atlantic: in the Africa exhibition at the Brooklyn In Paris, the buzz about Africa had Museum, New York (1923) they were already penetrated a wide spectrum not only presented in the original. In of applied arts by the mid-1920s. order to stimulate textile production The movement called “Negrophilia” in America, samples from New York is full of ambi­guities and refers to manufacturers were also integrated heterogeneous backgrounds of ap­ urator in the show. According to the c propriation and adapta­tion in avantStewart Culin these designs directly garde circles and the fashionable Arranged referred to the exhibits: “­ bourgeoisie as well as the black in series these embroideries and ­diaspora present in the city. In this the mats with pictorial designs recontext, ­Nancy Cunard adopted an vealed direct observation of nature intermediary ­position: ­financially and inspiration drawn directly from independent, she arrived in Paris nature such as cannot be discovin 1926 where she sought contact ered elsewhere today. This lively American circles. She to African ­ quality was instantly appreciated by was the partner of the musician the textile artists into whose hands I Henry Crowder – and with his placed them. First among them was help initiated and published the the head of Blanck & Co., the great Negro Anthology. Pan-African in firm of embroidery makers, who inorientation, it contained literary stantly copied the raffia designs, his and artistic documentation and embroideries setting the style for pos­ itions. Cunard associated herpatterns which extended from New self with political activities as well York to Paris, being most conspicu­ as the “vogue nègre”: her “tradeous of all exotic influences, at the marks” were bracelets of “African” Paris Exposition of 1925.” It is clear provenance, which Man Ray docuhere how aesthetic regard connects mented her wearing multiple times. to economic interests; questions of For interiors and fashion, stools and the copyright for designs and techheadrests made from wood as well niques could be added – discusas Kuba raffia weaving served as­ sions that are also virulent regarding sources of inspiration. These were recent cooperations in the field of also considered exemplary on the design. 38

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© Wendy A. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, Minneapolis 2009, p. 136,138

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TRANSFORM(N)ATION

Indépendance Cha Cha by the Congolese musician Le Grand Kallé – the first Pan-African song – celebrates the independence of his country and ­other African nations. The late 1950s and particularly the 1960s marked the departure from colonial tutelage and the rise of self-determination in large parts of the continent. Forms of freedom articulated themselves in the arts and in design. Images like those by the Nigerian photographer ‘Okhai Ojeikere show young people, the future minds and creative elites of a young nation, in modern clothing, framed by modern architectures of progress. They are euphoric images of awakening and optimism, as well as of cosmopolitan ­embeddedness. Transform(n)ation takes the design during the first years of independence into consideration. The fields of fashion and a ­ rchitecture in particular manifested a new spirit and new alliances, for ­instance with the non-aligned movement or, in design and architecture, partnerships with Scandinavian countries that did not have colonies in Africa. Innovations in urban design and architecture aim at inclusion – and not, as was common in colonial urbanism – at segregation of the native population. New buildings like hotels are promoted as urban icons and as “showcases” of one’s own achievements. The creative potential of design is not only used to express societal liberation but, in a very real sense, to attain economic ­independence: architects like Demos Nwoko in Nigeria experiment with new materials and call for a new furniture design in order to cast off old dependencies. Fashion pioneers like Shade Thomas-Fahm re-evaluate old and local textile ­techniques and combine them with new cuts and forms. The African Design D ­ evelopment Center, founded in Nigeria in 1971, aims for a “development of aesthetics, styles and techniques of African art relevant to the new African society“ (New Culture). Forms of freedom are also reflected in g ­ raphic design and new, artistic movements that deviate from colonial standards. The founding of magazines like Transition in 1962 in Uganda, New Culture in Nigeria, and Souffles in Morocco offer platforms for political and cultural emancipation discourse. They often take a Pan-African turn and strive for a union in the struggle against oppression in the still-colonised lands through the power of form. “Before it starts raining, the wind will blow“ is the line of another song, an old Highlife song from Ghana. It proclaims political discontentment and the critique of the behaviour of a new African elite. Their demonstrative consumption – design as ostentation – has been taken up repeatedly by artists and musicians. And the sculpture Indépendance Tchao by Kader Attia is not only inspired by the famous song, but also poses the question of a utopia that became very fragile.

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What did they look like – these “forms of freedom”? How are political independence and consumption, the desire to have a share in an “African dream”, interlinked? How does an aspiration to “design ­society” mani42

fest itself in everyday objects? What place do aso-oke and former ruling insignia find in the post-colony?­ ­ Based on one of her earlier instal­ lations – ­ C elebrating 54 years of ­Nigerian Independence – Alafuro ­Sikoki has compiled a c ­ ollection of objects and images for Flow of Form / Forms of Flow.

© Studio Sikoki, Photo: Thomas Splett

ALAFURO SIKOKI Private Atlas: Nigeria 1960

© Photo: Paul Schimweg, Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, Text: Barbara Plankensteiner

AFRICAN LACE Lace Tobe agbada Industrial, primarily imported embroidery is called “lace” in Nigeria and usually worn on festive or official occasions. This complements the hand embroidered dress and hand woven cloth of prestige garments. This particular kind of fabric is an Austrian-Nigerian invention and the result of transcultural trade relationships that began in the early 1960s. In close exchange with Nigerian importers, the Austrian ­ embroidery industry in Lustenau, ­ Vorarlberg developed a special style for the Nigerian market that opened for direct trade relationships after the country’s independence from Britain’s colonial rule in 1960. The ­ term “African Lace” was established as a name for the special designs and variants for the African (primar­ ily ­Nigerian) market, which constantly adapted to new fashions. The somehow misleading term “lace”

stems from the fact that the aesthetic of guilloche or eyelet embroidery looks quite similar to real lace. Even during the absolute boom-­ period of lace fashion in the 1970s, this ­expensive material became the ­focus of criticism as an expression of a lavish, corrupt elite. During the course of a Nigerianisation policy, and in an attempt to promote locally grown textile traditions, the import was temporarily banned and the fabric entered the country via ­ illegal channels. In contrast, the lace ­fabrics, which are tailored in classic or regional styles, were considered traditional clothing and identity building for the country.

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SHADE THOMAS-FAHM The first designers of the independence era took on the important role of establishing a new understanding of design. Their rich cultural heri­ tage was part of their designs and therefore a part of the new national identity. Shade Thomas-Fahm is regarded as the first fashion designer of independent Nigeria. Educated in London, she returned to Lagos in the year of independence. Her example shows the particularly close relationship between hotels and fashion – and the important symbolic role they took on as expressions of independence. She founded the first ­“African” boutique in the country – “Shade´s Boutique” – in the Federal Palace Hotel, which was built by the Cypriot architect Polyvios Michaelides in the International Style at the end of the 1950s. The Federal Palace was Nigeria’s exemplary modern hotel and at the same r­­­ time the place in which the Nige­ i­ an independence declaration was signed in 1960. As a meeting place for the new elite, as well as an international public, the hotel offered Shade Thomas-Fahm the ideal 44

framework to realise her vision of a fashion label “made in Nigeria.” To do this, she used traditional fabrics made in Nigeria (during a time in which the market was dominated by western fabric): “Before the 60s and in fact in the 60s, Nigerian women were spending so much money on imported fabrics. We were so wasteful. I came back, therefore, to prove to them that we could make ­interesting designs from our fabric; on ­akwete, adire, okene, aso-oke, and the beautifully coloured prints by the Nigerian Textile Mill, Aba ­Textile Mill, and all“. Among her achievements is also the modernisation of traditional forms, for example she transferred ­ arment into in­ the male agbada g novative women’s fashion. Thomas-­ Fahm’s aim, on the one hand, was to promote the local economy through the use of local materials and forms, as well as on-site production – for which she founded the “Maison Shade” as a production facility for her collections. On the other hand, in doing so, she was able to help the rich cultural heritage of the country reach new visibility and esteem – not only from the outside, but also within the young nation.

© Shem Paronelli Artisanal, Photo: Olukoyefunmi Olugbenle

SHEM PARONELLI Nkwo pumps, 2016 In search of a contemporary expression, the (shoe) designer Shem ­Ezemma, who has been working in Lagos, Nigeria since 2011, is more ­interested in urban references than rural ones. With an anti-aesthetic – that is nonetheless perfectly crafted – he challenges established ideals and seeks to set himself apart from an aesthetic of glossiness and glamour. His design approach can ­ be understood as a continuation of what Demos Nwoko propagated in the 1960s and 70s: to work ­cooperatively with skilled craftsmen and with locally available materials. His 100% handmade shoes are thus opposed to the ubiquitous cheap imitations and copies of leather products of fam­ ous international brands. The Italian sounding name is therefore not a coincidence but rather a reference to the quality that results from the time-intensive ­manual production, and the attitude that goes with it. Shem Paronelli’s collection focuses on (African) craftsmanship, which he strives to preserve and enhance. The result is

minimalistic, architecturally inspired shoe design for women and men – often related to brutalist archi­ ­ tecture. In combination with their unusual materials like twine or notched soles, his shoes have an almost sculptural character. Other ­ collections in turn take up local forms of repair or show traces of use. And again, they are a reference to local traditions and the contemporary ­urban surroundings in which they arise.

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NEW CULTURE. A REVIEW OF ­CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ARTS New Culture: A Review of Contem­ porary African Arts is the title of a ­magazine founded in the 1970s. Its goal was to accompany and accelerate the political and cultural transformation of Nigerian society. The first issue of New Culture appeared one year after the state funded ­festival FESTAC 77 in Lagos, which focused on national and Pan-­African identity. The eleven existing issues were edited, amongst others, by Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke. ­ Both belonged to a group called Zaria Rebels, an artists’ group that was founded in 1958 to discuss questions about the future of art and art education in Nigeria in terms of a “new culture”. The aim of the p ­ ublisher was to create this “new ­culture” in the field of architecture and design and also to secure the financial basis of production. Extensive and ­detailed reflections dealt with a new urban design that did not per­petuate old colonial structures but that would originate in new forms 46

resulting from individual research ­ and experiments based on older designs from all parts of Africa. ­ The magazine also included do-it-­ yourself instructions – entirely in the spirit of real economic independence.

Text: Ronja Merkel

SOUFFLES Souffles, French for “breath”, was a culture magazine that initially ­appeared in French and later also in Arabic (Anfas). It was published ­between 1966 and 1972 in Morocco, initiated by the poet Abdellatif Laib and, among others, supported by Mostafa Nissaboury and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. The magazine united a new generation of writers, artists and intellectuals that rebelled against imperialism and dominant colonial powers. They hoped for a cultural revolution supported by language and art. It should bring ­ about a break with the existing cultural production in order to create something new and independent. On the one hand, this took place through a detachment from foreign, European influences and, on the other hand, it was a reflection of particular local values. However, a ­ simple return to old traditions was not intended. This notion of ­progress did not exclusively refer to the magazine, but more generally to a new vibrant art and literature

scene in Morocco and across Arabic countries. The magazine represented a clear Marxist-Leninist attitude that was strengthened by years of violence committed by political authorities against the people. Souffles offered an interdisciplinary and revo­ lutionary platform that advocated the goal of a décolonisation culturelle. The cover of the first edition of Souffles, designed by Mohammed Melehi, is a mix of calligraphy and poster art (the latter was an import­ ant medium of the 1960s and 70s). It shows a square with the title of the magazine inside and a black circle underneath: a black sun. In the first issue of the magazine, this design is referred to as affiche congrès, as a conference poster. As such, it is related to the Tricontinental Con­ ­ ference in Havana, Cuba, which let the “Third World” become a reality. Later issues turned more radical and openly sympathised with the armed struggle against colonialism and imperialism – the guerrilla warrior ­ became a symbol of the fight for freedom.

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In the 1960s, Obiora Udechukwu was a member of the Nsukka school circle, a group of politically committed artists who believed that the basis for a modern “Nigerian” art ­ was to be found in the renewal of their own artistic form. His pencil and ink drawings are politically and socially inspired. His interest ­focuses above all on the lives of people in the simple neighbourhoods of cities, such as those of the night people, the latrine cleaners who in the darkness clean the waste out of the public toilets. He draws them sketchily, with huge buckets on their head and hats. Other works address life in the new capital of Abuja – a modern metropolis conceived entirely at the drafting table – which became a symbol of giant building contracts, speculation, and corruption. Udechukwu’s drawings illustrate this 48

tension: the excess of the rich and powerful, their ostentatious display of wealth, as well as the bitter ­poverty and resignation of the majority of the population. “Without an ethical sensibility,” Obiora Udechukwu claims, “an artist is merely a decorator.” In his large-scale paintings, Udechukwu refers back to traditional forms and techniques. He quotes and adapts the uli-painting of the Igbo, a pictographic system of symbols used in the painting of architecture and bodies. Similar to his graphic works, it is about the memory of a history, the visualisation of the past as a way to find an artistic and political identity in the present. Udechukwu’s images visualise history, store memories, and shape the identity of contemporary viewers. But they also express disappointed hope and harsh criticism of the social conditions after the euphoria of the ­independence-years had vanished.

Courtesy of Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth, © Photo DEVA, Universität Bayreuth

OBIORA UDECHUKWU Nightsoilman, 1978, Tycoon and Longshoremen, 1979, ­Diplomats, 1979

Courtesy of Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Köln, © Photo Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Köln

KADER ATTIA Indépendance Tchao, 2014 As a miniature, Indépendance Tchao by the Franco-Algerian artist Kader Attia refers to the Hôtel de l’Indé­ pendance in Dakar, Senegal. At the beginning of the 1970s – a little over ten years after the independence of the west African country under Léopold Sédar Senghor and a few years after the first Festival mondial des arts nègres (1966) – the hotel was built according to plans by ­Henri Chomette and Roland Depret. Since the end of the 1940s and into the 1980s, the office of the French architect Chomette had built governmental and private buildings and others in numerous African countries. Indépendance Tchao was initially created as a site-specific ­ ­installation on the occasion of the 11th Dakar Biennale in Senegal. ­Kader Attia refers back to the hotel high-rise with the sculpture. The borrowing is immediately identifiable, in particular through the emulation of

the characteristic brise-soleil façade. To make this, Attia uses discarded and somewhat weathered index card boxes, which he stacks into a high tower. The inventory of the archi­ve itself comes from a dissolved administration in Algeria. Only a few kilometres away from the central exhibition venue of Dak’art, even today the Hôtel de l’Indépendance is still a distinctive “modern” architectonic counterpoint to the flat, neo-classic­ al colonial administrative offices – an aesthetic incunabulum that epitomises futurity with its commanding verticality and its modern features. However, the former architectural icon currently stands empty and is in a state of decay. Indépendance Tchao (the title makes a reference to the famous song Indépendance Cha Cha) refers to a utopia that has grown fragile, the bursting of a dream, as well as to the survival of colonial archival and standardisation practices and to old and new ­(architectural) networks in the postcolony. 49

Finished in 1958, The Hotel Oceanic in Mombasa, planned by the German architect Ernst May who lived in ­exile in east Africa from 1934–1954, is one of the first modern hotel architectures in Africa, emerging at the threshold between a colonial British system and political independence. With its dynamic, curved layout and modern façade elements, and its ele­vated position on a plateau above the Indian Ocean, it demonstrates the desire for being part of architectural modernism as early as the 1950s. Prestigious building projects like luxurious hotels in the style of Hotel Oceanic often served the colonial administration as a demonstration of conciliatory integrative politics which should accommodate the old as well as the new elites. The ­architect and city planner Ernst May numbers among the progressive representatives of New Building in Germany. May worked in Nairobi, among other places, for the British colonial administration and trans­ lated ideas of modernist architecture 50

to local circumstances. A paternalistic attitude and a segregation-based colonial division of space are expressed in May’s designs for the ­African working population, a modernisation of East African architecture through what he called a ­modular “hook-on-slab” design. Utopian design and asymmetrical ­power relationships form a questionable alliance here. The Hotel Oceanic is also an example of May’s “tropical modernism”, which takes into account climatic conditions. The side facing the ocean has recessed balconies behind a concrete honeycomb grid as ventilation slots. After the independence of Kenya in 1963, the hotel became a landmark and showcase of the young nation. But it also represents – and this is what Kader Attia’s work refers to – the persistence of colonial architectural and planning networks in the postcolony. This has only gradually been superseded by a generation of ­African architects like Demas Nwoko in Nigeria or Beda Amuli in Tanzania. The Hotel Oceanic was demolished in 2000.

© Deutsches Architekturmuseum DAM, Photo: Martin Dixon/architectuul.com, Text: Agnes Stillger

ERNST MAY Hotel Oceanic Mombasa, 1950–58

Courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London, © Vincent Michea, 2012

VINCENT MICHÉA Before the Bigger Splash, 2012 Trained as a graphic designer in ­Paris, Vincent Michéa has lived between Paris and Dakar for several decades. At the beginning of the 1990s he founded his design studio 100% Dakar in the Senegalese cap­ ital. Since then, the city has become the object of his paintings, with its layers of different architectures. Whether in his series entitled Belle Epoque, for which he transferred record covers of African pop music into large-scale “screened” paintings, or in his hyper-realistic views of

Dakar and the collages of city architecture – the Afropolis is at the heart of his work: “I paint Dakar’s i­ndolent urban beauty,” Michéa says. Before the Bigger Splash demonstrates that he also adopts an ironic, critical stance towards urban development. Central is the shimmering blue of the Piscine Olympique ­ National, which was first built in the 2000s, but nonetheless in its scale evokes ambitious plans and aspirational projects – and how they connected to the euphoria of the 1960s. But what, the title seems to imply, comes after the big splash?

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LAURENCE BONVIN Avant l’envol (Before the Flight), 2016 That modern architecture once reflected hope and euphoria, the ­optimism of the time of independence, appears in Laurence Bonvin’s film Avant l’envol (Before the Flight), which portrays the architecture of independence in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and pursues the question of how this architecture is used today. The short film, which resulted from a collaboration with the Senegalese ­ artist Cheikh Ndiaye in particular, follows the traces of the French ­architect Henri Chomette. In 1960, the so-called “Year of Africa”, during which the Ivory Coast became independent with Abidjan as its ­ capital, a veritable construction ­ boom set in. After his emigration to Ethiopia in 1949, Chomette worked in many African countries. Among other buildings he designed the Hôtel de l’Indépendance in Dakar – as well as the parliament buildings, 52

­niversity, banks and conference u centres in Abidjan. In long shots and so-called tableaux vivants, Bonvin, who repeatedly deals with urban transformation in her work, shows the (after)life of these buildings, the present condition of the structures: traces of occupation and use, discarded furniture, and other re­ mains. She draws our attention to the architecture itself, to incidental details: one recognises subsequent alterations and traces of use. As a visual interpretation of the evolution of these architectures, the film ­testifies to the many interventions, symbols and signs, and the ­markings made by the users, but without ­putting them into the image themselves. She depicts the architecture, so to speak, in its second (or its ­actual) life. The film is here a means of research and reflection on the ­current condition of these ­structures of independence and a document of a past, but still opulent futurism.

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© Laurence Bonvin, stills from Avant l’envol, 2015

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FORMS OF COOPERATION / PARTICIPATION

Forms of Cooperation / Participation deal with the social and political ­dimension of design. In the 1970s, Victor Papanek coined the term Social Design; he called for a radical decentralisation and democratisation of design. Understood as an innovative practice that could lead to social transform­ ation, the specifications of design should be determined by social needs. Similar critical and participatory positions like Enzo Mari’s project Autoprogettazione transfer the power of industrial production structures with do-­ it-yourself approaches to the people. Forms of Cooperation / Participation­ direct attention towards forms that arose through exchange, dialogue, and the migration of concepts and practices. The question addressed here is whether artefacts can make social or political dimensions tangible. How are col­ lective concerns reflected in design? How are design cooperations shaped across n ­ ational borders, what role do they play within the context of “development cooperation” between Africa and Europe? Is it a “design­ ­between the cultures” at eye level or a predominantly asymmetrical constellation? The ­question of authorship is also virulent: who has the right to a ­design after a successful collaboration? Does co-authorship exist in design? What about the sustainability of such projects: can the design impulse that emerges from these cooperations lead to permanent changes? And how do these ­projects relate to former workshops which were held during colonial time, in which a European view affirmed what should be produced for the market and how “traditional African objects” should be designed. Today, in addition to cooperations between Africa and Europe, designers, social ­activists and artists are networking within the African continent: the African maker-scene, active since 2009, continues the principles of collective self-empowerment in the present. New dimensions of transnational communication and collaboration arise with the help of the internet. This exchange enables new forms of knowledge production in the sense of a “learning from ...” as well as new practices of design. In Papanek’s sense, the form and aesthetic of an object therefore take a back seat to the collective experience, bringing to the foreground collective intentions and values as well as the network of abilities of all involved: design as a process, as a participatory act, as social interaction. At a workshop initiated as part of the exhibition project in Bamako, Mali, the local production conditions became the point of de­ parture for a design research. The prevailing economic and social conditions were examined in order to incorporate them in design and to fathom the political possibilities of design as existence-creating and identity-forming.

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The show MANtransFORMS (New York, 1976) and the Whole Earth Catalogue (1971) represent a political and social restructuring of design in the 1970s. Within this context, Victor Papanek is considered one of the most important representatives of social design. His book Design for the Real World (1971), in which ecological concerns and designs for the “Third World” were addressed for the first time, reflects a consumption-critical attitude. For Papanek, who himself had a large collection of non-western devices, artefacts of vernacular culture represented a “non-capitalistic creativity”. According to his (romantic) convictions, they were a counterpoint to the alienation of industrial societies, ­ whose absurdities he condemned in his television series Design ­Dimensions with episodes like Let Them Eat Fakes or The Chrome ­Plated Marshmallows. Cross-cultural approaches should direct attention towards “real” social needs. A similar ethnographic analysis was offered 56

by his study How Things Don’t Work, in which he criticises the implicit technological obsession of “Mainstream-Design”. And Nomadic Furniture (1973) reads like an instruction manual for sustainable do-it-yourself products – with simple tools and straightforward instructions and his cooperative call “All Men are Designers”. The aesthetics of his models were geared towards their functionality and simplicity. The photo shows him in front of his own artefact ­collection on his Fold-Down Dining Bench. The Tin Can ­Radio should enable people in ­ remote regions of Asia or Africa to communicate even without electricity; the paraffin-operated radio consists of a tin can and transistor. Low-tech design connects here with an alternative im­ perative: to participatively improve existing conditions (in the globally encompassing sense). This contrasts with attitudes like that of Gui Bonsiepe, a contemporary who warned against stylising design as the ultimate problem-solving solution and thereby overlooking ­ political aspects.

© University of Applied Arts Vienna, Victor J. Papanek Foundation

VICTOR PAPANEK

© Cucula, Photo: Verena Brüning

CUCULA – REFUGEES COMPANY FOR CRAFTS AND DESIGN Ambassador Chair, Maxi Chair Since 2014, the Berlin project ­Cucula connects social and political work with refugees from Africa with the design of Enzo Mari. From a ­consumption and formalism-critical position and with the goal to ­ democratise design, the Italian ­ ­designer published instructions for building furniture in his book ­Autoprogettazione in 1974. Forty years later, he granted the Cucula team the rights to use and adapt his designs. Today young ­refugees build their own pieces out of pinewood as trainees under ­professional instruction: chairs and benches, but also shelves and their own creations loosely based on Enzo Mari like the Maxistühle ­(Moussa Stil) or a toolbox in the shape of a ship (Maiga Stil). In the Botschafter Stühle traces of flight materialise themselves through the brightly coloured plans of a former refugee boat. The premise of collaboration can already be found in

­Cucula’s name: Cucula comes from the West African language Haussa and means “doing something together”, but also, “to look after one another”. Alongside the transmission of artisanal knowledge and skills in joiner courses, for Cucula it is also about an exemplary search for educational possibilities – and therefore future options for refugees: “­Arrive and build your own future” is how Cucula formulates it themselves. Design should also be a means of self-empowerment here. In the long term, Cucula is interested in linking the design practice of the Berlin manufactory with their trainees’ ­regions of origin. The aim is to consider diverse cultural perspectives on design and to pursue questions about its (future) potential. The first attempts to do so took place during a workshop organised to ­accompany the Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow exhibition in Bamako, Mali with ­ ­designer Cheick Diallo.

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A major premise of Cheick Diallo’s design lies in the radically contemporary appearance of his creations. He refuses to make products that ­refer to stereotypical “signs of Africanness”, whether in an anecdotal or nostalgic manner. Born in Mali in 1960, he studied architecture and industrial design in the 1990s in ­ France. In 1997, he founded Diallo Design, followed by the Association of African designers in 2004. His furniture and objects, which are ­ found in international collections, are often inspired by old and everyday craft trades from West African cities, in particular from Bamako. With the intent of bringing these métiers into a productive exchange 58

with one another, his designs disrupt the boundaries between separ­ ate métiers. For his stools and side tables he applied textile dying techniques to leather processing and mixed them with the practice of tréssage; his silverware series resulted from collaboration with Tuareg silversmiths and ivory carvers. A further characteristic of Diallo ­ ­Design is premised on a particular perspective regarding the transitory potential of everyday things: a first stool was created during his studies by reshaping a snow shovel; the ­reference for Fauteuil Mo is a fish trap, as they are used on the banks of the Niger. The core of this chair, as well as the modularly expandable Table Caba and the Fauteil Baloo is a metal skeleton wrapped with nylon. Techniques and skills from the street

© Photos: Alexandra Weigand

CHEICK DIALLO / DIALLO DESIGN Fauteuil, 2017

also manifest themselves in his designs, particularly the practice of récuperation, which is based on the questioning and further processing of available material. In a kind of ­ésthetique utile (as the word design does not exist in Bambara), designer says, “craftsmen prothe ­ duce excellent objects in quite ­extraordinary places”. Special techniques of material processing have developed here: of folding and moulding, of patching and repairing, and assemblage. The distinctive features of these everyday designs – “household things” (soma-siri in Bambara) – that are used by more than 80% of the Malian population appear in the collection of objects compiled by D ­ iallo. He takes up these practices, expands them, and gives them a contemporary character. 59

The Gourd’s Family is the result of collaboration between the French designer Matali Crasset and the ­basket weavers of Bulawayo Home Industries in Zimbabwe. Crasset, whose design practice ranges from product to interior design, participated in the Basket Case II Workshop at the invitation of Christine Eyene and Raphael Chikukwa. The goal of this collaboration – which was sponsored by three foreign cultural institutions, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and the European Union – was the sustainable reinforcement and updating of the art of basket weaving, which spans the entire country. During the week-long workshop, the plant fibres were experimented with to expand the limits of the material and to develop a new formal language. Unconventional and playful creations are the result; a family of African calabashes, whose 60

individual pieces are more sculptural than purely functional objects, but also sometimes combine both aspects. Bulawayo Home Industries is a non-profit institution which helps women in the region tap into further income from basketry production. An intended by-product is the passing on and preservation of manual skills. Older techniques should connect with new materials, forms and practices. Through the encounter with designers and artists, artisanal ability and “design expertise” can stimulate one another. The initiators of the Basket Case Workshop emphasise a dialogical form of cooperation and Crasset highlights the collective dimension, which allows ­ The Gourd’s Family to become an “actualisation of a larger system of ideas”.

© Matali Crasset

MATALI CRASSET & BULAWAYO HOME INDUSTRIES The Gourd’s Familiy, 2014

© Editions in Craft, Front & Siyazama Project, Vase: Kishwepi Sitole + Front, Photo: Anna Lönnestan

FRONT & SIYAZAMA PROJECT Story Vases, 2010 The collaboration between the designers of the Swedish design studio Front, which is equally known for its conceptual and experimental design, and the women of the Si­ yazama Project from Kwa-Zulu-Natal began with a series of conversations. The Zulu women, whose glass bead craft became the starting point for various objects, recounted their everyday experiences as women in rural post-apartheid South Africa. In the form of metal and beads, parts of these discussions were later vis­ ible on the Story Vases. The story of a vase by Tholiwe Stile deals with hope and desire: “The last time I bought myself something was in 2007. My dream is to go overseas to have the experience of an aeroplane. When I would be up in the air I would close my eyes and relax.” Beadwork conveys messages about pattern and colour, as well as numerous references to oral culture. The Siyazama

Project which emerged within the context of the spread of HIV/Aids during the late 1990s at the intersection of craft and health education began with the cultural technique of oral-visual transmission. The project sought to disseminate knowledge about the illness and the ways that it is contracted through ­bringing together handworkers, trad­ itional ­healers (sangomas) and the University of Durban. Front, whose own cooperative design practice ­often engages with the expertise of others like handworkers or technicians, refers to symbolic communication and translates it into something concrete: the material and immaterial reciprocally stimulate one another into a material ­ morphosis. With the Story Vases, possibilities are explored that make the tradition of beadwork fit for the future. “Story­ telling” – admittedly used in contemporary design as a mere marketing strategy – takes on a social and political meaning.

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COdesignLab was founded by Paolo Cascone in 2007. This architectural office not only features cooperation in its name, but also seeks to be a laboratory for digital and ecological architectures. The collective investigation of ­ digital production pro­ cesses stands at the centre of the Urban FabLab project; the stated goal of the African Fabbers project is African and European to network ­ communities of makers through collaborative projects and conferences. Through do-it-yourself construction and open-source hardware, new structures and architectures also emerge – a post-vernacular design that mediates between local ­know­ledge, its materials and techniques and advanced technol­ogies: a kind of ­ testing ground for the future. “Traditional” and innovative procedures merge here with entirely particular syntheses. For the cultural ­centre of Sevaré, Mali, Paolo C ­ ascone and his senior colleague Fabrizio Caròla worked together with students 62

from France and Africa. The model shows a cluster of different domelike ­constructions arranged around a centre. By means of a parametrical design, functional and spatial needs were determined in order to achieve ecological effects. The potential of a meeting of high-tech design and low-cost construction methods is central to a project with the FabLab Defko Ak Niep in Dakar. The result is an open-air laboratory that consists of a thatched roof structure that, in addition to its function as sun ­protection, serves to catch rain­water and generate solar energy. To compensate for the lack of architectural and design training facilities in many African countries, COdesignLab aims at participatory and self-­ directed projects.

© COdesignLab, Photo: Thomas Splett

PAOLO CASCONE / CODESIGNLAB Cultural Center Sevarè, Mali

© Kër Thiossane, Photo: Defko Ak Niep

KËR THIOSSANE. VILLA POUR L´ART ET LE MULTIMÉDIA In 2002, Momar François Sylla and Marion Louisgrand founded Kër Thiossane in Dakar, Senegal as an artspace and place for multimedia technology. Its Wolof name refers to the importance of local creative practice, knowledge and experience; against this background new media and technology is experimented with. Kër Thiossane is a platform of exchange, discussion, ­ and civic engagement; artists, theatre makers, academics, neighbourhood youth, computer experts, craftsmen and bricoleurs meet here. Through numerous workshops, Kër Thiossane networks a young m ­ aker scene from different countries in ­Africa across a south-south axis, as well as from European countries. In 2008, it initiated the Afropixel Festival. Kër Thiossane works at the intersection of new media, technology development and community: the things and projects that result from their FabLab Defko Ak Niep (“do it with others”) under Dodji Honou

and Mouhamadou Ngom are useful and experimental – as in the case of a machine for drying fruits, a 3-D printer and textile photovoltaic cells – and playful and exploratory like the interactive swing. Within the context of the FabLabs that arose at the beginning of the 90s, design is a means of self-empowerment and emancipation, often also of fragile infrastructures. It is based on the expertise and shared knowledge of mechanics and electricians who are repairing and re-configuring damaged items in the informal districts of Dakar. In the FabLab In the FabLab high-tech is produced by lowtech. For example, the Jerry Cane computers are built from scrap computers and electronic materials (from Europe) in a plastic container. And with CNC-machines, small Arduino boards are fabricated in order to program simple actions. ­ The premise of a cooperative and participatory design is in Kër Thiossane’s case perhaps most insistently realised – and connects local imperatives with future potential.

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Kofi Setordji lives in Accra, G ­ hana and works as a painter, sculptor, ­(textile-) and furniture designer with such different materials as wood, terracotta, bronze, metal, stone, and found materials. Initially edu­ cated as a commercial sign painter and graphic designer, he studied sculpture between 1984 and 1988 with the Ghanaian sculptor Saka Acquaye. Among his best-known ­ mixed media installation is Scars of Memory – a work that deals with the post-colonial experience of violence. The cultural activist founded the Arthaus Foundation in the late 1990s – the name itself is a reference to the Bauhaus with its artisanal and artistic heritage – as a residency programme for international artists. Additionally, the Nubuke Foundation, whose founding board member is Kofi Setordji, has existed since 2006 in Accra, Ghana. It deals primarily with Ghanaian cultural heritage, mainly with textiles and other craft 64

­practices. In this context in particular, he began to work with weavers from Wa in northern Ghana, but also from other parts of West Africa on the development of new textile techniques and patterns. The result is the aesthetics of digital pixalisation imitating fabrics, ikat patterned textiles, and course fringed and untreated cotton textures. On the one hand, his art creates a kind of inventory and archive of different textile traditions. At the same time, he encourages the weavers themselves to record their textile designs and patterns – on the basis of which reproductions will be possible. Kofi Setordji’s home and studio in the Aburi Mountains, a place not far from the capital Accra, has served him for years as a base and “laboratory” in which he brings together his different experiments. He designed and built it based on ecological principles, similar to Demos Nwoko, who also created his New Culture Studios in the 1970s on his own and with ­local labour.

© Kofi Setordji

KOFI SETORDJI Textiles

© The Nest Collective

THE NEST COLLECTIVE Installation 2018 The Nest Collective is a multi-discip­ linary collective around Sunny Dolat, Dr. Njoki Ngumi, George Gachara, Jim Chuchu, and many others. It was founded in Nairobi, Kenya in 2012 and works in the fields of film, ­music, fashion, literature, as well as the ­visual arts. The Nest presents an­ other example of (trans)national cooperation on the African continent that not only generates individual creative production, but also en­ gages in the promotion of creative industries in Kenya and is concurrently politically active. The collective was instrumental in initiating the HEVA funds which supports young artists from fashion, craft and music. Their critical film project Stories of Our Lives documents the everyday life of LGBT Kenyans and positions itself homosexuality against current anti-­ campaigns. In this environment, The Nest negotiates the complex iden­tities of the present: “We‘re interested in the politics of otherness

through – queerness, blackness – ­ the lens of living and working in Kenya“. With their most recent publication Not African Enough ­ enya, on contemporary fashion in K they turn against stereotypical ideas about design from Africa and therefore shape the cultural ­ ­ pro­ duction in Kenya in a very unique way.

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MATERIAL MORPHOSIS

While the phenomenon of Material Morphosis has primarily been negatively connoted in a European context for a long time – in the sense of mere imitation, as deception or substitution – one can also recognise a principle ­therein that emphasises the meaning of “material as a subject”. Such associations were certainly not unknown in Europe; for example, the imitation of natural materials – like the genesis of stones – was considered as a production paradigm of mimetic art. Design has been understood here as an interplay between natural and artificial material qualities. The privileging of material (over the form) as a perspective appears all the more appropriate given how recent techniques of sampling, which are essentially based on material mastery and digitisation, have led to a re-evaluation of such creative­ ­ transfers. Material Morphosis is therefore often a media change. On the ­other hand, the focus on “material” as an oral tradition, as a substance as well as in the textile sense seems closer to “African” classifications because their objects are often categorised more by their material and semantic ­aspects than by their form: non-material qualities are bound to material ­conditions, particular materials are reserved for privileged groups or people. Material Morphosis focuses on the culture of materials and examines ­material –­­“matter”– as a carrier of meanings, in regional as well as transcontinental entanglements. Arising in the 15th and 16th century, a prime example are Afro-Portuguese ivory works: genuine “contact zone art”, they developed ­between the West African Kingdom of Benin, Sierra ­Leone, and the court in Portugal. The Material Morphosis here is two-fold: salt cellars, spoons, ­hunting horns and bugles testify to a material translation, as well as iconographic connections to local “African” subjects. Miniaturisations, reductions, compressions, and consolidations – in the field of architecture and furniture design – are also addressed as a variety of Material Morphosis. In modern as well as contemporary design and art, Material Morphosis is a common principles expressed as modernisation, democratisation, ­ennoblement and re-evaluation; yet it also refers to material innovation and new manufacturing techniques as well as design practices in a global, ­transcontinental context.

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The vortically-patterned porcelain bowl comes from the ceramic workshop of Marjorie Wallace, Mutapo Pottery in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her porcelain works are primarily inspired by braided baskets, therefore the dynamic pattern of the filigree bowl is guided by their structure. The special appreciation of basket weaving is expressed through the transfer of a material idea into 68

­nother medium. Similar to the a ­design premise of other designers, like Cheick Diallo, a connection between different métiers takes place here through processes of mater­ ial morphosis. This implies a play with expectations, of aesthetics and ­haptics, which are connected to the specific product. Objects like the porcelain bowl are no longer bound to patterns of use. Material morphosis thus leads to a new object, old attributes become invalid while the pattern is updated.

© Marjorie Wallace, Photo: Micky Hoyle

MARJORIE WALLACE / MUTAPO POTTERY Ceramic Bowl, 2016

© Haldane Martin

HALDANE MARTIN Zulu Mama Table, 2010 In 2002, Haldane Martin founded a label for furniture and interior design in Cape Town and produced the first products, the Zulu series, in collaboration with local artisans and weavers who directly benefited from the success of the charitable project. The surfaces of the contemporary design furniture are designed following the techniques of the Zulu basket weavers. While vegetal fibres – as well as twigs and branches in

architecture – were originally interwoven, plastics from recycled bottles and industrial waste provide the material basis of the Zulu series. The new material allows the application of multiple colours. Thus, the mater­ ial morphosis employed here brings to light the special, fluid form of the production technique.

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The idea of basket weaving connects these three projects: while ­Haldane Martin is most closely aligned with the original, interpreting it in a new material and product, Marjorie ­Wallace transfers the idea of basket weaving in another material. With Palash Singh from the National Institute for Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, material morphosis takes on a transcontinental form. Here, the repertoire of forms of basket production is expanded to include new and unusual forms. His project with the New Basket Workshop from ­Zimbabwe represents current southsouth cooperation in design with the goal of new convergences and syntheses. His light is constructed 70

out of two ­bamboo bowls inserted into one another. For this purpose, Singh uses the bamboo strips util­ ised for the production of (fruit) baskets. He adopts the technical knowledge about how to circularly order bamboo strips in order to develop a ­series of sculptural lamps. The special feature of this technology is its flexibility, which makes the light into an “interactive” object that can be differently formed. The lamp formally recalls a spinning top that, through movement, plays with light and shadow.

© Palash Singh for STEP / The New Basket Workshop

PALASH SINGH/ THE NEW BASKET WORKSHOP Katiyo Bamboo Stick Lamp, 2012

© Sonya Clark

SONYA CLARK Erasure, 2016 Erasure by Sonya Clark seems at first glance like a simple yellow pencil; upon inspecting it more closely its modifications are perceptible: instead of an eraser, it is topped by a small black cap made from fine human hair. The African American artist returns in many of her works to this material, which is particu­ larly symbolically loaded both in Africa and the context of the diaspora. In addition to its capacity as carrier of human DNA (essential a ­ for a Genetic Ancestry Testing), hair and specific hairstyles convey identitarian location, ethnic belonging, displays of status and, in the case of the “afro”, a political symbol. Erasure implies multifaceted associations: the redemption or suppression of

a cultural code, the cutting of all connections to “homeland” in the transatlantic slave trade, the rubber extraction on the plantations. The material morphosis – from eraser to human – transports these complex political fields and directly alludes to the economy of the slave trade. Other works, such as the necklaces workgroup, use the same material­ity and formal language. In this work, Clark also addresses questions about identity and rootedness. “We are networks of communication,” she writes, “we house libraries of ancestry in our cells. Like a biologist, I observe, identify and describe our structure, function, growth, origin and evolution. Roots and branching structures found in nature, physi­ ology and technology inspire this work.”

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The work V12 Laraki by Eric van Hove takes its name and inspiration from the V12 motor that was installed in the luxury class sports car made by the Moroccan automobile manu­ facturer Laraki – a car that the company advertised as “genuinely African” (only the motor block was imported from Europe). Artists and craftsmen of various trades “copied” the individual components of the auto ­motor. Local and global traditions, economic relationships and networks are elucidated in this object. Van Hove ultimately realised the idea of the “African motor” with a group of local artisans. He abided by the details of the formal precedent, but when building the machine used materials that were exclusively available in Morocco and traditionally coded as noble: African woods and stones, leather, horn and bones, as well as ceramic and fossil inlays. The individual components are signed by their makers; the art of engineering connects here with the elaborate techniques of artisanal 72

production. Laraki negotiates the value of labour power and handi­ craft, but also questions concepts of materiality and originality. Is the product from the assembly line and the factory – the formal precedent – the original? Or does originality lie in handicraft and the individually signed unique object? Eric van Hove, whose artistic practice is marked by a conceptual approach as well as an interest in ­ socio-political contexts, questions the context of global economy and local production. The material morphosis thematises the valences of artisanship and ­industrial production. “Eric van Hove,” c ­ urator Franziska Nori writes, “discovers forms of production and product ­de­velopment that arise both through the use of traditional (art)isnal ­capabilities, as well as digital technologies.”

© Private collection, Photo: Keetja Allard, NY

ERIC VAN HOVE V12 Laraki, 2013

© Emo de Medeiros, Text: Niklas Wolf

EMO DE MEDEIROS Saint Aditi from the series ­Electrofetishes, 2016

The material basis for the Electrofetishes are small, roughly hewn wooden sculptures that Emo de Medeiros purchases at markets in West Africa. These figures are used trad­ itionally, along with other materials like textiles, certain kinds of earth or animal products, for the production of objects that are considered powerful. The artist deforms the external appearance of these quasiready-mades and adapts them to an unspecific, “modern” seeming icon­ ography and to create updated and interactive objects. A reference for the works is the principle of power and agency, which applies to “trad­ itional” craft figures. Through the collection of different substances and materials, a constant actual­ isation and increase in their power is achieved. His Electrofetish is furnished with a QR Code so that the viewers can literally call the Saint WaHo with their “electronic extensions”, which is how de Medeiros

conceives of the omnipresence of smart phones. As if out of another dimension, the figure answers with the recorded voice of Andy Warhol. Wishes can be sent to the “holy one” by telephone, but also by text message. Through releasing figure-specific QR-Codes, the respective o ­wners can participate in their power. The conditions of the external form are adapted to a contemporary context. The formal constitutive element of the power figure remains unchanged at its core. By introducing an object from a religious context into a contemporary art and consumer critical discourse, he shows the processual movement from translation and appropriation. He focuses on the ­ ­global availability of form and texture, the possibility of mobilising things. Various practices of urban cultures and cults are therefore understood as phenomena that are seen worldwide: symbols, characters and traces of the material culture of ­ ­African countries are globalised and updated. De Medeiros also refers to common religious practices in West Africa, in which new media are integrated as a matter of course. 73

Unusual material assemblages play an eminent role in many of the works by this Nigerian-born artist who currently teaches in Toronto, Canada. While her video works mix found footage from American advertisements with her own recent footage of household scenes in northern Nigeria, Tuggar merges seeming opposites into unusual object con­ stellations in her assemblages. For Broom she works with alienation and techniques of distortion: a common broom made from plant material that is used throughout West Africa mutates into an electric broom by means of mini-speakers and built-in sound chips with digital sweeping sounds stored on them. Use and simple handling are questioned and counteracted. The artist connects objects, technologies and sounds from different cultures or regions to new subjects and metaphors that serve to investigate various dynamics and power deviations. Moreover, 74

she comments on the effect of imported western technology and alleged innovation on local realities. Fatimah Tuggar changes the materiality of an object or combines different elements together in order to achieve a fusion or hybridisation, a change of “traditional” forms with new technologies. Western con­ sumer goods, like a vacuum cleaner, are in this way ironically criticised. A western commodity with its alleged superiority is rendered ­ absurd, as it can’t be used in an ­ “African environment“ – and thus ­ reflects dependencies and resent­ ment. Broom’s material fusion permits new associations and thought processes. Here, the everyday object broom becomes an ironic update.

Courtesy of Binta Zahra Studios , © Fatimah Tuggar

FATIMAH TUGGAR Broom, 1996

Courtesy of the Southern Guild Collection, © Photo: Vatic

DOKTER AND MISSES Kassena Isibheqe Writing Desk, 2015 Dokter and Misses was founded in Johannesburg by the graphic ­designer Katy Taplin and the industrial designer Adriaan Hugo. As members of the Association of African Designers, their work represents a contemporary design in Africa that is developed by drawing upon locally available materials and models, as well as new interpretations of old patterns and motifs from different regions and traditions of Africa. ­Formal references for the furniture series are specific architectures of the Kassena in the border region of Ghana and Burkina Faso, which through miniaturisation are trans­ lated into new spatial arrangements. They also take up the symbolic graphic traditions of Southern Africa, like the litema Murals of the S ­ otho or the Ambhege beadwork of the Zulu. The design team uses different formal and narrative materialities. The Isibheqe version of the writing desk miniaturises an iconic form of

building and translates the graphic pattern of house walls into a visual code. Elements from the oral and graphic tradition are literally inscribed into the wood: the pattern represents two literary models in the Sotho and Tsonga languages, “composed” in the Ishibheqe Sohlamvu, an ideographic character system widely spread throughout Southern Africa. This textually unifies elem­ ents of both languages, transmits the sonic characteristics in geometric forms, and sees itself as a de­ ­ colonial, alternative system of ­writing. The change of material and the updating of form, the translation of both into a new context, shapes the design. The Kassena architecture is therefore more than an ­image-giving model. It is a carrier of traces, which are evident in the new object. The material morphosis sharpens the view of these inscriptions as a possibility to group together different formal and narrative influences, as a visualisation and manifestation of history in the ­object. 75

The Nigerian designer Yinka Ilori lives and works in London. His furniture objects comprise found mater­ ials like old stools and dressers. He disassembles them into their individual components and assembles them into new functional units. On a thematic level, Ilori builds upon a rhetorical culture of allegorical in­ terpretation – a form of “speaking differently”, as is common in Ghana and Nigeria. In every day communication it finds expression in numerous adages and idioms; in art it is expressed through the premise of ­ transferring linguistic pictures into the visual. (Historic) cult objects are evidence of this: the Fon’s Asen-Tableaus made of metal, for example, embody and illustrate popular epigrams, parables from the history and the genealogies connected to the Yoruba or Fon from Nigeria and Benin. Especially textiles and most 76

importantly modern wax prints have textile subtexts inscribed on them. Illori uses these traditions, the verbal and the textile, and materialises them in the Parable Chair Collection. If his stools could speak, than Oba would tell you that it is better to save high-flying dreams for your­ self and ThreesACrowd stands for ironic background commentary of an urban culture. Ilori humorously emphasises these proverbs and translates them into surprising material and formal constellations.

© Yinka Ilori

YINKA ILORI Oba & ThreesACrowd, Parable Chair Collection, 2011

NORA AL-BADRI, JAN NIKOLAI NELLES The Other Nefertiti, 2016 The Other Nefertiti is a project by the artists Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles. As part of an artistic project, the duo scanned the bust of ­Nefer­titi, which has been in Berlin since 1913, and currently resides in the Egyptian Collection in the Neues Museum. With the help of the scans and a 3D printer, al-Badri and Nelles produced a replica of the bust, which they ­returned to Cairo as an artistic event. They additionally made their data publically available as a free download under a creative commons ­licence. Material mor­phosis takes on a new form, a digital one. No ­material transfer ­ happens here, the trans­ formation takes place from a m ­ aterial form into an immaterial one. When the digital data set is then ­transferred into material, a second material ­morphosis occurs, one that entails a marked difference from earlier “reproductions methods”: certain ­

parameters like size, material and production techniques are not set, but must be fixed by the user, who becomes an “author” by doing this. The actual transformation in The Other Nefertiti lies on a conceptual level and connects to a critical im­ petus: because there are also questions concerning the right to the appropriation of foreign cultural ­ property, its accessibility and pos­ sible forms of restitution. A material morphosis in the digital age shows that the results are not equivalent to forgery, mimicry and imitation, but rather open new categories.

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MAXHOSA BY LADUMA is the name of a South African fashion label Ngxokolo in founded by Laduma ­ 2011. The design is inspired by Xhosa culture, translated into a contemporary language: ­ primarily men’s knitwear, with colours and patterns referring to “traditional” Xhosa beadwork. The material morphosis concretely manifests itself in a transfer of the genuine aesthetics of dazzling and colourful glass beadwork in a new technique that Laduma Ngxokolo learned from his mother as a young person. The threading, weaving, or applique, in the trad­ itional production of beadwork is translated into a knitting pattern in the textile hand machine production. MAXHOSA BY LADUMA uses exclusively local materials, merino wool and mohair. Designs for sweaters, jackets and trousers result from this, as well as a number of pieces for a women’s collection – a ­modern 78

dress code meets a Xhosa dress code. Ngxokolo also explores the possibilities of orienting contempor­ ary knitwear design towards “trad­ itional” conventions: “The ­Amakrwala Collection inspired by my vision to create a modern Xhosa inspired knitwear collection that would be suitable for Xhosa initiates, who are prescribed by tradition to dress up in a new dignified formal clothing for six months after initiation.” He not only refers to the pattern and colour of the beadwork, which in addition to jewellery was – and still is – a part of a visual communication system, but also to urban styles from the townships of the 1950s and 60s, like the pantsula style. Many of his fashion designs – among others the My Heritage my Inheritance collection that was shown at the Design-­ Indaba-Fashion Show in Cape Town as well as in Paris – are based on a research of symbols, colour combinations, and meanings of beadwork. As updates they are also a form of material archive, transformed in ­another medium.

© MaxHosa

LADUMA NGXOKOLO MAXHOSA Markwalas Collection, Autumn/­ Winter 2012

© I.AM.ISIGO

BUBU OGISI / I.AM.ISIGO Identity 2017 Bubu Ogisi, founder of the N ­ igerian fashion label I.AM.ISIGO is part of a young generation of fashion designers in Lagos who commute between the continents and connect conceptual approaches with recourse to their own cultural heritage. ­Ogisi, who lives and works between Nigeria, Ghana, and France, spot­ lights the positioning of identity within a globalised world. I­dentity is the name of her 2017 summer collection, which is inspired by the Itsekiri in Warri in South Nigeria, in particular by their omoko dance with its special male costumes. The ­Itsekiri, known for their far-reaching trade relations and cultural inter­ connections succeeded in creating a cultural niche: “The Omoko dance signifies not only a heritage but also the ties and bonds and the different layers of our existence as well as our ­lements of identity.” She adopts e this male-fashion, such as flounces and colourfulness for her collection,

which is for women. In doing so, she also transcends gender boundaries, as Shade Thomas-Fahm did before her in the years of the i­ndependence. In the 2016 summer collection ­Modern Hunters she refers to Ghana and the Kingdom of Asante. Here, she takes up the sankofa concept, which says that one should reach back to the past and retrieve it. In this sense, she designed smocks, as they were “traditionally” worn by men in new materials and ­colours (11-colour ­ olour palette kente) extending the c of kente fabrics. She experiments with new colours and materials, which are subsequently adopted by the weavers. Crossing borders and actualisations, as ­addressed by I.AM.ISIGO, are simultaneously also re-evaluations that bring the past into the present.

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The young design label Àga Concept consists of the architect Moyo Ogunseinde and the designer Olubunmi Adeyemi and is one of the first initiatives in Nigeria to take “traditional” everyday objects, like ­ kitchen utensils, and update them. The name àga comes from Yoruba and means a functional object or piece of furniture. In their new interpret­ ation of traditional kitchen implements, for which Àga Concept ­created a large research collection, the duo connected their Yoruba heritage with a reduced aesthetic. ­ For this they coined the term “afro-­ ­ minima“: „We believe mini­ malism to be inherent in African design and culture.“ The product ­ palette of the Raw urban ­collection includes cooking spoons, cutting boards, mortar and pestles, and bowls from local wood – made Nigeria. Colourful accents are in ­ chosen according to Yoruba ­colour classi­ ­ fication, primarily white, red, black and grey, as well as ivory 80

and silver/light blue, which the art ­historian ­Babatunde Laval ­considers shades of white. Orange, copper-­ colour, and indigo, on the other hand, are considered shades of black. Their target audience is found in Nigeria as well as in the diaspora, where food as well as its preparation ­imparts a feeling of home.

© Àga Concept Campaign photograph, 2017

ÀGA CONCEPT Raw Urban II, 2017

© KnollTextiles

DAVID ADJAYE Aswan, 2015 The first fabric collection of the ­architect David Adjaye for the furniture manufacturer Knoll is dedicated to the textiles of Africa; its name­ sakes are African cities like Aswan, Cairo, Dakar, Djenné, Harare and Lagos, among others. In particular, Adjaye takes up the structures and richly patterned textiles from primarily West and Central Africa and updates them. According to Adjaye, this should subvert stereotypical notions about African design and make the diversity of its cultural ­ legacy visible. As material archives, textiles are of particular importance in this context, storing memories, commu­ nicating status and identities. As goods that were flexible and easy to transport, they were not only used as a means of payment in local (as well as transcontinental) long-distance trade, but also as a vehicle for cultural exchange and the transfer of ideas. At the same time, their production is characterised by contact situations, since individual materials

have often been imported. This is particularly visible in the West African kente cloth that Adjaye uses as ­ swan. the inspiration for the fabric A Kente was initially woven from locally produced cotton; later – in the eighteenth century – silk threads were also used which came from imported and unravelled clothes. ­ Adjaye adapted the typical pattern of the kente cloth: here predominantly asymmetrical, seriality and discontinuity broken through colour and movement, held together by a particular rhythm of a recurring motif alone. Similar aesthetic affinities for the fragmented and heterogeneous exist in polyrhythmic African music, and the art historian Herbert Ross underscores the kinetic moment of fabric: “Kente was made for movement.” For “his” ­ ­ kente fabric Adjaye digitally distorts the t­ypical pattern in order to translate it into the present, as a contemporary ­reference to the digital age.

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SPECULATIVE FORMS

Speculative Forms unites design positions and projects at the intersection of technology, science and society. They aim to change the status quo of social conditions, to make something (seemingly) unreal existent. Design is here a technique of the imagination, which forms and tests visions of possible futures: “The skill here,” Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby write in ­Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, “is making links between today’s world and the suggested one.” These scenarios are based on what is technologically feasible and its further development. Not only should visions be real, but the real should be visionary. Beyond a market conforming and adapted design, speculative products are often fictional and hypothetical. In the African context, they connect with Afrofuturism, a techno-cultural movement with futuristic orientation in music, literature and art that started in the 1950s. (Historic) experiences and dreams of a black diaspora in America manifested themselves in the form of science fiction, cyber-­ culture and futuristic aesthetics and iconography that connected ­androids and aliens with African mythologies and cosmologies. Afrofuturism and Afrotech have experienced a renewal over the past few years on the ­African continent itself as speculation on desirable futures. Early utopian projects, like the establishment of the first African space mission by Edward Makuka Nkoloso from independent Zambia are newly discovered within this context. According to the Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe, in the desire for actual independence the return to one’s own systems of knowledge and the readiness to experiment attains an enormous virulence – and Africa is promoted as a laboratory of the future. On the one hand, Speculative Forms comprise products that touch upon an investigation of often fragile urban infrastructures and on a micro-level aspire to improve them. Other projects speculate through experiments and hypothetical ­products on the future of materials and new cycles of resources, energies, materials, alternative economies as well as scenarios of participative ­structures. But Speculative Forms also happen with a view to the maker movement and the potential of 3D printing: is there a “revolution” in light of the weak existing industrial production in many parts of the continent – a radical change, like the one that triggered the emergence of video ­technologies and mobile phone usage in the 1990s? Speculative Forms also bring together positions that thematise the violent aspects of technological advancements. They often connect this with a critique of economic­relationships and political structures. These works oscillate between a fascination that comes from the new technological ­possibilities and their dark and dystopian realities.

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Alafuro Sikoki’s project proves that design can also influence social processes. Initially educated in Philadelphia, USA in industrial design, she works today between London and Nigeria. For her long-term project H++, she experiments with the possibility of transforming water hyacinths, which in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria make the water impassable, fishing impossible, and therefore deprive fishermen of their income, into a u ­ sable resource. The H++ Project in the Niger Delta has the goal of both restoring ecological balance and constituting an alternative means for the residents to generate income. Sikoki integrates local women in the project from the beginning and, in the development of the product, connects to their experience in weaving and braiding ­objects from raffia, reeds and c ­ otton. She harvests the water hyacinths with them, dries them, and twists 84

them into cords in order to finally make objects from them that meet everyday needs and can be sold at local markets. In addition to chairs and stools, she also ­recently created lamps: forms of ­cooperation distinguished by their durability and longevity, in addition to their vivid colours. According to Alafuro Sikoki, her goal is to create a useful raw material out of what is considered a harmful plant and, ­ furthermore, to secure the survival of the island residents and their cultural identity. Studio Sikoki represents a new ­ development in design where a ­ young generation of designers with self-initiated projects challenges common design strategies in order to propose viable alternatives to the existing system. In a social sense, for Sikoki it is also about how design can contribute to new concepts for society.

© Studio Sikoki

ALAFURO SIKOKI / STUDIO SIKOKI H++ Water Hyacinth Project, 2011/2017

© Markus Kayser, Photo: Amos Field Reid

MARKUS KAYSER Solar Sinter Project, 2011 What alternatives can design offer with regard to a forward-looking sustainable engagement with material, resources, energy and distribution? Two resources dominate the planet’s desert regions: sun and sand. While the sun is available as free energy, the latter forms an almost unlimited raw material, for example for the production of glass. This speculative consideration leads the way for the Solar Sinter Project by the product designer Markus Kayser. He uses the 3D printing process of laser sintering, which he adapts to the conditions of an unusual production site: the desert. The laser beams are ­replaced by sunbeams, plastic (the customary material for 3D printing) by sand. Markus Kayser tested his first Solar Sinter Machine in 2011 in the Moroccan desert and ultimately expands this to a fully automated computer operated version. The side panels of the solar panels provide the necessary energy. The ­ first results of these experimental

­rrangements are simple bowls as a well as more complex structures, whose fascination lies in their un­ usual aesthetic and the high-tech procedures used to create them. But even more important than the product are the possibilities of the procedure itself. With regard to architecture, for example, it could be the foundation for a new kind of construction in the desert. The intention of the Solar Sinter Project is a change of perspective – another view on a region that has long been understood as inhospitable and unproductive. Alongside sun and sand, a third component is brought into play here: a dynamic and global open source community that constantly works on further developing the software and hardware for the 3D printer. Free access to technology over the internet enables dissemination in regions that until now were largely exempt from industry production, and provides individuals the possibility of product production that is geared towards local conditions and needs.

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Even as a young person, the Togo-­ born industrial designer and artist, who lived between Paris and Togo, inquired about the origins of the forms and materials of the everyday objects that surrounded him. Not to mention why objects that are regarded as representative of Africa are predominantly older pieces or antiques: “As a teenager, I spent my time wondering why in sci-fi movies, every landscape, every object I could see was western or Asian based. I’ve finally understood that somewhere our legacy had been locked in the past, that we couldn’t be ‘futuristic’ in the eyes of our fellow Europeans. We have to look behind our shoulders, get back to our traditions, seize the best of them and shape a future with it. This without forgetting we are part of the World, totally, unquestionably. The future is for me not only a matter of dialogue with the past but and ­beyond everything a dialogue with the rest of the planet.” L447, The Stool, and Koreo follow the principle of Aguessy’s Newbia Anticipation­ 86

­Project, which can be understood as a series of attempts that is central to the speculative question of the possible development of an independent “African” design. The products touch on the thesis that the colon­ isation of the African continent abruptly disrupted the develo­pment of local production techniques and technologies. Because of this, Aguessy refers to older materials, forms, design principles and techniques to further develop them on this basis. Aguessy explores the boundaries of the material, mainly employs machine production and high technology – and with the resulting aesthetic thwarts the conventional expectation of an “African” design. Within this framework, he organised a first FabLab in Porto-­ Novo, Benin in 2012. Kossi Aguessy, who was educated at the London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, numbered among the representatives of cosmopolitan – Afropolitan – a generation of cultural producers who (temporarily) return to Africa to use their talents and ­creativity to engage in a collective ­process of “future making”.

© CHARLES, Paris ,  Photo: Johannes Danglehant

KOSSI AGUESSY The Stool, 2015, Koreo, 2015

© Photo: Thomas Splett

JULES WOKAM Mobilium (Model), 2016 Jules Wokam operates between the realms of art, architecture, fashion and product design. His works convey the idea of a modern, fu­ ture-looking Africa, building on the wealth of traditional knowledge ­systems and technologies. This approach follows the idea that self-awareness requires knowledge about one’s own heritage. Contrary to a mere adaptation of western forms, materials and functions, Wokam’s designs build on a continuation of local developments that he speculatively leads into the future. Wokam describes some of his designs as “urban utopias” – benches, shelters and pavilions as furnishings for future (Camaroonian) cities. As in the case of Mobilium, which is built on a hexagonal floor plan, it is about functional design: created and inspired for and through public space. On the one hand, it refers to a genuine urban practice, while on ­ the other it borrows from older ­architectures. The Mobilium, which was honoured in the design section Biennale of Dakar, at the 2004 ­

­rimarily refers to one of the p country’s old Mousgoum buildings ­ (tòlek). ­Originally built from lime and equipped with a complex drainage system, it is transformed here into a light and airy pavilion made from wood and metal. References to the versatility of contemporary urban structures can be found in the flexibility of the foldable sides. Adaptable for many situations, ­ Wokam’s Mobilium can be an indi­ vidual retreat or a public meeting place. Further questions about the individual and his or her role in society follow. In the context of his longterm project the Urban Utopias, the public space of African cities is turned into a field for experimentation in order to negotiate the pos­ sible links between older technol­ ogies and their relation to the present, of intimacy and the public realm, technology and beauty, or form and function.

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­react to their everyday observations in Rustenberg, South Africa. Children need to travel long distances to Projects that focus on microstrucget to school and, because of electures in urban contexts show that tricity shortages, only seldom have speculative design does not necesthe opportunity to study at night sarily solely have large solutions in ­because of insufficient illumination. mind. Instead they attempt to quesRepurpose Schoolbags seeks to tion observations of everyday life change this: the upcycled school and, within the possibilities at hand, bags have an integrated solar lamp. to connect social and ecological This is charged on the way to school ­issues with economic ones and, in and serves as a reading lamp after this way, seek to create an improvenightfall. In an environment in which ment within microsystems. Repurmany households need to get by pose Schoolbags and Lumkani from without electricity and are also imSouth Africa and Cladlight from pacted by kerosene shortages, the ­Kenya are among these projects. reading lamp is a valuable asset. Today, Rethaka is a company with ­ eight full-time employees – six of RETHAKA (PTY) LTD them are women – and produces Repurpose Schoolbags, 2013 about twenty bags a day. The material used for this purpose is ­ The Repurpose Schoolbags come plastic waste from the region, from the South African start up which is obtained, among other ­Rethaka (Pty) Ltd, which was foundways, from schools in the area, ed by Thato Kgatlhanye and Rea­ which encourage their students to ­Ngwane in 2013. The project brings collect for the project. Kgatlhanye ­together ecological issues, like recyc­ has been internationally recognised ling and solar energy as a form of alfor this project multiple times, ternative resource finding, with sofurther projects – also outside of ­ cial questions about the basic right South Africa – are in progress. to an education. The two women

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© Rethaka Ltd., Text: Agnes Stillger

FORMS OF URBAN ­MICROSTRUCTURES

 © Lumkani , Text: Agnes Stillger

LUMKANI Lumkani Fire Detector, 2015 In 2013, a firestorm destroyed over 800 huts in Khayelitsha, one of the largest townships in South Africa. Approximately 5000 people were displaced. This experience directly led to the foundation of Lumkani, a social technology start-up initiated by the students of the University of Kapstadt with the goal of developing a fire-warning system for informal settlements and townships. Instead of reacting to smoke, as conventional devices tend to, the version that Lumkani developed shows especially high levels of heat. This decisive difference responds to the concrete living conditions in settlements like Khayelitsha, in which smoke is often a by-product of cooking, heating or lighting. Lumkani’s fire alarm is a smart device and interacts over­ radio frequencies with other ­ de­­ vices. After the alarm sounds, each fire alarm in the immediate vicinity activates all available devices with a special warning tone, which shows that the fire is already threatening the immediate surroundings. Through a chain reaction, each device

expands the warning radius. ­ ­ All text information is bi-lingual, but­  Lumkani has also developed a special graphic design to make the service accessible to illiterate users.

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Boda-Bodas, as the motorcycle taxis are called in Kenya, are omnipresent in Nairobi. They guarantee progressing quickly through the daily ­“Go-Slow” of the capital city’s dense traffic. At the same time, accidents, often with serious injuries or fatal outcomes, are plentiful. Michael Gathogo Githinji has therefore developed a vest with lighting ­ elements mounted on the back. ­ They are connected to the handlebars via Bluetooth. As soon as the driver signals or brakes, the information is sent to the signal ­ transmitter on his or her back. The system thus ensures greater visibil­ ity. In recent years, laboratories have been set up in Nairobi to enable young people, in exchange for a low financial contribution, to develop and realise their ideas. One of these laboratories is Gearbox – centrally located in Nairobi, this institution provides access to a wide range of devices such as 3D printers, laser cutting, metal processing machines and a complete computer hardware 90

sector, as well as software. This is where Michael Gathogo Githinji works on 3D-printed medical products, so that they do not need to be ­imported at great cost.

© Cladlight

CladLight / MICHAEL GATHOGO CladLight, 2014

© Photo: Thomas Splett

FUNDI BOTS Kasambula, 2015 Founded in 2011 by Solomon King Benge in Kampala, Uganda, the non-profit organisation Fundi Bots has set the goal of offering Robotics lessons in schools nationwide. A generation of inventors and innov­ ators will grow up in the near future. To date, supplementary classes ­organised by Fundi Bots take place in fifteen schools at weekends, on afternoons or during holidays. Participants are instructed on a fundamental level to observe their own sur­roundings from a solution-oriented and practical perspective: problems are identified; solutions and concrete technical applications are sought collectively. Alongside a foundational knowledge in Robotics, Fundi Bots teaches electronic engin­ eering, draftsmanship, mechanics and computer software programming. Problems in Uganda, according to Fundi Bots, require local solutions – and local materials. In ­ order to build a functional robot, recycled pieces, like components from various electronic devices or found

materials are sufficient. The Fundi-­ Walker has been created in this way, including a remote-controlled ve­ hicle that can measure the outside temperature and wirelessly transmit it in real-time. The six-legged robot Kasambula runs on a simple DC ­motor and was built with plywood, screws, grooves, a bicycle chain, a ball bearing and a track roller, as well as sawdust adhesive and a re­ cycled eleven-volt laptop battery. The tools: handsaws and gimlets, ­pliers and sandpaper. This illustrates ­concepts of a structural design. “In its motion, it always maintains three legs on the ground for stability and lifts three. For every step, if it lifts two of the three legs on one side, it leaves one down, and lifts one on the opposite side while main­ taining two down” (Fundi Victor Paul Kawagga). In light of the rudimentary level of existing state educational ­institutions, FabLabs and technology centres like Fundibots take on an important position: Speculative forms function here in the sense of self-­ empowerment and emancipation.

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Combining topoi from mythology and science fiction, the short film Pumzi by Wanuri Kahiu stands for the new “tradition” of African Futurism. The plot: thirty-five years after the Third World War, the “war for water” has made the planet unin­ ­ habitable, and the only people to survive live in a high-tech new town in East Africa. Water is no longer naturally available, but must be laboriously gleaned from sweat and urine. When the young scientist Asha succeeds in growing a plant sprout from a handful of earth of mysterious origin, she presents a danger to the autocratic government which had ­ claimed that a life outside was impossible. Asha nevertheless succeeds in escaping the surveillance. In a dystopian landscape marked by ongoing drought she succeeds in growing a young tree. In his characteristic combination of science fiction with references to reality, one can recognise in Asha’s struggle and 92

her benevolence and homage to ­Wangari Maathai, the founder of the “Green Belt Movement” in Kenya and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Pumzi (Swahili for “breath”) not only criticises the problematic handling of the life-sustaining element water, but it indirectly criticises practices such as multi-national concerns buying up water sources. At the same time, the danger also a ­rises of using technological in­ novations against people: in Pumzi everyone is subject to a totalitarian surveillance regime and permanent control, their bodies have become resources. For the Kenyan Wanuri Kahiu film-­ making is a form of storytelling: in an afrofuturist manner, ­local narratives of the speculative, myths, and legends are combined with current themes, thus imagining possible futures. As an Afrofuturist project whose narration of “Africa” is hypermodern and has chosen the “black body” as the main protag­onist, the film also resists common topos of the science-fiction genre.

© Wanuri Kahiu

WANURI KAHIU Pumzi, 2009

© Jean Katambayi Mukendi

JEAN KATAMBAYI MUKENDI Voyant, 2015 The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most resource rich countries in rare metals. The artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi grew up here in a mining settlement in Lubumbashi, on the edge of the ­ copper belt. Today the mines are ­integrated in the global network of the mobile communications industry through a joint venture with an international company. The wealth of raw materials, like copper and coltan, is diametrically opposed to the many problems in the everyday life of the local residents: insufficient infrastructure, power supply short­ ages, inadequate healthcare, poverty, a high level of pollution, and a lack of security in light of the rebel militias. In this environment, Mukendi creates imaginary machines, un­ usual sculptural objects that operate at the intersection of art and technological experimentation. Central subjects of his work are electrical circuits and the principles of energy

circulation. These can be attributed to the functioning of various organisms, be they global, local, physical or intangible structures. His works can be understood as critiques of globalisation, corruption and social abuses. He contrasts the valuable resources which are exported in ­order to enable high-tech outside of his country with his low-tech objects. The work Voyant, is a monumental robot made from paper and cardboard, which in its clear discrepancy with Western high tech­ nology raises extensive socio-­ political questions about tech­ nological autonomy, the acquisition of knowledge, and local independence on the basis of their own resource wealth. His machines thus present parallel infrastructures; they reflect reality but also the country’s inherent potential: they visualise ­alternative systems and possibilities.

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In the works of Abu Bakarr Mansaray from Freetown, Sierra Leone, speculative forms manifest themselves in technical drawings and construction manuals. His images show futuristic (war)machines and automatons. Through textual comments they manifest their proximity to urban legends – stories about question­ able wealth and occult economies. The drawing Alien’s Ultimate (Bad Ass) also falls in this category. It shows an alien-manned flying object and, as noted by Mansaray on the sheet, is a visual realisation of a story about an infernal machine that threatens mankind. The title refers to a science fiction film from the United States called Aliens – The ­Return (1991), especially the scenes that glorify the technical weaponry of the US military. Soldiers fight with a large weapon arsenal against ­aliens that outnumber them. Mansaray mixes the American alien metaphor for overpowering evil during the 94

time of the Gulf War and other military interventions with local legends about “occult economies”. Not only in regions of Africa impacted by war, but also in cities marked by sharpening social inequalities, myths circulate about the origins of unexplain­ able wealth. One suspects a pact with the devil or the jujuman is behind it, in any case magical practices. A brutal civil war prevailed in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002; the trade with ­so-called “blood diamonds” played a significant role here. In Aliens ­Ultim­ate, hell is a place of slaughter bathed in blood red. Even though ­indeterminate beings in science fiction behave brutally, it is the ultimate futuristic weapon machine that embodies the evil, the beast. In order to make the horrors of war comprehensible, it needs the space-time shift of science fiction and a banishment of the demonic chaos through a ­precise, controllable presentation of mechanics. The future here is a ­dystopian one; technology is nego­ti­ ated between fascination and ­horror.

© Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris, Photo: Cyrille Martin

ABU BAKARR MANSARAY Alien’s Ultimate (Bad Ass), 2016

© Michael MacGarry

MICHAEL MACGARRY Lagos Nigeria 2027 from 100 Sun series, 2010 Lagos Nigeria 2027 is part of a series made from three city-visions: together with Luanda 2019 and Malabo 2023, the series thematically links to areas of large petroleum reserves and important resources in Africa. Lagos 2027 has nothing in common with the contemporary view of the Mega City, instead MacGarry shows it as a super modern city with futuristic high-rise buildings and without a reference to the informal econ­ omies that shape it. The sleek CAD-aesthetic of his image is a speculation on what would have happened if the profits from the oil industry had stayed within the country and had been fairly shared. ­speculative forms focuses here on a criticism of global economic structures, an irresponsible handling of resources, and the local effects of these ­actions. They connect to the future of a self-determined Africa with a speculative optimism. As fictional

hybrids, the works both question common paradigms, like the sovereign state itself, power relations, or conceptions of value, justice and ­development, as well as the relationship between industrial technologies and the African continent. Michael MacGarry writes about his work: “My work investigates the ongoing ramifications of imperialism on the African continent, coupled with the analysis and parody of the socio-­ political and economic role of ­political elites within this ­context as well as the increasingly complicated dynamics attendant on the ­extraction of natural resources – particularly nation-­ states post-­ oil – in African ­ inde­pendence.”

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Ladi Kwali, Michael Cardew and a Tangled Story of A ­ frican Studio Pottery Susan Mullin Vogel

The Victoria and Albert Museum owns a ceramic vessel made in Nigeria by Ladi Kwali that contains a stew of contradictions (Fig. 1). This “water pot” (according to the label) is hand built and has many features of a traditional Gwari water pot but she made it of high-fired stoneware and glazed it with tenmoku, an ancient Japanese glaze formula. It has neither the round bottom of a Gwari pot nor the raised foot of a European one, though it stands straight on a flat surface. It is too heavy to carry and too small for water, and in 1957, just months after it was made, the Museum purchased it from her first exhib­ ition ever, at the Berkeley art gallery in London. Ladi Kwali’s round pot is wider than it is high. Like most African water pots, its presence emanates from the perfection of its silhouette and from the expansive volume enclosed within. It is not sculptural. She made countless similar pots1 but her best, like this one, are both delicate and sharp, having an exceptionally formal, precise and generous contour filled like a great inhal­ ation. They have an austere purity of line, a long unbroken complex curve; rising over the swelling belly, tightening at the shoulder then reversing at the neck without articulation all the way to the flaring rim. At the bottom the round line suddenly pulls straight inward and dies in the shadow. Her finest pots can seem to hover, levitating volume above a perilously t­ apered base. The neck is short and wide-mouthed, allowing glimpses of the darkly mysteri­ ous interior. She engraved her smoothly sensuous surfaces with orderly Gwari patterns, linear and textured under a variegated glassy surface. As Tanya Harding puts it, Ladi Kwali’s pots are “at once familiar and strange, the recognizable vernacular glittering with glaze.”2 Before he met her, Michael Cardew made an admiring drawing of a classic Gwari low-fire earthenware water pot – “best I ever saw” – that Ladi Kwali had made in 1950.3 He notes that it is sixty-one centimeters high and records its refined profile, compact neck, and the incised linear lizards and panels of roulette-textured decoration. Under the tutelage of Cardew, and for the rest of her life, Ladi Kwali continued to faithfully reproduce a version of that pot adding a minimally flattened base, and reducing its typical size to about half the original. In different countries and different circumstances she made innumerable – maybe hundreds of – closely similar vessels that never evolved over her long career. The Victoria and Albert vessel is one of her “translations” of the Gwari water pot of her childhood, her one inherited form. Ladi Kwali was a consummate craftsperson, a supremely skilled potter with 96

­ xceptional talent who owed her austerely perfect Gwari silhouette and ­lively e decorations to the generations of women potters who came before her. This paradoxical vessel is not a pot in any sense: it should be described as a Gwari style vase, a decorative object useful only in the context of “modern” households. It is a three dimensional depiction of a Gwari ceramic but not an interpretation: it lacks the variations and analytical distance that separate a rendering from a rethinking of a received form. Without commentary and without attitude, Ladi Kwali’s vessels of this kind accurately reproduce the original forms and decorations just reduced in size and fabricated in a different material. They are skeuomorphs but neither she nor those around her seem ever to have acknowledged that most interesting dimension of her work. Ladi Kwali’s vase has long been on permanent display at the Victoria and ­Albert Museum near a large photograph of its maker with Cardew her ­mentor, and founder of the Abuja Pottery Training Center (Fig. 2). In 1950, the Nigerian colonial government had appointed Cardew (1901–1983) the first ­Pottery Officer in the Department of Commerce and Industry, charging him with the task of helping to establish a modern Nigerian ceramics industry. Ladi Kwali (ca. 1930–19844) was by far the most successful “student” at the Abuja Pottery, though she arrived as a mature virtuoso hand-building potter, and the Pottery’s mission was to prepare young Nigerian men for careers making table­ware on a wheel. The Pottery, however, was located in a region where clay was generally women’s work (as is widespread in Africa) with the local exception being Hausa pottery, traditionally made by men. In time, the Abuja Pottery accommodated this reality with two work areas: the ­Darkin-Hausa where Hausa men worked on the wheel and the Darkin-Gwari for hand ­building by Ladi Kwali and three other Gwari women making “water pots.”5 She was touted as a new kind of modern potter and was adept at throwing on the wheel, but the best-selling pots that made her famous (and at times kept the Abuja Pottery solvent), were glazed Gwari pots created with the age-old hand building techniques Ladi Kwali had learned from her aunt. I became interested in Ladi Kwali because she was using a traditional ­Japanese clay body and glaze that suggested her work was connected to the early 20th century British-Japanese search for blended modern forms. Could it be an overlooked African component in this international dialogue? I soon discovered, however, that Africa played no part and that Ladi Kwali herself had only the thinnest of connections to Japanese ceramics – and may barely have seen any – but that her misunderstood works and her constructed persona contained a thicket of revealing contradictions and ironies. Her career as a celebrated woman artist and a personage far ahead of her time is a small oddment on the edge of African modernism that throws a sharp light on broad issues at the core of that modernism and its relationship to primitivism, abstraction and the ethnographic in Nigeria at the time.

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Ladi Kwali is still celebrated in Nigeria today. She is prominently featured on a Nigerian bank note, and in the capital a major conference hall, thoroughfare, and the former Abuja Pottery Training Center itself are named for her. Important museums in the United States and Great Britain currently have dedicated displays about her and this year she was included in a compen­ dious exhibition on British Studio Pottery though she never lived in Britain.6 Her works are sold at contemporary African art auctions, and today she, along with the great Magdalene Odundo, thirty years her junior, are the most famous African ceramic artists. Ladi Kwali’s work is not modern, but the public persona she constructed, performed and inhabited as an international celebrity artist, was uniquely modern ahead of her time. Before Cardew even met her, Ladi Kwali knew her own value and wanted it recognized: as a potter with a clear sense of herself as exceptional, she had taken to signing some of her pots with a mark on the neck, and had demonstrated her ambition by leaving the village for work as a trader in town.7 Among hundreds of skilled women potters in the region, Ladi Kwali had managed to catch the attention of the Emir who urged Cardew to bring her to the Pottery. In person, she radiated confidence and charm – when he first met her, Cardew mentions her beauty and her dazzling smile. She was clearly adept at turning to her advantage the casual sexism of the day and she knew how to play upon a western audience’s weakness for the exotic. She and Cardew toured European and American cities where, at each stop, she performed a demonstration of the distinctive Gwari technique by completely forming a reduced size water pot in a short time without a wheel and with a minimum of tools. She approached her pottery demonstrations as theater, spotlighting her skills and her engaging personality. Elegantly dressed and wearing stylish shoes, earrings and a dramatic head tie, she would thrust her fist into a large ball of clay on a low stand, then pull up the walls of the pot with a scraper as she walked around and around it. She built the upper half with thick coils, paddled the whole vessel into shape, smoothed and decor­ ated it with roller patterns and incised Gwari figures of different creatures. She is described as “dancing” around the pot as she raised and smoothed it, and as singing in pleasure when it was a success. In the middle of their tour in America, Cardew wrote to his wife complaining that Ladi Kwali had twice threatened not to perform her demonstrations unless she was paid more than previously agreed.8 After receiving an MBE from Queen Elizabeth, the Nigerian men at the Pottery called her “Radio London,” as she excitedly ­entertained everyone with her tales of Europe.9 The ancient Japanese tenmoku glaze formula and stoneware clay body that Ladi Kwali was using in the 1950s had arrived in northern Nigeria by a circu­ itous route. In the 1920s, young Cardew had become the first apprentice and lifelong supporter of Bernard Leach, the famous founder of the British Studio Pottery Movement which shared social reform ideals and a respect for traditional craftsmanship with the earlier Arts and Crafts Movement. Leach, 98

Fig. 1 Gwari-style vase by Ladi Kwali, Victoria and Albert Museum, purchased at her first exhibition, Berkeley Gallery, London, 1958. Stoneware, tenmoku type glaze, 30 cm high, 34 cm wide. (Photo Museum)

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Fig. 2 Ladi Kwali with Michael Cardew (right), and Bernard Leach, Cornwall UK, 1962. (Photo from Harrod, 2012, 95, photographer u­ncredited)

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however, rejected Arts and Crafts decorative styles and sought a return to the sophisticated simplicity of vernacular medieval English pottery and J­apanese folk ceramics – particularly of the Mingei movement. The leading British and Japanese figures of the two movements were closely allied in their efforts to blend Asian and European aesthetics. Like their English counterparts, Japan’s Mingei theoreticians and potters rejected their elite ceramic traditions and found inspiration in Japanese “folk art”. From the medieval Leach took bold forms without ornament, and incised or slip decoration; from the Japanese came a preference for stoneware over porcelain, ancient glazes, and the aesthetic of wabi-sabi or the humble beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete. Unlike the early twentieth century Primitivist sculptors, painters, and designers finding inspiration in African arts, Leach, Cardew and other British Studio Potters never turned to African pottery for aesthetic ideas or techniques. Cardew’s ceramics made in Africa continue in the vein he had been working in England, unaffected by two uniquely defining features of African arts that resonated among European textile and furniture designers: the inventive sculptural volumes of African ceramics; the abstract decoration, often in high relief. One reason for this may lie in the European value system for ceramics, still unchallenged in the mid-20th century. A summary is useful here because every feature of historical African pottery and of Ladi Kwali’s inherited Gwari tradition was held in low regard compared to European or Asian ceramics. Ladi Kwali used the hand building techniques (coiling, pinching, paddling) common to all sub-Saharan African pottery traditions and to humankind’s earliest ceramics. By the 3rd millennium BCE, the potter’s wheel was in general use in Asia and in the ancient Mediterranean. Wheel throwing everywhere was traditionally a male occupation while hand building, where it survived, was generally practiced by women. From antiquity till the late 20th century, virtually all European pottery has been wheel thrown or cast in molds: hand building was seen as backward or primitive except for the ­making of sculptures. Ladi Kwali grew up working with earthenware, the clay body of all traditional African pottery as well as of all ancient Mediterranean and European ceramics (among many others) before the 18th century. This clay always fired at low temperatures (600–850 degrees centigrade), reliably produces extremely large, relatively lightweight vessels that will cool water by evaporation, and will resist the thermal shock of cooking. An average African water pot holds an impressive five to six gallons. Burnishing with a smooth pebble partially seals the surface but from medieval times, European potters used vitreous glazes to seal and decorate their wares. The most prestigious clay bodies in Europe and Asia are stoneware and ­porcelain which must be fired at high temperatures in kilns (where they have a high rate of failure – especially porcelain). Kiln firing was an exclusively 101

male occupation while open bonfiring was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it has a very low failure rate.10 It has been characterized as technically simple though in fact it requires a ­hyper refined combination of specific clay body, fuel, firing technique and atmospheric conditions – formulas derived from local experimentation ­mainly by generations of women. Alongside Africa’s hand built, low temperature, bonfired, burnished earthenware, Cardew introduced: wheel thrown, high temperature, kiln fired, glazed stoneware. The first set of qualities were not only low prestige, ancient, “primitive” survivals, but were associated with women’s work; Cardew’s new ceramic industry would be modern, sanitary, and dominated by men. Ladi Kwali adopted all of the innovations she learned from him including the potter’s wheel which she worked prolifically as a production potter. (All the Abuja potters including Cardew and the Gwari women turned out hundreds of identical wheel thrown, glazed casseroles, coffee pots, pitchers and other tableware for the market following Cardew’s models, but Ladi Kwali’s production work is not addressed here.) For her sensitive Gwari style vases, how­ever, she and the other Gwari women stuck with their hand building roots and also usually chose the dark brown tenmoku glaze that evoked the traditional Gwari locust bean stain. It gives their pots the dark heft and presence of the origin­ als. On display at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art and at the Victoria and Albert Museum are two such vessels easily mistaken for work by Ladi Kwali though they were made by Asibi Ido and by Lami Toto respectively. Cardew didn’t completely subscribe to conventional hierarchies, though he framed even the Nigerian pottery traditions that he loved in terms of the high prestige qualities they lack: “their technical character remains unchanged [from ancient times]: they are made without the throwing or potter’s wheel; they are always open-fired; they are never glazed …”.11 He was one of the ­seldom discussed “outsider” colonials who passionately loved Africa and lived in some isolation on the African side of divided colonial society. Like others of his convictions, he vigorously defended his African protégés and had serious differences with the administration while automatically sharing many of its ­paternalistic and racist assumptions – and the benefits of being a white man.12 He saw “masterpieces,” “noble and beautiful pots in vast numbers” among Asian and African hand built ceramics, writing of Ladi Kwali’s Gwari tradition in particular, “This is perhaps the most direct, sensitive and primitive [style of the region] …” a survival of stone and bronze age technology.13 In his own work, from youth he had rejected the “artistic,” highly decor­ated British porcelains of the time, and for the first half of his career created low fire earthenware pieces with simple slip decorations and clear glazes. He was at heart a Primitivist. While ceramic histories do not characterize Leach and his followers this way, it is clear that their aesthetic was a kind of ceramic-based Orientalist 102

­ rimitivism. The search for inspiration in exotic and simple “folk” ceramics P lead by Leach in the teens and the nineteen twenties parallels the search by ­European painters and sculptors a decade earlier that became Primitivism. Leach, Cardew and the Japanese Mingei ceramic artists and thinkers, formed their shared ideal of modernism around anti-modernism, a desire to counter what they saw as pernicious effects of industrialization and the vast rush of economic, social and material modernizations of the early twentieth century. A return to direct experience and authentic, hand-made work would redress losses from the de-humanizing mass-produced objects pervading the envir­ onment. While Primitivism in painting and sculpture had gradually become diffuse and had lost significance by mid-century, Cardew, like Leach himself never wavered from the style and philosophy of ceramic Primitivism which Cardew incongruously brought to Abuja in 1951.14 Having selected Abuja as the location for the Pottery, Cardew gravitated to Gwari, the sole pottery style in the region that used figurative graphic decor­ ation.15 It features engraved birds, snakes, lizards, fish – the same kind of natural subject in a flattened linear style that Cardew himself had adopted decades earlier from traditional rural British pottery (Fig. 3). Abstraction had come to dominate the work of the modernist wing along with most of the art and design world, but Cardew, adhering to an earlier ideal of humble ­traditional wares, gave Ladi Kwali and the Abuja production potters designs of animal and plant motifs to reproduce, an uneasy conjoining of English and Gwari decoration.16 Meanwhile, by the 1940s in ceramic circles of Europe and America, abstraction in the art world had created space for a new kind of vessel-like ceramic sculpture, not intended to be used, that was a vehicle for personal expression.17 The British Studio Pottery movement, though still vigorous, was challenged by a strain of modern ceramics belonging to high modernism that had grown out of a Wiener Werkstätten and Bauhaus aesthetic brought to Britain decades earlier by refugees Lucy Rie from Austria, and Hans Coper from Germany among other sources (Fig. 4). Ceramicists had been recruited to art school faculties and were increasingly in dialogue with current art styles and theories. The breakdown of hierarchies of media and materials, the blurring of categories of art and use, of art and craft – in addition to the rise of abstraction had all loosened the bonds of conventional pottery making. Functional ware and wheel thrown pieces lost importance. Where Rie and Coper are described as the “metropolitan” school of British ceramic ­artists, Leach and Cardew were the “rural.” In California, a group of artists, among whom Peter Voulkos is the most prominent, developed a disruptive form of modern ceramics allied to abstract expressionism. Starting in the 1950s, and all through the years Cardew was in Abuja, Voulkos was constructing monumental unorthodox sculptures by any means including punching, slashing or dropping big wheel-thrown forms on the floor then combining them with hand build slabs and epoxy paint. With a Pop Art 103

s­ ensibility, Robert Arneson and Viola Frey were creating irreverent glazed figurative sculptures. These ceramic artists were making oversize, hugely ambitious artworks and seemed to belong to a different era from the one ­inhabited by Cardew and Leach. Cardew had avoided the art world and the avant garde in England, and might have imagined that he was well away from it in Abuja. He always preferred to work with what he called “unspoiled” – less educated Africans, and at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in nearby Zaria, had limited his contacts to the foreign technical staff who could advise on his chronic kiln problems. But while he was training apprentices in what others had ­characterized as the “rural” school of British Studio Pottery – and I have called a Primitivist style, Nigerian students in painting and sculpture at Zaria were debating and defining a new Nigerian modernity.18 The contrast between his project and theirs went on full view at the Arts and Crafts Pavilion on Victoria Island during the 1960 independence celebrations. Inside among the crafts was a display of glazed Gwari vases by Ladi Kwali and her fellow women potters’ vases along with domestic tableware by her, Cardew and others. Outside, covering one entire wall was a mural, titled Mother Nigeria, painted by Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, and Uche Okeke, depicting at the top an enormous stylized figure whose embracing arms extended over smaller figures below. For the Zaria modernists, five-year old Abuja’s “modern” pottery was already old fashioned and ethnographic. The Abuja Pottery Training Center occupied a zone somewhere between the categories of technical school, production pottery and studio pottery, but by the 1970s young studio potters elsewhere in Africa were graduating from art schools and beginning to invent their own personal styles. These upcoming ceramicists all eventually specialized in sculptural and expressive pieces and several came to Abuja to learn while Ladi Kwali was still working there. We can situate her work in relation to the nascent African studio pottery by looking at theirs. Kingsley Kofi Broni, (1945–2017),19 junior staff member of the ceramics ­department at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in ­Kumasi, worked and trained at the Abuja Pottery during the last three years before Cardew’s final departure in 1965. He focused on wheel thrown ceramics and deeply absorbed the Cardew-Leach philosophy and aesthetics, but subsequent studies in California with Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson took him in a more avant garde direction. He eventually developed his own striking abstract modernist style, creating both hand built and wheel thrown stoneware objects covered – till the end of his long life – with Cardew-inflected glazes. His works have no evident connection in facture or in style to the pottery traditions of Ghana or Nigeria (Fig. 5).

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Fig. 3 Gwari Casserole by Michael Cardew ca. 1975. Stoneware, tenmoku type glaze, 28 cm wide, made at Wenford Bridge, Cornwall. Private collection.

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Fig. 4 Hans Coper, Bottle with Disc and F our Cycladic Forms, 1970–75, stoneware, 11.4 to 29.8 cm high. (Photo Yale University Art Gallery, Linda Leonard Schlenger Collection. © Crafts Study Centre, University for the ­Creative Arts) Fig. 5 Kingsley Kofi Broni, Tea Bread, stoneware, glazed. 1970s, approx. 45 cm wide. Estate of K.K. Broni. (Photo by Kelvin Kwaku Haizel)

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As a young student, Magdalene Odundo (born 1950) spent the summer of 1973 in Abuja at Cardew’s suggestion. There she worked with the Hausa men on the wheel, and learned variations of hand building techniques from Ladi Kwali, Lami Toto and Kainde Ushafa, hand builders working there at the time. She had studied art and ceramics in England but permanently adopted the Gwari traditional earthenware clay body and with pulling, pinching, coiling and burnishing methods as the core of her practice. She still credits Ladi Kwali and Cardewthese potters for leading her to this early breakthrough. Her large sculptural vessels are formally unlike any others – while the means of their making and their material essence connect to women’s ancient hand building in Africa and the world over. Three years later, at the nearby University of Nsukka, the young Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (born 1944) was hand building his own style of high fire, unglazed stoneware. He met Ladi Kwali on a visit to the Abuja Pottery but his own abstract sculptural ceramics were already firmly grounded in the modernist stream of the period. His Broken Pots series was hand built stoneware but it seems utterly self-generated with no visible derivation from traditional African pottery nor from any specific forbear or ceramic artist working elsewhere.20 Among all the artists and movements we have surveyed, Ladi Kwali’s corpus of Gwari-style vases appears narrow, singular, and remote from the others, immune to influences, her own project. Her skeuomorphs, though adopted by the Gwari women made to work at the Pottery, were not part of constructing modernism in the Nigerian art world, and they had no connection to styles of ceramic arts current in Europe, America, or among Africa’s early studio potters. They do not even look like the Leach-Cardew tradition with which she is associated. What her glazed pots most closely resemble are the old Gwari pots still holding gallons of water back in her home village during the years she was in Abuja and on tour. Producing variants of a single pot form, she did not have the practice of a ceramic artists like Magdalene Odundo who create succession of unique objects, grounded in a search for original personal expression, nor of studio potters like Cardew – sketching, devel­ oping new designs that he could make as single functional pieces or in small runs. From the serial works she created, and from her working methods, it is clear that throughout her career, she approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms, but with the creative processes she learned in her village. Ladi Kwali’s practice married the values and processes of Gwari crafts traditions with the virtually identical production pottery values and processes she learned from Cardew. Both were based on finely honed techniques that could efficiently produce an infinite series of nearly identical, quality pieces in a short time.21 If Ladi Kwali’s vessels radiate confidence and effortless beauty, it is because she executed them with the fluent precision of a craftsperson who has 107

i­nternalized every necessary stroke and efficient gesture over years of ­practice. Her demonstrations were thrilling and flawless, because hers was a process of endless repetition which allowed her, for example, to engrave her pots of consistent size and shape with motifs from her mental inventory ­without any preliminary setting out. She appears never to have been ­attracted by the idea of creating single objects like a studio potter who values ­originality and invention.22 In fact, growing up in a craft tradition, she was taught to respect the acceptable limits of originality and she learned the boundaries between exciting, desired innovations and excessive deviations that are confounding and unnecessary. Over her whole working life, she made just one change – the switch from earthenware to stoneware. Because stoneware was the only clay body produced at the Pottery, and all the firings were high temperature, that defining change of medium was implicit in Cardew’s invitation to work there. The reduction in size, the flattened ­bottom, and the addition of glaze were necessitated by the new material, and we know it was Cardew who decided to glaze her stoneware pots.23. We cannot tell whose idea it was that she should attempt that defining change, Ladi Kwali or Cardew. During her first year at Abuja, he certainly made accommodations to encourage and facilitate her hand building – a departure from the original plan for the Pottery.24 That single innovation was her last, and thereafter her highest goal remained that of all Gwari potters for generations past: to materialize the most perfect version possible of her a ­ ncestral Gwari form. Like a singer singing a song known to all, each per­formance offered a chance to exceed all previous ones without changing anything.

Acknowledgements: The literature on Ladi Kwali is skimpy and I owe a huge debt to Tanya Harrod’s sharp portrayal of her career and personality in her splendid biography of Michael Cardew. For my understanding of ceramics in the art world, I relied on Sequoia Miller in The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art, New Haven, 2015. Overall, my interpretation benefitted from several texts on women and pottery by Moira Vencentelli, of which the most readily available accompanied a 2008 exhibition at Carleton College titled, ­Trajectories: Survival, Revival and Innovation in Women’s Ceramics.

1 Ladi Kwali’s name is attached to three different qualities of superficially similar vessels: 1) her finest, large, special objects commissioned for ceremonial gifts or created for gallery exhibitions: e.g. the Victoria and Albert’s vase, which is signed in large letters on the neck. Others have her LK mark and the Abuja Pottery mark or occasionally the mark of potteries in UK. 2) Single pots from demonstrations, built with available clays, fired and glazed by others after she left; these are often stamped with her LK mark (without a pottery mark) and are mostly in the collections of the host institutions though they are unlike representations of her skills: e.g. the vessel in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, made one afternoon at the Renwick Gallery. 3) Unsigned, sometimes smaller pots made in quantities for sale in Nigerian shops by her, Asibi Ido, Kainde Ushafa, Lami Toto and other Gwari women at Abuja Pottery. The British Museum has on display Af1993,02.114, an unsigned, relatively small pot tentatively attributed to Ladi Kwali. It is a bequest from William B. Fagg, the former Keeper who purchased it for himself. Absent her stamped LK mark, such objects cannot be definitively attributed to Ladi Kwali. She marked many of her wheel thrown pieces of tableware, made as a production potter.

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2 Tanya Harrod 2012, The Last Sane Man: Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the ­Counterculture, New Haven, p. 290. She characterizes Ladi Kwali’s pots as “translations.” 3

Harrod 2012, Fig. 74, p. 244

4 Her given name was Ladi; Kwali is her home village. Her birth is usually noted as early 1930s, though a signed funeral oration lists it as 1920. Okunna Emman 2012, Living Through two Pottery Traditions and the Story of an Icon: Ladi Kwali, Mgbakoigba: Journal Of African Studies 1/1. July, p. 6, n. 1 5

Ibid.,p. 3

6 Glenn Adamson, Martina Droth, and Simon Olding (Eds.) 2017, Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, New Haven 7 She was the rare woman in an African village able to imagine another life for herself and then, because she had no husband, to be able to follow opportunity. Significantly, all the Gwari women working at the Abuja Pottery were said not to have husbands; children were not the problem because it was acceptable for them to be raised by other family members. The relative paucity of women working artists in the 20th century is in part attributable to the fact that a married woman could rarely escape her duties as a wife. 8

From the vivid portrait of Ladi Kwali in Harrod 2012, p. 263–266, 293, 348–351

9 History of Ladi Kwali, the Famous Nigerian Potter retrieved on January 29, 2017 from https:// www.observenigeria.com/citizens/history-of- ladi-kwali- the-famous-nigerian-potter/ 10 Ironically, this low failure rate has left few archaeological traces of African ceramic centers whereas mounds of broken wastes mark the sites of ancient kilns in Asia and Europe. 11 Michael Cardew 1970, Pottery Technique in Nigeria, in: Silvia Leith Ross, Nigerian Pottery, Lagos, p. 9 12 Harrod 2012, throughout, has an nuanced account and discussion of this kind of complicated, passionate colonial love of Africa. 13 Michael Cardew 1969, Pioneer Pottery, London, p. 87 14 In another wonderful incongruity, he later taught Australian Aboriginal potters to make his designs for narrow-necked pitchers based on Gwari oil jars. Harrod 2012, p. 331 and color fig. 34. 15 Cardew called it “a stylized or schematized kind of naturalism.” Garth Clark 1976, Michael Cardew: an Intimate Account, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, p. 59. By “graphic decoration” I mean engraved or painted decorations, not modeled or applied relief elements. 16 Cardew was surely unaware of a debate embroiling Nigerian intellectual circles arguing that abstraction was elitist and obscure, and not suitable as an art style for the new African nations – ­coincidental support for the direction Cardew had chosen. See Ben Enwonwu 1963, Into the Abstract Jungle: a Criticism of the New Trend in Nigerian Art, Drum, June: 25–29 17 The influential critic Herbert Read had written as early as 1924 that pottery, free from figurative associations, was “plastic art in its most abstract form.” 18 On Cardew and Zaria’s artists see Harrod 2012, pp. 284–286. On the Zaria Modernists see Chika Okeke-Agulu 2015, Post-Colonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria, Chapel Hill 19 I am working on a study of K.K. Broni in collaboration with Kofi Adjei. 20 Susan Vogel 2012, El Anatsui: Art and Life, Munich, pp. 34, 35, 138 21 Concluding that Ladi Kwali should be regarded as a masterful craftsperson in no way diminishes her achievement. While many scholars of African art in America today are reluctant to characterize African textiles or ceramics as “crafts,” modern and contemporary ceramic artists in Britain and the US see nothing pejorative in the term. Many would call themselves “makers,” or “ceramic artists,” though they could equally be called sculptors, installation or mixed media artists. Among the principal institutions supporting avant garde ceramics in the UK today are the British Crafts Council and the unrelated Crafts Study Center where Edmund de Waal is chairman of the Board. One of the most prominent British writers and theoreticians on contemporary ceramics, Simon Olding, is Professor of Contemporary Crafts at the University for the Creative Arts. 22 The Abuja Pottery was expected to be financially self-supporting from sales of tableware, requiring all the potters, including Cardew and Ladi Kwali, to spend months at a time working as production potters, turning out utilitarian ware in volume on the wheel. For more creative – and higher priced pieces, he did studio pottery and she returned to hand building Gwari style vases. 23 Garth Clark 1976, p. 75 24 In January 1955, Cardew wrote to his wife that he was creating a special grogged clay “to enable Ladi to make her nice pots in her own way.” By August 1955, Ladi was making “big fine pots in her proper style using our clay; to be glazed. Glorious!”. Harrod 2012, p. 265

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Design, Development and its Legacies: A Perspective on 1970s Design Culture and its ­Anthropological Intents Alison J. Clarke

In the century to come, the design professions, with industrial design in the vanguard, will rededicate their efforts toward the final emancipation of all ­humans from drudgery and social and economic subjugation [...] human ­beings in a new Renaissance will, once again, become the masters of their environment as the race achieves, finally, that ultimate form of equilibrium known as peace.1 From the late 1960s to the close of the 1970s, anthropology and the s­ ocial sciences coalesced with industrial design, transforming design from a practice ostensibly geared towards form-giving, to one of critical intervention with a human-centred agenda. First emerging as a ground-roots ‘alternative design’ movement influenced by workers’ unions, design activist students and methodologies of user-based research developed, for example, in ­Human-Computer Interaction studies (HCI), by the 1970s, the coming together of anthropology and design evolved into a formal policy within the international industrial design profession. When industrial designer Arthur Pulos, President of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) made the statement cited above, the design profession had achieved a vital prominence in newly emerging development policies: design, beyond the instrumentalism of the modernist paradigm, was being reinvented as the harbinger of social inclusion. In a recent essay Stirring the Anthropological Imagination: Ontological ­Design in Spaces of Transition (2017) Arturo Escobar, anthropologist and leading post-development theorist, reflects on the ways in which we might understand design culture in a new ‘cosmopolitical’ context and as part of a broader historiography of development policies.2 Escobar previously observed contemporary design’s move out of the studio and into the everyday lives of ‘ordinary’ people and their social relations, the blurring of distinctions between users/clients and experts, and the shift away from class ­definitions of the design profession. In so doing he invoked the prescience of Victor Papanek’s seminal work Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) written “as industrialism and US cultural, military and economic hegemony were coming to their peak” as an earlier attempt to balance a ‘development’ agenda with a socially inclusive remit.3 Papanek, in stark contrast to the sanguine tone of Arthur Pulos’ 1979 opening address to the ICSID congress in Mexico, had famously condemned i­ ndustrial 110

design as a profession that “put murder on a mass-production basis”4. ­Denouncing designers as “a dangerous breed” whose ambitions should be re-imagined in the framework of a collective social conscience and cross-­ cultural sensitivity, Papanek’s ‘design for the real world’ polemic appealed to a generation familiar with the political consequences of ‘aid as imperalism’. On the surface, asserts Escobar, little appears to have changed since ­Papanek’s international intervention in the field of development and design: neo-liberal economic policy has expanded, the commodity consumption ­Papanek and his contemporaries were pitted against thrives, and the hege­ monic culture of free-market capitalism rather than social need, continues to drive design innovation. However, what has transpired unequivocally in the four decades since Papanek penned his polemic, is that the notion of design has become ever more ­dispersed, expanding across and between disciplines from bio-technology to the social sciences, more recently gaining prominence within transitional discourses. As we move towards “understanding human practice in terms of ontological design”, to quote Escobar, rather than the rationality of modern­ ity, it has never been more timely for historians to turn their attention to the historiography and objects borne of the specifics of a design and development discourse.5 A myopic design history approach focused almost exclusively on the objects of Western capitalism and formal design aesthetics ­eschews the fact that development politics and anthropology are inextric­ ably bound to the history of industrial design.6 This essay considers the ways in which the informal ‘alternative design’ ­movement led by figures such as Victor J. Papanek became incorporated into industrial design’s role in the entente late Cold War politics of the 1970s. It draws attention to the ways in which anthropology and human-experience based methodologies, which sought to go beyond rational problem-solving and which were first taken up as part of a socially progressive agenda within the design community, were later adapted as an emerging genre of ‘development design’.

The Anthropological Turn within Design The 1970s ended, at least among the industry’s policy-makers, with unbridled optimism for the industrial design profession: poised at the centre of an inter­disciplinary network of social sciences ranging from anthropology to epidemiology, the transformative potential of design’s social agenda promised to lead humankind into a future beyond the bare-faced technocracy of ­Modernism. Think-tank style events, such as the series sponsored by the inter­ national charitable educational and scientific Ciba Foundation on Health and Industrial Growth (funded by the Swiss pharmaceutical company) which brought together a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary collection of 111

­ articipants: Indian medical scientists, professors from Britain’s first national p ­institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, academics from the London Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, all of whom gave equal footing to design discourse. Victor Papanek, speaking on behalf of the design community, discussed topics including the “harmful side-effects of industrial development” and the “socio-environmental consequences of designers”.7 In Europe and the US, at the start of the decade, design had been critiqued by commentators, social activists and theorists as a threat to local cultures, emerging economies and authentic social relations; cast as the handmaiden of wanton commercialism, corporate power and Western ethnocentrism.8 This stance was coupled with a growing dissent towards development pol­ icies, and the concept of charitable aid was seen as an extension of quasi-­ imperialism that was gathering momentum with widely-read publications including Aid as Imperialism by Teresa Hayter (published in paperback by Penguin in 1971) and, in the area of economics, E.F Schumacher’s highly ­influential Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973). Schumacher’s work, and his role as co-founder of the Intermediate Technology Development Group in 1966, was of particular relevance to designers keen to reject design’s non-critical role in bolstering corporate technological developments and consumer culture in general.9 In his study of the incorporation of design as a form of ‘soft power’ in Cold War politicking, historian Greg Castillo identifies how from the 1960s onwards “scholarly debate shifted to the notion of US cultural imperialism, ­defined as the exaltation and propagation of American values at the expense of native culture”.10 Certainly this concept of ‘soft power’ is useful in understanding the forging of a new policy on design and development in the late 1970s. In 1979, the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development ­(discussed later in greater detail) brought together major leaders of industrial design to sign a policy document formalizing a proactive stance on development policy’s relationship to industrial design; this watershed moment emerged perfectly poised to offer a forum for the exploration of alternatives to corporate dominated intervention. The ratification of the ­ ­Ahmedabad Declaration, by representatives from nations as diverse as ­Pakistan and the USSR, followed a ten-day congress in India organized ­jointly by ICSID and UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) together specialists to discuss issues ranging from small-scale bringing ­ ­cottage industry production techniques, to the protection of indigenous crafts. Pulos justifiably had reason for his optimism in viewing industrial ­design as a vanguard force set “toward the final emancipation of all humans from drudgery and social and economic subjugation”.11 During the 1970s, the rhetoric of the international industrial design ­profession, as made apparent in the configuration of working parties and conference proceedings of the leading professional body ICSID, began to question the 112

overtly commercial role of the designer; addressing instead design as a tool for social change within a humanist paradigm that crossed both post-industrial and so-called ‘developing nations’. Within the European art and design schools, syllabi based on formalist aesthetics and technological functionalism were brought into question by the emergence of an ‘alternative design’ movement underpinned by theories of anthropology, intermediate technol­ ogy, development studies and neo-Marxist critiques of Western consumer ­culture. Even within self-consciously ‘designerly’ movements, such of those in the Italian avant-garde, anthropological discourse, theories and method­ ologies moved prominently to the fore.12 Anthropological discourse, in particular, with its focus on localized m ­ eanings, ritual context and human-centred methodologies, was newly embraced within strands of the mainstream design professions. This resulted in a series of high profile conferences, policy-initiatives and design projects which transformed the politics of the 1970s design culture. The constructs and terminologies of ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ were challenged, as was the role of industrial design within human development policies as studies in design began to address cultures, material and social, beyond the Western paradigm.13 Despite these internal debates within the profession, ‘anthropol­ ogized’ design was generally understood as a tool operating outside the commodity culture and monolithic economic structures with the aim of ­ ‘broadening constituencies’.14 But to what extent, we have to ask today, did the radicalism of design schools, keen to break down the hierarchies of applied art practices through the ­incorporation of social rather than aesthetic agendas, become co-opted by a neo-colonial agenda of ‘design for development’? How was design inculcated into the Cold War US allied nations rhetoric and post-colonial policy, underpinned by a transnational ‘modernisation theory’ set on ‘staging growth’ through the export of modernisation and economic development?15

Design for Development: Ahmedabad Congress 1979 The National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad and the Institute of ­Technology, Bombay hosted the groundbreaking Design for Development ­congress (January 14–24, 1979) following a series of working party discussions and initiatives led by the ICSID and UNIDO. It brought together a ­hundred and thirty delegates (ninety-eight of whom were representatives of India) from twenty-five nations. This spectacular event firmly positioned ­India at the centre of a design and development policy-making agenda; its self-proclaimed mission was to address “the role of industrial design in the development and diversification of a developing country’s industrial production by designing new products and re-designing old ones”, identifying “ways and means” of satisfying needs through “co-operative and bilateral 113

arrangements”16. Lasting a full ten days, the historic meeting was timed to coincide with the auspicious Hindu festival Makar Sankranti, and Gujarat’s cultural highlight, the dramatic and picturesque Kite Flying Festival that would be watched by an array of social policy experts, design leaders and NGO representatives. India acted as a ‘case example’ of the opportunities for industrial design in the context of a mixed economy, with particular attention paid to design education, skill upgrading for small and medium-scale industries, and craft and village industries. Indeed the keynote address of the congress, ­ ­ entitled ‘Identity in Modernisation’, was delivered by Romesh Thapar, left-leaning author of India and Transition (1956) outspoken critic of Nehru, and a member of the Club of Rome global think-tank that in 1972 had published the renowned Limits to Growth report regarding sustainability and expansionism.17 An aide-memoir, circulated within UNIDO, four months prior to the Ahmedabad Congress, stated clearly that the “role of industrial design in related areas of social need, including ‘design for the handicapped’ would be clearly demonstrated”.18 The 1979 Ahmedabad Congress, as the first industrial design congress to be held in a ‘developing’ country, was not simply a response to internal politics or debates, but rather the culmination of a series of political meetings that had actually commenced as early as 1965 dovetailing with an overt and overarching Cold War agenda. As a growing body of research attests, high and popular cultural forms, design and specific genres of goods, were instrumental in affecting ‘soft power’ in the Cold War period. As Castillo states in his study of the cultural diplomatic politics of Cold War mid-century design, “from World War II through the 1960s, what US foreign policy analysts found problematic was not the rapid pace of worldwide Americanisation but the lack thereof. In response, they called for aggressive overseas propaganda programs”.19 The extent of Cold War soft power strategy extended beyond the wholesale marketing of the ‘American Way of Life’ through US commod­ ities, as epitomised by the famous Khrushchev and Nixon ‘Kitchen Debate’, and in sponsored Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) travelling exhibits featuring ideal US domestic design, into the realm of the indigenous and handmade.20 Historian Takuya Kida has documented, for example, how crafts played a crucial role in the Japanese-US cultural exchange project of the 1950s, to the extent of having considerable impact on the established ­aesthetics and forms of traditional Japanese crafts.21 Such models of polit­ ical-cultural intervention into indigenous material culture had already been established as an integral component of ‘soft’ cultural policy by the early post-war period. The National Institute of Design was an astutely selected location for the ­ICSID 1979 Congress, placing India at the forefront of the policy and drawing on the Cold War legacy of the West’s cultural-political intervention in Nehru’s modernising agenda. In 1977, NID had been awarded the ICSID-Philips Award for industrial design in developing countries, the following year a UNIDO 114

­ ilot report, conducted by John Reid, former President of ICSID, exploring p “The State of Industrial Design in Developing Countries” had confirmed India specifically, and NID under the directorship of Chatterjee, as the optimal venue for the commencement of the congress. Chatterjee himself had introduced Reid, acting as a UNIDO consultant, to the design culture of NID and Gujarat more generally. Reid, who presided over the ICSID executive from 1969–1971, during a period in which affirmative action in recruiting a broader constituency outside developed countries was a priority for the society.22 He began his report with a definition of design as a socially bound practice: “the development of industrial design [...] despite its enormous technical and ­scientific content, is an art, not a science. It is concerned with people – their hopes, needs and aspirations”.23 The dialectic of preserving design as an ­embodiment of national identity and authenticity, and the explicit drive to innovate new designs fit for export to a Western market was a defining theme of the design development agenda. Early into the section of the report dealing with India, Reid encapsulates this search for the authentic echoing the Eames’ fetishisation of the “lota” in their famed India Report.24 “It is sad,” ­observed Reid, “that the first chair I saw was of Scandinavian design in itself ‘derived’ from an American original.”25 A rather clumsy slogan, coined in the making of this UNIDO pilot report, summarised a freshly honed design and development agenda “Industrial Designing is About Caring For People”.26 Among the few existing discussions of the Ahmedabad Declaration within design history and theory, it is generally identified as a golden moment; a crucial turning point in the recognition of the social potential of industrial design in the ‘Third World’, ‘developing’ or ‘peripheral economies’.27 The Declaration is also most often represented as the culmination of a linear history: an extension of India’s policy-making, rooted in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s post-independence stance on national industrial development in which design was viewed as a means of improving the quality of life. Such accounts, in some instances penned as academic articles by original attendees themselves, frame the Declaration in the context of the legacy of the Eames’ aforementioned India Report, which had led to the establishment of the National Institute of Design in 1961. Ahmedabad’s unique claim to the national design heritage of India, as the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s first ashram and the political legacy of the swadeshi policy, is also noted as the backdrop to the Declaration. The rhetoric used to frame the Declaration asserts that, following Independence in 1947, Nehru extended an invitation to Charles and Ray Eames asking the couple to give their insight into the potentialities of design in India as part of the “modernizing agenda of the postcolonial nation state”.28 This relationship between Nehru’s India, and the Eames as a design team was of course far more complex and politicised in nature, forming an integral part of a broader Cold War Indo-American public diplomacy and propaganda strategy.29 Nehru had made his first official visit to the United States in 115

­ ctober 1949, during a period of extensive Soviet public diplomacy activ­ O ities and the Chinese Communist Revolution. During WWII the US Office of War Information (OWI) actively represented the United States to the Indian people as a “champion of democracy” associating, according to diplomatic historian S.E. Graham, “America’s war aims with the cause of democracy worldwide”.30 The USSR was outspending the US in terms of cultural diplomacy in India, and Washington was particularly sensitive to this fact in light of China’s turn to communism. To quote Graham: “US analysts noted that the Indian public by and large supported Nehru’s policy of neutrality, condemned racial segregation within the United States, and regarded Washington’s anti-Communist foreign policy as a vehicle for neo-Colonialism.”31 After the suspension of philanthropic activity during and immediately after the war, the first promin­ ent Cold War public diplomacy act was the commencement of the Fulbright Scholar Exchange scheme, and the Ford Foundation investment schemes between US and India from 1952. Winning over the Indian elite, intellectuals and cultural leaders was seen as vital in assuaging suspicion of the US. It was in this context that the Ford Foundation had invited the Eames to make their five-month tour of India, and report upon the state and future of its ­design culture. In other words, Nehru did not simply ‘invite’ the Eames to offer their superior knowledge as western industrial designers, to a developing economy. Rather “design [was viewed] as a catalyst for change, newness, and creativity for Indians” and for the US an integral part of public diplomacy policy.32 The Eames’ involvement in India was the result of Cold War politicking that spanned a decade. But most significantly the Ahmedabad Congress took place after a period of considerable rupture in Indian politics that unsettled pre-existing Cold War cultural diplomatic strategies. Following Nehru’s death in 1964 Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party had taken power. 1979 saw the end of the coalition government that had been put in place after the so-called ‘Indian Emergency’ in which Gandhi’s party was accused of ­corruption. The 1979 Ahmedabad Congress is better understood then as emerging from this disjuncture with the unrealised Nehruvian vision of design as a catalyst of change, rather than as a linear progression. It was a major diplomatic under­taking aimed at bolstering Western relations with India at a time of upheaval, with Indira Gandhi re-elected with a newly honed pro-foreign policy approach by 1980.33 Arguably, the Ahmedabad Congress marked the end of the rhetoric the Eames had helped construct around the promise of a modern democracy of design, underpinned by the neo-colonial Modernist pedagogy of the Ulm school tutors, and their ilk.

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Design Dilemmas and Quasi-Anthropological Solutions The Ahmedabad Congress consolidated a post-colonial concept of design for social usefulness, epitomised by the emergence of what art historian ­Saloni Mathur has described as a “design in an Indian idiom”, with proposals for adapting indigenous aesthetics in favour of the vernacular, and the guise of appropriate technology.34 Designer of the customised bicycle, S. Balaram (who would become a prominent design theorist and educationalist in India) attended the RCA industrial design masters course through the support of a Ford Foundation Scholarship, an example of intra-cultural design transfer that could not have been a more perfect assertion of Cold War cultural ­diplomatic policy on design and development brought to fruition. This design typology, generated within the parameters of the intermediate and appropriate technology ethos, had emerged in the 1970s to embody in material and visual form the dialectics of the development discourse rather than, as Mathur has suggested, “the problem-solving spirit of the Nehruvian era”.35 In fact, accusations of neo-colonialism had been aimed at designers from the earliest emergence of design and development discourse. A semi-populist version of this ‘design for development’ phenomenon was ­illustrated in Papanek’s Design for the Real World (1971) and those of his ­design projects that utilised quasi-anthropological constructs such as a co-­ participatory ‘tin can radio’ design powered by dried cow dung and allowing ­ nglish the application of indigenous decoration. The reverse-side of the first E language edition of Design For the Real World featured a telling commendation by Finnish industrial designer Barbro Kulvik-Siltavuori: “Today there is much controversy about design responsibility. And inevitably in discussions and articles Victor Papanek is mentioned. Some think he is too political, ­others that he is not political enough; some that he encourages neo-colonial exploitation [...]”.36 In many respects Papanek had become the totem for ­design development by the 1970s, both its successes and discontents. Objects such as Papanek’s tin-can, dung-powered radio designed for ­ NESCO and aimed specifically at Indonesian users, evolved as archetypes U of a design for development genre. A form of material culture that stood as shorthand for a broader set of ideological intents that sort to challenge the authoritarian logic of design. In Design for the Real World, Papanek lends his readers a telling anecdote regarding a visit to the Ulm School in the mid1960s, where he used the occasion to show slides of his ‘indigenous’ tin-can radio replete with brightly coloured embroidered appliqué decoration, shells and sequins. The professors at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm purportedly walked out of his lecture in protest at the tin can’s lack of ‘formal’ aesthetic merit. Painted in muted grey, the Ulm contingent suggested, the design might be rendered acceptable; “But painting it would have been wrong,” ­retorted Papanek, “[F]or one thing, it would have raised the price of each unit by maybe one twentieth of a penny each.” “[M]uch more import­antly,”­ 119

continued Papanek, “I feel that I have no right to make aesthetic or ‘good taste’ decisions that will affect millions of people in Indonesia, who are mem­ odernist bers of a different culture.”37 Considering the Ulm School’s overtly M agenda, and its enormous influence and complicity in Cold War post-colonial cultural politics through pedagogic policy-making in schools such as India’s NID, it is clear Papanek and his contemporaries were keen to disassociate themselves from their brand of perceived neo-colonialist ­positioning. Project Batta-Koya typified a newly defined design-thinking uniting cultural anthropological sensitivity and a desire to address ‘the real needs of the user’. Devised in 1973 as an intermediate teaching aid for ‘under-developed’ countries, it was sponsored by the Tanzanian and Nigerian governments, ­under the auspices of UNESCO. The design was accredited to Victor Papanek and Mohammed Azali Bin Abdul Rahim of Malaysia in consultation with ­peoples from West Africa, Central Equatorial Africa and East Africa.38 Based on observations of ‘emerging nations’ in which ‘oral story-telling traditions’ predominated, the Batta-Koya design [meaning ‘talking teacher’ in the ­Chadic language Hausa] consisted of a customised cassette player, part of which could be housed in a calabash and bamboo case. The UNESCO-awarded design inspired by ethnographic research and ­ o-­design identified the need to communicate orally with a disparate group c of communities, using over two hundred dialects, on vital issues such as public health and nutrition. The cassette tapes gave information in a range of tribal dialects – the intent being to bridge the gap between pre-literate and post-literate information systems and societies. The cassette player design was a simplified version of a Phillips 3302 battery powered recorder customised for educative and informational needs. A broader intention of the design was to de-centralise government information through the use of dialects for localised consumption and the furtherance of community empowerment. Following publication of his Batta-Koya project, Papanek complained that some social scientists “in the West” would argue against the device not ­fitting into the concept of indigenous authenticity thus making it neo-­ colonial in intent. “To withhold it because of theoretical sociological minority reasons smells of professional imperialism, or bourgeois romanticism camouflaged behind revolutionary rhetoric,” countered Papanek, arguing ­instead that “tools of this sort are by their very nature trans-national, culture-­ preserving and meta-political.”39

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Conclusion By the time Victor Papanek stepped up at the opening of the UNIDO/ICSID ­Design For Development conference in 1979 to present the ICSID-Philips Award to the co-host National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad (the first ­international award for ‘Design in Developing Countries’), the ‘anthropolog­ isation’ of design, first populised in his polemical book, had become ­mainstream. Hybridised designs, emanating from pedagogic initiatives in progressive ­design school programmes were redolent of the contradictions of the ­design and development agenda that, in 1979, the Ahmedabad Congress attempted to institutionalise as an extension of Cold War cultural diplomacy and a Western development strategy. Many anthropological methods and paradigms including theories of localisation, authenticity and ethnographic observation were utilised informally, but when posited strategically in conjunction with industrial design, they had far-reaching political consequences in maintaining a dualist, top-down approach to development. By the late 1970s, development-thinking had extended from the economic development theories and post-war USA policies, evolving according to ­Escobar into a “basic human needs approach” by which even those in dis­ agreement with prevailing capitalist policies were “obliged to couch their ­critique in terms of the need for development, through concepts such as ’participatory development‘ and ’socialist development’”. “Development,” ­argues ­Escobar, “had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imagin­ ary.”40 Due to their physical, political and aesthetic nature, artifacts made through the idiom of ‘design for development’, arising from educational courses, conferences, and design activism, have remained largely excluded as objects of museological display, or of history making. Yet the design processes, and designs themselves, played a crucial role in the concretisation process that forged development’s impact as “a certainty in the social ­imagin­ary”41 and its ensuing neo-colonial consequences. This ‘design for ­development’ legacy continues today, largely unhistoricised within design practice, as the emphasis on the social and the inclusive becomes ever more ­pertinent. A longer version of this essay was published as Design for Development, ­ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design, Special issue: Design Dispersed: Anthropology and Design, Journal of Design History 29 /1: 43–57, 2015. 1 A. J. Pulos 1979, The Profession of Industrial Design, Professors’ Seminar. Congress and Assembly of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, Mexico City, October 14–19

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2 Arturo Escobar 2017, Stirring the Anthropological Imagination: Ontological Design in Spaces of Transition, in: Alison J. Clarke (ed.), Design Anthropology: Object Culture in Transition, London, pp. 201–216 3 Arturo Escobar 2012, Notes on the Ontology of Design, unpublished manuscript circulated for the panel Design for the Real World: But which World? held at American Anthropological Associ­ ation, San Francisco, November 13–18, p. 2 4 Victor Papanek 1984² (1971), Design For The Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Second Edition, Completely Revised, London, p. ix 5

Arturo Escobar 2011, Sustainability: Design for the Pluriverse, Development 54/2: 139

6 A recent Design History Society conference addressed this issue under the title “Towards Global Histories of Design: Postcolonial Perspectives. September 2013”, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India. 7 See Ciba Foundation Symposium 32: Health and Industrial Growth, Amsterdam 1975 8 See: Victor Papanek 1971, Design for the Real World New York; Wolfgang Fritz Haug 1971, Kritik der Warenaesthetik, Frankfurt am Main; Ralph Nader 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed, New York, 1965 9 Teresa Hayter 1971, Aid as Imperialism, London. Design for the Real World has constantly remained in print since its first publication in English 1971. In the preface to the second edition, Papanek observed: “Design for the Real World appeared in most European bookstores together with two other books, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and my good friend Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. There is an important communality among these three volumes.” Victor Papanek 1984², p. xvi. 10 Greg Castillo 2010, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Design, Minneapolis, MN, p. xiv 11 Pulos 1979 12 For a discussion of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass’s engagement with critiques of consumer culture and search for an ethnographically based design approach see Alison J. Clarke 2013, Design Ethnologist: Ettore Sottsass Jr., in: Alex Cole and Catharine Rossi (ed.), The 1970s Italian Design Avant-Garde, ICA exhibition catalogue, Berlin; Silvia Franceschini and Valerio Borgonuovo (ed.) 2016, The Indigenous and the Authochthon: Design for the Real World meets Global Tools, at SALT Istanbul, Global Tools: A Radical Italian Experiment. For a discussion of the rise of the ‘anthropo­ logical object’ in 1960s and 1970s design activism see Alison J. Clarke 2017 (forthcoming), The Anthro­pological Object, in: Alison J. Clarke, Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition, London. 13 See, for example, the ongoing debate between Gui Bonsiepe and Victor Papanek regarding the appropriate terminologies within industrial design discourse regarding geo-political disparity of power relations: La Risposta di Papanek a Bonsiepe, Casabella 396 14 For the notion of ‘broadening constituencies’ see Victor Papanek 1983, Design For Human Scale, New York, p. 13. A useful overview of the rise of social agendas in the 1970s is provided by Pauline Madge 1993, Design, Ecology, Technology: A Historiographical Review, Journal of Design History 6/3: 149–166, and Nigel Whiteley 1993, Design and Society, London, in particular the chapter “Responsible Design and Ethical Consuming”, pp. 94–133. 15 For an extensive discussion of Cold War politics and development see David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark Haefele and Michael E. Latham 2013, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Amherst. 16 Aide-Memoire, Meeting for Promotion of Industrial Design in Developing Countries, 78-5076, p. 3 17 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers & William W. Behrens 1972, The Limits to Growth, New York 18 Aide Memoire, op. cit., p. 3 19 Castillo 2010, p. xiv 20 See Gay McDonald 2008, The “Advance” of American Postwar Design in Europe: MoMA and the Design for Use, USA Exhibition 1951–1953, Design Issues 24/2: 15–27; Gay McDonald 2010, The Modern American Home as Soft Power: Finland, MoMA and the “American Home 1953” Exhibition, Journal of Design History 23/4: 387–408 21 Takuya Kida 2012, Japanese Crafts and Cultural Exchange with the USA in the 1950s: Soft Power and John D. Rockefeller III during the Cold War, Journal of Design History 25/4: 379–399 22 “The motion to set up a special commission to examine the problems of developing countries was eagerly greeted by the Sixth General Assembly of ICSID when it sat at Nash House on 8–9 September”, Design Journal 250, October 1969, p. 16 23 John Reid 1978, The State of Industrial Design in Developing Countries 1978: A report of the Pilot Mission to India, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey. Preface, UNIDO consultant document number id. 78-7582, UNIDO archive Vienna, Austria, p. 27 24 Charles & Ray Eames 1958, The India Report, Ahmedabad, India, retrieved on 17 May 2017 from The National Institute of Design, http://nid.edu/Userfiles/Eames___India_Report.pdf

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25 Reid 1978, p. 13 26 Ibid. 27 See for example Balaram 2009, p. 54; Ashoke Chatterjee 2003, Design in India: The Experience of Transition, Design Issues 21/4: 4–10. Both authors analyse the Ahmedabad Declaration and Congress through incorporation of their perspectives as first hand experience as attendees (in the case of Balaram) and as leading delegate and Executive Director of NID, in the case of Chatterjee. 28 Saloni Mathur 2011, Charles and Ray Eames in India, Art Journal, 70/1: 34–53 29 For an extensive discussion of the use of art and culture in US Cold War propaganda see Frances Stonor Saunders 1999, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London. 30 Sarah E. Graham 2012, Engaging India: Public Diplomacy and Indo-American Relations to 1957, Los Angeles, p. 18 31 Ibid., p. 25 32 Saloni Mathur 2007, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Oakland, CA 33 See M. T. Kauffman 1982, Mrs. Gandhi Making the Most of Foreign Policy Openings, New York Times, June 6 1982. Online version, accessed on 24 August 2014 www.nytimes.com/1982/06/06/ weekinreview/mrs-ghandi-making-the-most-of-foreign-policy-openings.html 34 Mathur 2011 35 Ibid., p. 39 36 Papanek 1971, inside dust jacket 37 Papanek 1971, p. 164 38 Victor Papanek 1975, Project Batta-Koya, Industrial Design July/August: 56–57 39 Ibid., p. 57 40 Escobar 2012, p. 5 41 Ibid.

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Between Favela Chic and Autonomy. Design in Latin America Gui Bonsiepe

“Theories do have political implications.”1 From a Western perspective, it often seemed obvious to read the development of design in so-called periphery countries2 – once condescendingly dubbed ‘developing countries’ – as the same process as the development of ‘the centre’, just staggered by several decades. Such a simplifying view, however, fails to do justice to reality. The reflections below are intended to offer a differentiated picture of the relationships, ranging from complex to antagonistic. Rather than seeking to present an encyclopaedic overview of design in all Latin American countries, the aim here is to elaborate a characteristic profile by examining selected but significant data. Although this sketch primarily relies on material dealing with the development of design in Latin America since the 1930s3, possible parallels can also be identified, given the structural similarities, with Asia and Africa and their former colonial countries. The region offers revealing material illustrating the decisive influence of the Western economic – and political – decisions on the ups and downs, advances and setbacks, in design’s development in the periphery. These countries, each in their own context, are characterised by a dependence created by asymmetrical power relations, if not crude dom­ inance relations, which forges the framework for practicing the complex of activities involved in design in Latin America.4 A set of criteria comprising the following six categories can be used to sketch the present state of design: - Consolidation of the professional practice of design - Training available for design (provision of design classes) - Integration of design in business policies on the local level - Funding for design within government programmes for industrial development (establishing design centres, integrating design into institutes for ­innovation research) - Design discourse (publishing design journals and books, media presence) - Design research (first and foremost in the form of design history)5 Against the background of this structure, the following provides an outline of the development of designing material artefacts in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the role of craft production, e.g. the design approach known as ‘nativism’, though without the political and restorative connotations recently informing this term.6 124

In 1949, the Boletín del Centro de Estudiantes de Arquitectura, the student journal of the architecture department at the University of Buenos Aires, published a short piece by Tomás Maldonado entitled El diseño y la vida social. In this article, he put the case from the visual arts perspective for revising the cultural importance of designing industrial products. Rather than design being a kind of ‘second rank’ applied art, it was an independent field in a technical and industrial civilisation and formed an integral element in the process of modernisation.7 Maldonado’s article is regarded as the very first in Latin America to explicitly address the subject of industrial design and clearly elaborate the distinction between art and design. He also touched on the controversial topic of whether design can be viewed as an artistic activity, an issue often surfacing in a perennial debate, and unequivocally took a stand against the tendency to read design as applied art – a questionable, if not outdated concept derived from middle-class notions of art removed from strategic utility benefit and an industrial sector driven by profit and utility. One may wonder how a country in Latin America came to call for endowing industrially produced materials and everyday semiotic artefacts with a practical and theoretical dignity at a time when Europe was still suffering from the consequences of devastation under fascism. The reason, though, can be found in the emigration / forced migration of artists, writers, composers, philosophers and scholars from diverse European countries, including ­ those from Spain fleeing the Franco regime as well as Italians, French, ­Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles and Czechs who were victims of a prevailing political and racial persecution in their own countries.8 These ­migrants brought with them writings and documents facilitating the access of Argentina’s young artistic avant-garde to previously unknown material, in ­particular documents on the Russian Constructivists who explicitly ­addressed and explored the connection between politics and the design process. The young avant-­garde, in turn, wanted to overcome their isolation and expand their sphere of activity by focusing on industrial products and their role in everyday life in the belief that it was feasible to link a technical and industrial revolution with a social revolution. The birth of industrialisation in Latin America was shaped by two major ­ lobal events: the worldwide economic crisis in 1929 and the Second World g War. As the main combatant nations increasingly focused industrial production on weapons, they cut back or halted the export of industrial products; in some cases, exports were also banned for political reasons. In the area of furniture production, the architects in Argentina9 who had been developing designs for this manufacturing sector since the 1930s laid the foundation for the term ‘industrial design’.10 Yet the industrial production of complex goods, for example agricultural machinery, which integrated industrial design did not start until the 1950s.11 Given that the profession of industrial designer did not yet exist in Latin America and there were no official programmes for design, the industrial designs were developed by engineers, technical ­ 125

draughtspersons and ­people who were self-taught.12 The first generation of designers – in this case, working with the entire complex of activities ­involved in the design process13 – comprised those from the fields of architecture, mechanical engineering, artisan crafts and art. They faced the task of ­transforming design skills into an activity relevant socially, industrially and economically, and hence delineated the profile of a new profession. The early 1960s saw countries such as Brazil and Argentina launching training programmes for design influenced by institutions in Europe and the ­United States – principally by the Ulm College of Design, London’s Royal ­College of Art, the IIT Chicago and New York’s Pratt Institute.14 At this time, design centres were also founded, for example, the CIDI (Industrial Design Research Centre) in Buenos Aires in 1963. These fulfilled a similar function to the design centres in Europe15 with the aim of educating society at large and, as such, were comparable to the Gute Form (good design) movement at that time in West Germany. These design centres undertook such tasks as organising exhibitions of industrial products, holding competitions, presenting lectures, publishing materials, and establishing a library for the field where the current leading design journals could be consulted. Industrial engineers in leading positions played a crucial role in integrating industrial design into development programmes, though in general they have received little ­acknowledgement for their work.16 The term ‘industrialisation’ certainly had positive connotations at that time, since the social and ecological impact of industrialisation processes on the environment either had not been registered or were disregarded as colla­teral damage of relatively little importance. In general, development was viewed, beyond any shadow of a doubt, as a thoroughly worthwhile goal, with industrialisation rightly anticipated as producing an increase in aggregate income. However, the question of who would ultimately benefit from the fruits of industrial development – apart from the undeniable advantages of a modernised infrastructure and public services – evaporated in an atmosphere of generalities and vagueness. Even today, in comparison to other regions of the world, Latin America still has the most pronounced income disparity ­between its various social groups.17 In popular imagination, high-ranking politicians liked to be seen with their hands grasping a control wheel on some pipeline in an oil refinery or chemical plant or inspecting a sheet-metal factory. The smoking factory chimneys and intermeshing cog wheels symbolised industrialisation’s potential. Even though individual voices critiquing consumer society could already be heard in the second half of the 1960s, the doubts expressed about design and the need for a critical approach increased significantly in volume after the 1990s. This development came in the wake of the concept of design unravelling, its absorption into marketing as well as its one-dimensional alignment to the glorified market. In 1968 at a design exhibition in Río de J­ aneiro, for example, students at the ESDI Escola Superior de Desenho In­dustrial presented an installation critical of design 126

described by a Brazilian ­ design historian as follows: “Packaging from ­industrial products were displayed on a long table surrounded by 10 of the Series 7 chairs designed by Arne ­Jacobsen in 1952. The installation was crowned by a vacuum cleaner whose suction tube was replaced by a broomstick.”18 This installation can also be read as part of the wave of student protests in 1968, in as far as it exposed the a ­ ntinomies between modern design and industrial and social realities, but it did not advocate overcoming these contradictions by rejecting industrial production and returning to vernacular design. While development policy in the 1970s focused on the manufacturing industries, exemplary designs were created, above all, for the public sectors – the industrial design of street furniture and visual communication for urban guidance and orientation systems – which can certainly stand international comparison. The industrial development policy promoted by various governments was flanked by multilateral projects especially the UNIDO (United ­Nations Industrial Development Organization).19 Here, the aim was to use import substitution to improve the foreign trade balance of periphery countries, support local manufacturing industries, satisfy demand on the domestic market, and develop those products meeting local requirements which were unavailable on the international market. This policy was directed against the traditional role assigned to the periphery as an exporter of commodities in the form of wheat, soya, meat, wood, copper, iron ore, crude oil, rare-earth elements, coffee, spices, palm oil and cotton, i.e. ‘designerless’ products. The economic policy of extractivism or neoextractivism20 fitted perfectly with the periphery’s role imposed since colonialisation as a supplier of raw materials – a farce of a type of development that left – and leaves – wastelands behind. The programmes integrating industrial design were directed against this constellation of international trade derived from colonial dependencies. Bilateral programmes were inevitably permeated by political interests. For example, the Alliance for Progress (1961–1970) funded and designed by the United States also sought to block the spread of the Cuban revolution in Latin America.21 At this point, one should mention in passing the appropriate technology movement, promoted especially in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, and the approach propagated under the rallying cry of ‘Small is beautiful’22 calling for technical demands on manufactured products to be so simple that they could be made in a village smithy. This movement resonated particularly with students who, through their attraction for the supposed simplicity of rural life, had strong reservations about urban life and industry, if not capitalism in general. Similarly, California’s New Age movement should be also mentioned here with its attempts at developing alternative lifestyles – virtual enclaves in an industrialised world. This movement was characterised by its appeal to the American way of life’s strong tradition on self-reliance (e.g. ‘Do-it-yourself’). Here, the Whole Earth Catalogue, published in several ­ 127

­ ditions since 1968, provided nothing short of an encyclopaedia of selfe made designs. In 1976, the theme of design in the so-called developing countries – until then only a footnote at best – was given an international profile by the Design for Need conference held in London at the Royal College of Art. The decision to address this socio-political complex of themes was necessitated, to an extent, by the wave of student protests around the world in 1968. The debate revealed the discontent over the role of designers in a consumer society as accomplices in accelerating the circulation of commodities. The question was raised of how it would be possible to satisfy needs beyond the markets, a point specifically addressing the situation of periphery countries. At that time, these were bundled together under the collective name ‘Third World’, today a concept entirely lacking in substance. Under neoliberalism, as the present phase of capitalism is known, there is little left of the tangible unease at the congress and the underlying mood of concern. The critique of the capitalist mode of production only lives on, at most, in the idea of sustai­n­ able design, even if the term ‘sustainability’ cannot be saved from being ­instrumentalised as a mere label leaving everything just as it was. A topic often addressed in the discourse of design in Latin America revolves around the identity of local design – a question which can be explained as a reaction against the influence of hegemonic23 designs of the core countries as well as the attempt to counter this influence with something ‘own’, in­­­di­­g­e­n­ous and familiar. The turn to the ‘own’ signalises the desire to challenge the occidental patterns of thinking and axiologies internalised in the course of the history of colonialisation. Since the late 1990s, the body of critique linked to this has been termed decoloniality.24 A similar interest in the ­autochthone was already evident in the 1960s in the visual arts, identified under such terms as indigenism, campesinismo (rural and peasant motifs in art) and obrerismo (subjects in art rooted in the world of work).25 Countries such as, for example, Mexico and Columbia are renowned for their highly differentiated tradition of craft products, each with their own individual material, formal and chromatic expression. In these products, as is well known, the functions of design and production form a single unit. When industrial designers adopt craft designs and deliver products then made by craft workers – primarily by women –, this brings with it the danger of using these workers purely as labour rather than fostering their innovative abilities. Moreover, the rich stock of forms for craft products is linked to a traditionally rather narrow range of products. By romanticising the notion of ‘design’, it then becomes possible to present these products as authentic design informed by a hypostatised Latin American essence. The enthusiasm with which this option of ontological essentialism is sometimes pursued can be linked to an anti-technological Romanticism with its aura of the supposedly genuine and exotic, intact and unspoilt. Through the appropriate marketing, 128

this creates resonances – not least as ‘favela chic’ offered at art trade prices – in the design boutiques of core countries glutted with industrial products. The turn to designing less complex products that are simple to manufacture can be explained as a result of Latin America’s de-industrialisation, a process starting in the 1990s, and the break with a policy of import substitution and domestic market production which, from 1965 to the late 1970s, provided industrial design with the foundation and framework for development. The movement to promote industrialisation, especially for small and medium enterprises, gradually lost momentum as, among other things, programmes specifically developed for periphery countries in the euphemistically entitled Washington Consensus (1989) fuelled a wave of privatisations and a concomitant plundering of public resources – a development particularly pronounced in Latin America. In the wake of privatisation and opening up the economy to foreign capital (buying out local companies, first and foremost banks and phone companies) design was increasingly in demand as an instrument of branding and ‘corporate identity’.26 At the same time, with ­design seen as a soft option compared to such subjects as engineering or medicine, there was a glut of design courses – with nearly 600 courses covering all manner of areas offered in Brazil alone at state and private colleges. Although the ministries of education are responsible for drafting and monitoring the conditions for setting up design courses, these requirements are lax and far less stringent than those imposed on other study programmes. The introduction of postgraduate degrees and doctoral programmes in design led to a growth of publications as well as largely academic and traditional research in the field, whereby it is still open as to whether this will further deepen an already profound gap between design practice and the academic ivory ­ ­tower.27 As is evident from two volumes edited by Nadir Lahiji, the question of ­design’s utopian potential alludes to a problem which, over the last twenty years, has almost entirely disappeared from design discourse, except in architecture.28 This may be due to the discourse in the field of architecture being able to draw on a long tradition, in contrast to other areas of design. Certainly, I am not aware of anything comparable in the fields of industrial design and visual communication. The colonial past of Latin American countries does enable design or – in a larger sense – the complex of activities involved in the design process to be taken as an example the multi-layered and as yet supressed attempts at emancipation in such areas as politics, the financial, economic and industrial sectors, and everyday culture. In the present decade, it is no coincidence that the 200th anniversary celebrations of political independence in most countries in Latin America have brought into debate the topos of a ‘second independence’, i.e. redeeming the promise of modernity. ­American philosopher Susan Buck-Morss has characterised the modernity project as: “[…] the dreamworlds of modernity – political, cultural, and ­economic – are expressions of a utopian desire for social arrangements that 129

transcend existing forms”.29 As is well known, the mere mention of the word ‘utopia’ and the possibility of changing existing social structures is an anathema for postmodern ideas and its two political variants of neoliberal conservatism and post-structuralism.30 When it comes to the socio-political role of design in the periphery, that role can be read from the questions which prove so difficult to answer: Does design – however understood – con­tribute to weakening hegemonic relations between the centre and the periphery? Does it harbour the potential of emancipation, of dismantling ­conflict-laden ruling conditions, of limiting heteronomy? One step here, for example, would be to focus on solving local problems – since the only things that investment funds looking for worthwhile objects in the periphery ignore and leave untouched are those countries’ problems. Starting from local ­design problems is far from cloistering oneself away – and given today’s networks any such plan would certainly be an illusion. Instead, it facilitates the elaboration of design solutions that could sensibly be expanded from the local to other contexts as well. If design is to be able to play a role as an export factor for periphery economies at all, then it would have to be aligned with existing standards. And there, the trade agreements and ISO Standards as they stand already act as a filter in the economies of core countries to neutralise un­ desirable competition. It is no secret that design activities in the periphery, as far as they are directed to counter a role limited to the export of commodities and are unwilling to adapt to the dominant media, can hardly be harmonised with geopolitical hegemonic interests. In this sense, far from the potential of design being at the mercy of exaggerated or obstructive practical necessities, it is explicitly exposed to a conflict situation.32 Here the design process can contain – ­excluding any heroic idealisation – a moment of resistance and be a step, even if a very small one, to reduce heteronomy. The quote at the start of this article can thus be amplified to read: Practice also has political implications. 1 David Graeber 2001, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value – The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York, p. 88 2 The term ‘periphery’ is used in the sense of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory referring to the asymmetrical value transfer from dependent countries to core countries. According to this mode of analysis, Latin American countries belong to those countries with semi-periphery status. As early as the 1960s, it was above all social scientists from Latin America who analysed the relationship between core countries and the periphery as part of their work on dependency theory. In contrast to advocates of dependency theory, Andre Gunder Frank (1929–2005) supported the radical idea that underdevelopment was not a state, but produced on a daily basis. The topic of development and, with it, the political role of periphery countries was first officially voiced in a speech by President Harry Truman in early 1949. At that time, he talked of ‘underdeveloped’ countries, a disparaging term rightly avoided today. His speech marked the official start of the Cold War. 3 Fernández, Silvia and Gui Bonsiepe 2008 (eds.), Historia del diseño en América Latina y el Caribe, São Paulo 4 Two sources are mentioned here from the wealth of economic statistics available: the e-magazine QUETZAL - Politik und Kultur in Lateinamerika (www.quetzal-leipzig.de/themen/ globalisierung-und-regionalisierung/die-stellung-lateinamerikas-in-der-weltwirtschaft-19093.html) with its article on the position of Latin America in the global economy (in German) by Peter Gärtner, as well as the mOXLAD (http://moxlad-staging.herokuapp.com) database and blog with figures, e.g. on economic indicators in Latin American countries, presented visually as charts and graphs

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(accessed: 26 June 2017). The data is largely drawn from studies conducted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. These figures show, just to give two examples here, that over a period of 110 years – from 1900 to 2010 – the unit price for imports in Argentina rose twelvefold (from 50 to 596) while the unit price for exports only increased sevenfold (from 51 to 366). The figures for Brazil show the same tendency: the unit price for exports increased by a factor of just under nineteen (22 to 425), while the unit price for imports rose by a factor of 36 (25 to 899). This widening gap is not only caused by economic factors, but these figures ­nonetheless are very revealing. 5 Gui Bonsiepe 1991, Paesi in via di sviluppo: la coscienza del design e la condizione periferica, in: Raffaella Ausenda (ed.), Storia del disegno industriale 1919–1990 – Il dominio del design, Milano, pp. 252–269 6 During the United States presidential election in 2106, the term ‘nativism’ was given a definite right-wing spin – a direction the term had not had before. In the context of the resistance movement of native peoples, nativism had previously meant a turn towards preserving and reviving own indigenous cultures. As a radical stance, ‘nativism’ can be read as an intensified reaction to immigration which, in its most extreme form, calls for a halt to all immigration. 7 Tomás Maldonado 1949, El diseño y la vida social, CEA – Boletín del Centro de Estudiantes de Arquitectura 2: 7–8. Republished in Carlos Méndez Mosquera and Nelly Perazzo 1997 (eds.), Tomás Maldonado – Escritos Preulmianos, Buenos Aires 8

Tomás Maldonado 1989. Entrevista. Flash Art, 151. Spanish version in Maldonado 1997, pp. 117–127

9 These were architects born and trained in Argentina as well as those coming to live in the country. Two of three designers of the iconic BKF ‘butterfly chair’ were Argentinian (Hardoy and Kurchan), while Bonet was from Catalonia. They intensely followed developments in modern architecture in Europe – primarily Le Corbusier and Gropius as representatives of modernism. The first edition of the influential Argentinian cultural journal SUR (South), founded by Victoria Ocampo in 1931, published writings by Gropius on the Total Theatre. When Victoria Ocampo visited Gropius in Berlin in 1929, he showed her works of modern architecture in the city. See: Silvia Fernández 2017, Modernidad Temprana – Revista SUR / Victoria Ocampo, Buenos Aires (at press) 10 Martha Levisman 2015, Diseño y producción del mobiliario argentino 1930–1970, Buenos Aires. In terms of the reception of modern furniture, the new tubular steel furniture was initially praised for its comfort and functionality, as well as for its hygiene and cleanliness. But it was also viewed as being an element alien to the popular tradition, if not condemned from the outset as ‘Bolshevist and Jewish’. Carlos Mazza 2012, Tradicional y moderno en la producción de muebles en Argentina: 1930–1950 – Equipamientos para hoteles de turismo y oficinas administrativas, Registros 8: 52–68 11 The company policy – today known as the corporate identity programme – of the Argentinian state oil company YPF, founded in the early 1920s, was inspired by the model of corporate identity created by Peter Behrens for AEG. Javier de Ponti (ed.) 2012, Diseño, identidad y sentido – Objetos y signos de YPF 1920-1940, La Plata 12 From 1951–1953, a design course was offered at the Instituto de Arte Moderno at the MASP (Museo de Arte Moderno São Paulo). The director of the institute was the Italian art historian and critic Pietro Maria Bardi, who emigrated to Brazil in 1946. However, it was not possible to gain support from the industrial sector for this precursor institution. See Ethel Leon 2014, IAC primeira escola de design do Brasil, São Paulo. In 1963, the ESDI Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro officially launched a complete, fully-developed university programme for industrial design and visual communication which explicitly referenced the programme at the Ulm College of Design (HfG Ulm), and had a considerable influence on design training in Brazil. Similarly, a programme for industrial and communication design was also launched in Argentina in 1963 at the National University of La Plata which also drew heavily on the programme in Ulm. The crucial role played by the Olivetti company, represented by Adriano Olivetti (1901–1960) and Roberto Olivetti (1928–1985), has as yet only been partially documented and researched. The company had branch offices in São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Hence, three cultural spheres provided important influences on the development of design and training in Latin America: English-speaking (UK and USA), German-speaking (West Germany and Switzerland) and Italian. 13 Spanish uses the term diseño industrial for product design, and comunicación visual for graphic design. Since the 1990s, with the expansion of the term ‘design’, the general term ‘designer’ is sometimes used. Under the influence of the multitalented artist and activist Aloisio Magalhães (1927–1982), Brazilian Portuguese has adopted ‘industrial design’ as an umbrella term covering both product design as well as – contrary to international usage – visual communication (programação visual). This is because the Portuguese word desenho means sketch/drawing and so does not reference the design components evoked by the English word ‘design’. For many years, there was an ongoing disagreement over whether desenho industrial, meaning ‘technical drawing’, should not be expanded to include industrial design. To avoid confusion with ‘technical ­draftsperson’ as a profession, the industrial designers call themselves by the abbreviated term ‘designer’ from designer de produtos.

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14 The publications by Tomás Maldonado had and still have the greatest influence. The ­meticulous and painstaking work by Laura Escot 2007, Tomás Maldonado: itinerario de un intelectual técnico / The itinerary of a technical intellectual (bilingual edition), Buenos Aires, presents a detailed account of Maldonado’s development. In his work as an artist, Maldonado, co-founder of the Asociación Arte Concrete-Invención in 1944, is regarded as belonging to the Argentinian avant-garde movement. He took a practical and theoretical view of the culture of technical industrial objects and design and regarded the training of designers as a new challenge. In 1954, the same year he started his tenure at the Ulm College of Design, he painted his last work in the twentieth century but, after a long break, returned to artistic work in 2000 in Milan. His new works have been shown at venues including galleries in Berlin and Lugano as well as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Although Maldonado’s crucial role in cultural development has been widely acknowledged in Italy and Latin America, such appreciation has not yet been forthcoming in Germany, despite his leading role at the Ulm College of Design and his thirteen years there as a teacher, vice-chancellor, designer and author. 15 For example, the Design Centre in London opened in 1956, based on the Council of Industrial Design founded in 1944 during the Second World War. 16 The three examples of engineers here all played a key role in promoting and consolidating industrial design. In Chile, Fernando Flores (1943–) introduced industrial design as a subject on an equal footing in a technological research institute in 1970; in Argentina, Basilio Uribe (1916–1997) founded the Design Centre in Buenos Aires; and in Brazil, Lynaldo Cavalcanti de Albuquerque (1932–2011), in his role as President of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq; 1980–1985), called for integrating industrial design into policies on industrial development. As a rule, designers are not admitted to these institutions – a situation which can be attributed, on the one hand, to a lack of information and, on the other, to the widespread public image of designers as specialists for creating attractive product shells and differentiating side issues, or as mavericks not used to working in teams (designers where their name and personality plays a role). 17 Göran Therborn 2017, Dynamics of inequality, New Left Review 103: 67–85. He references the Human Development Report 2015, which also contains an inequality-adjusted index compiled using the Gini coefficient. 18 Ethel Leon 2013, Design em exposição, Ph.D. thesis, School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo 19 In 1973, the author of this article published a UNIDO report in Vienna instigated at the initiative of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). The report then served as the guidelines for programmes supported by the UNIDO (Gui Bonsiepe 1973, Design for industrialization, Vienna). At that time, I had been working for five years in Chile, and had extensive experience in this area. Just a few weeks before the putsch, I received the request to write the report and had just six weeks to complete it. This report served as a point of reference for the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development, published in 1979. 20 The dominant media rarely report on resistance from affected local populations against the consequences of such policies, and especially against strip mining, which robs them of the basis of the livelihood. 21 This also included using the Peace Corps, even though these mostly young volunteers need not necessarily have been aware of the fact since officially it was promoting an agenda for peace. However as has been noted, “The main reason that John F. Kennedy proposed this idea was to ultimately halt communism.” Lindsay Boshak (after 2008), The Peace Corps, accessed 26 June 2017 ( http://www.coldwar.org/articles/60s/PeaceCorps1960.asp) 22 Ernst Schuhmacher 1974, Es geht auch anders – Jenseits des Wachstums / Technik und Wirtschaft nach Menschenmaß, Munich 23 The lectures were published in Julian Bicknell and Liz McQuiston (eds.), Design for Need 1976, London. The two UNIDO reports mentioned above deal with the role of design for industrial development, but do not address craft production in any greater detail. The United Nations agencies promoting design training are organised in specialisations by their main focus, including technological and industrial development, where engineers and business economists are primarily responsible, and cultural affairs, involving the human sciences. In this categorisation, craft production falls under culture. In line with this division of labour, the approaches of the design programmes are also different. 24 On the difference between hegemony and dominance, see Vivek Chibber 2013, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, London 25 Pablo Quijano 2010, Notas sobre la teoría de la colonialidad del poder y la estructuración de la sociedad en América Latina, Papeles de Trabajo – Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Etnolingüística y Antropología Socio-Cultural 19: 1–15 26 For more information on this, see the detailed research by Argentinian art historian Andrea Giunta on the fine arts in Latin America: Andrea Giunta 2008, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y

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política, Buenos Aires. Chapter 7 on the Aporias of Internationalism, in particular, allows parallels to be established to the development of design. Since Latin America’s de-industrialisation process began in the 1990s, the spectrum of the design problems tackled has narrowed. In the context of the de-semantisation of the designer concept, product design has largely limited itself to small design objects made by craft processes and using autochthone or recycled materials – lamps, fruit bowls, stools, and utensils for writing and desks. 27 There is no updated and comprehensive data available on the designer labour market. Based on personal estimates, weakening product design in Brazil is partially balanced by, for instance, games design. 28 In a study of 25 countries, the following four indices were compared and listed in a ranking: publications in leading scholarly journals; number of registered patents; extend of investment in R&D (research and development); and the number of doctorates in the sciences and engineering. The Latin American countries in the study included Brazil and Mexico. Brazil, for example, ranked seventh for doctoral degrees, did not generate any sizeable number of patents, came 24th for publications in high-profile scholarly journals, and was not investing any sum worth mentioning in R&D. Source: Stephan Theil 2013, Por que a Alemanha ainda produz tanto?, Scientific American – Brasil 11, No. 126: 39–43. Whatever one’s reservations against benchmarking, these findings are revealing and an indication of how universities are isolated from the rest of society. 29 Nadir Lahiji 2014 (ed.), Architecture Against the Post-Political – Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project, London; Nadir Lahiji 2016 (ed.), Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project?, Winchester The publication by Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle (eds.) 2015, Cartographies of the Absolute, Winchester, follows a similarly critical artistic activism. 30 Susan Buck-Morss 2002, Dreamworld and Catastrophe – The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge Mass, Preface, p. xi 31 Hal Foster 1985, Recodings – Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, New York, p. 121 32 As yet, no attempts have been made to pursue the option of opening up the constrained sphere of design by linking design activities to technical and scientific innovation.

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The Politics of Design in Postcolonial Kenya Daniel Magaziner

Two Landscapes of the Imagination One landscape was small. Imagine a house set within a grove of trees; a stream bubbling nearby; a tiled-roof muffled the sounds of rain, providing a suitable atmosphere for listening to music, or reading, or maybe having a bottle of beer. It was a small house, wood floors, one bedroom with a single bed, covered with a leopard’s skin; more skins on the floor provided a soft cushion for bare feet – and the right ‘African’ atmosphere. It was quiet.1 The other landscape was larger and louder. It was a mountain, and people’s ideas about it were changing. For generations those who lived around its base had thought it static, a permanent, stable presence in their lives. Healers climbed it to make rain. In time, people had learned more about the mountain and its role it bringing forth moisture; so they planted trees on it and built dams around it and eventually even reshaped it to continue its vital role in ’making rain’ “in the interests of the general welfare.”2 Both this house and this mountain might have existed, somewhere, but for our purposes today what matters most was that neither was a real existing place, intimately known to those who imagined them. Instead, both landscapes were products of imaginations, six years apart, at the University of Nairobi. The house was the creation of Fred Karanja, who in 1972 was a second year student studying design at the university. His design theory pro­ fessor, an American named Nathan Shapira, had assigned Karanja and his classmates the task of designing their ‘ideal future home’. Karanja was 22, recently arrived in the city from a rural area, and single. He imagined a bachelor’s quiet idyll, with culturally appropriate accents, far away from the hustle and bustle. He was a diligent student – Shapira called him “one of his best” – and this was one among numerous projects he completed during his three years at the university. He finished in 1974 and went to work as a designer, first for the government, then on his own as the founder of the one of the country’s pioneering design firms. Four decades later, interior design has long been one of his specialties.3 The imagined mountain was also the product of a mind at the University of Nairobi. By the time Karanja arrived, the University’s design program was in its sixth year. It began in 1965, spun-off from Fine Arts, as the first industrial design program on the African continent. Its founding was prompted by the arrival of a new lecturer in Industrial Design, a South African-exile named 134

Selby Mvusi. Mvusi was a generation older than Karanja; he was a graduate of the University of Fort Hare in his native country and had taught previously at universities in the United States and Ghana before settling in Nairobi. Trained as a painter, sculptor and art educator, over the course of the early 1960s Mvusi had begun to think with increasing urgency about the intersection between design, mechanization, industry and culture in contemporary Africa. He foresaw that the story of the second half of the twentieth century was going to be the rise of earth-shaping technologies, of computers, of humanity’s capacity to make, remake, threaten and sustain their environment. He believed that the ability to design defined humanity, since people were uniquely capable of anticipation, creation and realization – and he worried that the onwards march of technology and mechanization was going to leave Africa behind. So in a 1966 paper given to the Colloquium on Black Art in Dakar, he imagined a mountain and a people who recognized that, even though the technology was different, the need to make rain for the general welfare remained the same. In addition to this Dakar presentation, Mvusi ­delivered many lectures at the University of Nairobi before he died suddenly in a car crash at the end of 1967.4 There are some obvious differences between these two acts of imagination. But I propose that in the distance between Karanja’s modesty and Mvusi’s ambition we can see a revealing chapter in the history of design in Africa, not necessarily in terms of style, or aesthetics or other conventional metrics of design history, but instead in terms of the intellectual history of postcolonial Kenya. The story of the Nairobi design program is multiple stories, which emanated from the same place, under the same name, but which diverged in their aspirations and addressed dramatically different concerns. One was more successful than the other, but in the distance between them we can see alternative histories of what ‘African design’ was imagined potentially to be. In what follows I’m going to move in time – first forward from the turn of the 1970s to explore the challenges and possibilities of the program that Nathan Shapira reconstructed in the wake of Mvusi’s death, until Shapira’s own, controversy-shrouded departure from the University in 1973. That the American left trailed by controversy was at least in part due to the typical rivalries and jealousies that mark academia; but also because of the ways in which his program had failed to live up to his South African predecessor’s ambitions. I will then pivot to examine how design had once been understood, before concluding with some remarks about the achievements and difficulties ­during the first decade of institutionalized design in higher education in Africa. Although careers like Karanja’s suggest that design has been ­ institutionalized in Kenya (as elsewhere on the continent), some of the ­ ­questions Mvusi asked still demand answers.

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Design Pragmatism, 1970–1973 Nathan Shapira and Selby Mvusi met for the first time at a UNESCO conference on ‘African and the United States,’ held in Boston in 1961. Their paths crossed again at design conferences in the mid-1960s, and again when ­Shapira – then a professor at UCLA – brought a group of American students to study abroad in Nairobi. After Mvusi’s sudden death, university and other colleagues appealed to Shapira to help maintain Nairobi’s program. He applied for leave from UCLA in 1969 and took over in Nairobi the following year. His was “a rescue operation”, he explained to a colleague in the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design in May 1970, which he hoped would preserve what was then one of only three functioning design programs in the Global South,5 India and Brazil boasted the others. Design, along with architecture and land development, was shortly to move to a new facility donated by the Danish Government, and they were increasing their enrollments to maximize the space’s potential. Yet even as the program seemed secure, there were weaknesses. Most ­ laringly, Shapira admitted, “we have great difficulties in Kenya to explain g who we are and what we do.”6 This lack of familiarity with the concept of ‘design’ at large was true within the university as well. Although his enrollments were increasing, Shapira knew that only a tiny minority of design students had intentionally registered for the degree. Odoch Pido preceded ­Shapira by a year, but his experiences were typical of Shapira’s time as well. Pido was a Ugandan student who matriculated while the University of Nairobi was still a constituent college of the University of East Africa (along with Dar es Salaam and Makerere). Pido had done some art at the secondary level, without really enjoying it. He suggests that art classes were reputed to be for “academic dwarfs”7. An ambitious student, he aspired to study Veterinary Medicine at tertiary. His grades were not good enough, however, so he was admitted to his second choice – an arbitrary one, design.8 Grace Kihara came after Pido. She had done some art as a student at Alliance Girls school, but hardly considered herself destined for a creative career. She was a good overall student and passed with marks good enough to be accepted to study either geography (and a career as a teacher) or the notvery-well understood discipline of design. She knew she was not interested in being a teacher, so she opted for the less known path.9 Fred Karanja’s came the next year; his path was similarly random. He too had done art at a secondary level (where he chafed against the expatriate instructors’ edicts always to be ‘objective’ and ‘realistic’). In 1970 he was working at the University as a bursary clerk, where he met Shapira. They got to talking and Shapira invited him to department to take a look around. “I asked him, what this was all about? Because I didn’t know, what is ‘design,’ what do you ‘design’?“. Shapira attempted to explain the concept, touching on its multiple ­instantiations – product design, graphic design, interior design, something 136

called ‘visual communication.’ Karanja did not “capture all the details,” but he was intrigued enough to register for the course when the next academic year began. He was one of twenty students who began the three-year course; he estimates that no more than a quarter finished with the degree. University fees were difficult to raise and maintain; most University faculties suffered comparable rates of attrition. But sentiments like Karanja’s doubtlessly contributed to this. Kihara remembers her classmates’ sharply questioning their instructors: “What [is] design? Where will we get jobs?” That meant that Shapira not only had to convince his students and others that design mattered, he also needed to convey how design could contribute both to Kenyan development and to his students’ lives. He organized design exhibitions in university facilities to demonstrate what design meant and how students could contribute to it. Most visibly, in 1971 he successfully lobbied for the design program to produce the symbolic language for the inaug­ uration of the University as a standalone institution (after the University of East Africa folded in 1970). Design students and instructors produced all of the posters and other printed material for the occasion; the best known ­element of this was the academic regalia Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta wore as he assumed the position of University Chancellor, which was ­designed by the department’s textile instructor, S.M.A. Sagaaf.10 The regalia included one of Kenyatta’s favored pillbox hats, in leopard skin; there were also leopard skin accents on the robes themselves. He also appealed to industry. In February 1971, for example, Shapira spoke to the Kenya Institute of Management, a business advocacy organization. He wanted the country’s corporate leaders to see that design was “not ­emotional,” nor purely aesthetic, but instead that “it should make a major contribution to improving the standard of goods, packaging, publications,” etc., produced and distributed in Kenya’s growing capitalist economy.11 This was an essential point: trained in Milan and having worked for a decade in the modernist, consumerist utopia of Los Angeles, Shapira, unquestionably, a capitalist, and if design was going to succeed in Kenya, it needed to serve the niche offered to it by capitalist society. He arranged for students to meet industry leaders, to tour factories, broadcast studios, etc..12 The connection between design and capital was reinforced in classroom assignments; ­Karanja recalls being charged with designing visual communication material for a Nairobi based company. He consulted with the owners about their needs, then spent time designing a brochure “so that you communicate all the information clearly […] in a format they will come to appreciate it.” The company had never contracted a designer before and its officers were­ ­ hesitant to see the commercial benefit. Overcoming their objections was thus also part of the assignment and good practice for the world of work that lay on the other side of the university. And it was creative and taxing practice; this was before computers were widespread, so he did all the lettering and ­coloring by hand.13 137

Fig. 1 Nathan Shapira with students at the University of Nairobi, exact date unknown (1969–1971). ­Reproduced by permission of the Nathan Shapira Design Archive, San Francisco State University, USA.

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Odoch Pido’s experiences were similar. He recalls that Shapira spoke ­frequently about “design management,” establishing systems to respond efficiently to corporate needs, and that this was very much at the heart of his pedagogy. Students visited government ministries, advertising agencies, construction firms and then developed designs intended to convince others that their intellectual labor had something to offer. It went both ways – ­Shapira also promoted the potential for a career in design by speaking to high school students and others about professional opportunities. Faced with the prospect of filling ten empty seats to begin in 1972, he promised a crowd gathered at a “Careers’ Conference“ designers would find “­employment ­opportunities […] in Government services and public agencies, local ­industries, […] architectural offices, research and educational institutions.”14 Shapira went further by accepting design commissions and sharing this financial and pedagogical benefit with his most promising students. Pido and Shapira ­collaborated on an interior design for the American Information Studies ­Library, for example. They also worked together to design a pattern for a textile company that was interested in entering the maridadi cloth market, which had previously been dominated by artisanal production.15 This commission / assignment got to the heart of Shapira’s theories about design, in that it also implied what design might specifically offer to Kenya’s developing capitalist economy. The Kenyan context was critical. From the outset, Shapira was aware that he was a white foreigner in a postcolonial context (and region) where the politics of representation, authority and indigeneity were highly charged. Even as he completed the ‘rescue operation’ in 1970 and 1971, he was thinking ahead towards how a stable design program would “accelerate the Africanization process.”16 Africanization meant both, training African designers for industry and for the department itself; more critically still, it meant reinforcing “the concept of political independence […] with a sense of cultural identity.” He wanted his students to think about their projects in light of “traditional material culture.” “I feel more and more involved with cultural anthropology,” he wrote to a colleague, “because we simply cannot transfer western cultural values […] upon the masses of ­people who live in a developing economy.”17 He sought pedagogical films on ­“pre-­industrial design to bring into focus the need of more dialogue between ­designers and anthropologists” and guided his students to make that the connection explicit, in their patterning and other projects.18 He wanted his students first to see and then to embody durable links between precolonial, traditional, or artisanal design practices and the competitive marketplace that they would enter after earning their degrees. Shapira did his best to convince students of the importance of Africanizing design in line with what he understood to be local craft traditions. He ­collaborated with the ­Institute of African Studies’ ‘material cultural project’ on a display during the 1971 inaugural festivities, earning media coverage and the conclusion that “design must follow Kenyan culture,” as The East 139

­African Standard put it.19 Kihara and her classmates had lectures on ‘cultural studies,’ which required them to visit the National Museum to view its ethnographic collections. One of her classmates, Sultan Somjee, was so taken by the ethnographic collections that he ended up staying at the university to do a PhD in anthropology and eventually published a book Material Culture of Kenya (1993) inspired in part by these early visits to the National Museum.20 Somjee’s trajectory was unusual; more common were student assignments like reports on body covers and ornamentation, with the implication that such studies would influence their 1970s design practice. “Patterns, designs, materials, etc., which are considered ‘mod’ overseas are copied and ­reproduced here,” one student explained. This competition “has accelerated the need to produce d ­ esigns and patterns which bring out the traditional styles,” to stimulate and shape local demand.21 With research and planning, design could assist African countries to “establish a national dress, […] which will make them stand out as independent states culturally, as well as ­politically,” another student suggested. A strong current of cultural nationalism thus ran through much of Shapira’s program. Primitivism was also tempting. Shapira promoted external examiners like Jerome Hausman, a respected art educator from NYU, who visited in 1972 and worried that “a Mona Lisa, a Rembrandt, a Mozart is not a suitable art form for Africa.” African designers needed to begin with local culture, Hausman insisted, like that evidenced in the manyatta he visited in the Ngong Hills, where the children “were happier – indeed, blissful – than those in ­Manhattan,” who were surrounded by industrial modernity.” The task of designer was therefore to figure out how to turn that observation into the basis for usable objects, rather than allow Western-designed imports run roughshod over local happiness.22 In 1973, Shapira reflected on his experiences in Nairobi at a resources conference in Tel Aviv. He doubled down on this point, citing one of the best-known proponents of cultural preservation amidst industrial modernity, his former colleague Okot p’Bitek. “The white man’s stoves are good for cooking white man’s food,” Shapira quoted from p’Bitek’s novel, The Song of Lawino, “bloodless meat of cows that were killed many years [ago] and left in ice to rot!” But Shapira’s reading of p’Bitek was selective; he sympathized with Lawino’s ­condemnation of designs (like the stove) based on Western needs (bloodless meat) and demanded that designers “in the developing countries […] be ­familiar with the traditional values” of the places in which they worked. Yet he was not going to take this critique too far; it was essential to be conversant in local design aesthetics and values because then designers could “serve as a bridge […] to a market economy for their societies,” whereby “the social values of traditional material culture[,] which developed a sense of pride and belonging” in the past[,] might be “transferred to the mass-produced goods used in the modern world.” ‘Traditional’ design practices and ­aesthetics thus mattered because, intelligently deployed, they would help 140

designers avoid a scenario in which “mass production in an evolved ­consumer’s economy [becomes] a major factor in widespread alienation.” In other words, how do you ease the shock of a developing country’s economic transformation into a capitalist consumerist society? Former students ­remember ‘vending machines for kangas,’ among other ideas.23 By the time Shapira presented these ideas in Tel Aviv he had returned to teaching full time at UCLA, which had been his plan all along. After some fits and starts, he was replaced by African instructors in Nairobi, who continued the work of institutionalizing, popularizing and Africanizing design. This also meant continuing the imperative he set for the program: to contribute to Kenya’s capitalist transformation by designing in a recognizably ‘African’ way for a mass consumer society. His students had imagined a quiet house carpeted with animal skins, or with a “traditional African” atmosphere, “achieved by kitenge curtains and upholstery, plus a unique collection of African carvings [and] spears,” as one of Karanja’s classmates understood design theory in Kenya.24 Africanization went hand in hand with professionalization, as Karanja himself had learned. Design was about finding a task to complete and to be paid for and if such tasks did not present themselves, it was about promoting the work that design could do and making the jobs appear. “Through design [Shapira] told us, you actually attend to people’s problems,” and there was potentially no bigger problem than the dislocation of Kenyan society’s development.25 Design was the art of the possible, which meant it “had to be adjusted to the reality of the circumstances existing in Kenya.”26 So Shapira left and students like Pido and Karanja went to work for the government, designing materials for events like agricultural shows, or objects promoting the road building achievements of the Ministry of Works; over time, they founded their own companies. “It’s up to you to use the skills you have acquired [in university], to go out there and convince people what you can do,” Karanja recalls, because “there’s an industry out there which requires [designers’] services”– even if that industry did not yet know it. Karanja credits Nathan Shapira for teaching him about both industry’s need for design and helping him to develop the tools to meet that need. He might also ­credit him for the particular gloss on the word ‘industry,’ which Shapira sometimes did and sometimes did not affix to the practice of design. But whether he called it ‘industrial design’ or simply ‘design,’ under Shapira’s stewardship the program aspired to fill the niche provided to it postcolonial Kenya’s ­industrial, capitalist economy. Academic design moved forward, along its set path.

Design Utopianism, 1964–1969 None of this was inevitable. Shapira frequently quoted his predecessor’s ­Mvusi’s writings on design. He edited and circulated Mvusi’s essays and on at least one occasion went so far as to “insist” that a visiting newspaper reporter 141

read a 1964 Mvusi essay before writing about the department’s activities ­under Shapira’s stewardship in mid-1972.27 He credited the South African for establishing the program and continued to teach his writings long after he returned to the United States. But Shapira and Mvusi were different; the former was an aficionado, not an apostle of the latter; he suggested that Mvusi was “too ambitious” about design’s potential in Kenyan society.28 Shapira ­believed that his more realistic program was a legitimate response to Mvusi’s charge to the West to “give us of your knowledge […] not your values,” an edict that Shapira quoted to a reporter interested in the practice of design in K ­ enya.29 It was clear from the outset that even if he appreciated the South African’s ideas, he did not necessarily share them. In 1969 Shapira spent nine days in Nairobi, strategizing with people who had taught with Mvusi about how best to strengthen the design program. They considered ways to disseminate Mvusi’s writings – a task which Shapira would embrace for the rest of his teaching career – and mulled over founding “Institute of Design Studies” at the university, “to enlist the participation of leading designers and experts […] to serve the urgent needs of African and other developing economies.”30 All present agreed that the first step was to get Shapira reassigned from UCLA to Nairobi; there was some disagreement about what came next. Shapira has “sympathy for Selby’s work,” Derek Morgan, one of the deceased South African’s collaborators, wrote to Nisa Mvusi, Selby’s widow, “even though he might not know at the present time how it works.” Mvusi’s ideas about industrial design did not begin and end with ‘industry,’ whereas the other attendees of the 1969 meeting worried that Shapira’s “present bias is more on the lines of the Raymond Lowey / Dorwin Teague approach of refining […] existing production.” Lowey and Teague were titans of branding and product design; given the program that unfolded, we might conclude that Shapira would have been thrilled if the Nairobi program had come to replicate their numerous successes in corporate America. But others in the “Selby Mvusi Design Study Group” obviously had something else in mind. Shapira “has a lot soul,” Morgan fretted to Nisa Mvusi, “but not quite the kind that is pertinent to our problems out here.”31 The implication was that although Shapira meant well, his theories about design’s utility in building brands and cultivating a ­Africanist corporate culture did not adequately capture the scope of what the previous instructors of the design program had hoped it might yield. They had imagined that design developed an altogether different set of ­ideals and in time, some evidently concluded that these had been betrayed. There is a universe between Shapira’s of Mvusi’s quote and the same quote deployed to condemn; likewise there was a universe between the program’s life in the 1960s, and its life in the 1970s. The irony was that Shapira was to some degree responsible for Mvusi’s introduction to and subsequent interest in industrial design. As mentioned previously, the two men met at a UNESCO cultural development conference in the early 1960s. Shapira was an active member of ICSID when, in 1963, the organization began to collaborate with 142

UNESCO to plan an international conference on the education of industrial designers. They lacked representatives from the recently colonized nations. Shapira suggested Mvusi, who was then lecturing art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. On the first of January, 1964, ICSID’s secretary general, Josine des Cressonnières, invited him to attend a seminar planned for March 1964, as the “sole representative of ­African countries” – and indeed, of the Global South.32 By reputation, she knew that he was an artist, not a designer, so she included various briefing papers on the history of the discipline, as well as spirited talk by one of its best known proponents, Tomás Maldonado, then the director of the Ulm School of D ­ esign in West Germany. Mvusi wrote back quickly to accept the invitation to attend the seminar. “It is indeed very true that I am not very familiar with Industrial Design,” he conceded, but as he surveyed Africa’s competitive disadvantage in industrial production, the continent’s need for “education of industrial designers is urgent, is self-evident; in fact it is of crucial importance in the overall effort at industrial reconstruction in post-colonial Africa.” The repetition in this letter suggests a certain nervousness, a tentativeness; he was overwriting to compensate for his insecurities about his knowledge of the subject. There is also the hint of an original approach, however, in that Mvusi already saw industrial design in terms of the continent’s ‘industrial re-construction,’ not industry per se.33 In any event, he proved a quick study. The invitation arrived during a period of professional and intellectual transition in Mvusi’s life. By 1963 he had earned some prominence both in South Africa and abroad as a painter and a sculptor. He made his living as an art educator, even as he was beginning to sour on fine arts and the academic infrastructures that sustained their practice. At the conference he attended with Shapira and elsewhere he leveled careful critiques against an art history established that was insistent that ­Africa’s most creative days were in the past. He was in frequent conflict with gatekeepers who stubbornly insisted on the value of traditional cultural heri­ tage over and against contemporary production. Over the first months of 1964 he travelled to the UK; there he met with industrial designers and educators; he read, and he thought. In industrial design Mvusi found a language to help him escape from a discourse on African artistry that he thought sentimentalist and too oriented to the past. He found a way to reorient the conversation about African creativity to the machine age.34 In March, Mvusi traveled to Bruges to attend the seminar. The transcript ­suggests that he was mostly silent as other attendees talked about issues that had little to do with what he knew of contemporary Africa – about ­designers’ relationships with advertising firms, for example. He might have noted the frequently grandiose tones with which practitioners discussed their discipline. “Industrial design is the creative activity fulfilling an integration of human spiritual and material needs through industrial production,” went a typical sentiment. During discussions about pedagogy, perhaps 143

­ nderlining one attendee’s contention that the industrial designer’s task “is u to develop new objects which are natural to the situation” – to the now, where needs and concepts are annunciated, not to valorize the retrospective then. A good object was “a part of nature,” fitting so well into its context that it seemed like it had always been there.35 He entered the conversation only when it swung to consider the unique ­challenges of design education in low income countries. Maldonado and others proposed that Western design programs ought to make the recruitment and training of non-Westerners a priority. Mvusi disagreed. “I am not asking to send African students to Ulm,” he countered, “but to have our own institute [in Africa] where Maldonado can come.”36 This was presumptuous, given that there was not yet a single design program in Sub-Saharan African, but Mvusi was serious. In his paper he worried that Africa and the ‘low income world’ in general was being denied the opportunity fully to participate in industrial design, because of a lack of funds and expertise, and especially because of prevailing ideas that non-Western peoples simply were not suited to contemporary technology and needed instead to preserve their traditional craft practices. Mvusi rejected such fearful conservatism. He knew all too well that there were those who reacted to the contemporary moment by “ten­ aciously holding onto old established and known modes of culture.” To his mind, such an approach was “misguided, [and] most definitely misplaced.” To preach the values of aesthetic convention “may solve conscience” – it might comfort those concerned about the post-colonial decline of the ‘authentic’ Africa, but it “cannot solve problems.” It was the twentieth century; “people within the many cultural systems that are existing in the world today must themselves adapt science and technology […] in order to build into their own cultures an appropriateness to contemporary processes. This they will have to do or die.”37 This sounded extreme, yet Mvusi had evidently become convinced that the stakes were that high. He defined design as “the plastic realization of time-consciousness.”38 The things people made demonstrated their mastery of time and place. Hearkening to the discussion of ‘natural’ design, Mvusi asserted that “the truly excellent object is the object that most successfully eliminates alternative interpretations to both its form and its function […] It is an object responsibly made. It is an object that allows and conforms only to responsible use of itself. It is not just the right object, it is an object ­originally conceived of and made for the right reason.” ‘Right objects’ were not just ideas; they were ideas “influenced and related to other ideas.”39 The present demanded its own objects that would be “the means and the avenue of self-expression which, expressing the same spirit of Africa [as in the past] today express it [in] twentieth-century […] terms.” Perhaps that is what he meant when he wrote to des Cressonnières about his interest in ‘industrial re-construction.’ From art history he had learned that Africans had created objects to meet the needs and demands of their social, economic and 144

Fig. 2 Selby Mvusi with students at the University of Nairobi, exact date unknown (1966–1967). Reproduced with the permission of Davinder Lamba.

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­ olitical lives; in other words, they had once made things to suit their needs. p ­African objects were African because they had suited an African contempor­ ary age’s uses and needs, not because they gestured to unchanging, static tradition or a romantic past. African social life had evolved, however; A ­ fricans still existed and therefore Africanness needed to be understood as something other than static. It was processual and ongoing; it was not a m ­ atter of skins, spears and cloth. Rather, “the African personality must be defined ­industrially,” he concluded.40 Mvusi knew that his arguments were controversial and “in parts offensive,” at least to people of a certain ideological perspective. He was unapologetic. The “time now” was also offensive, he wrote to Cressonnières after the seminar. It especially offended him that people continued to talk about practices from the African past, which left the continent’s creators lagging further and further behind the present. The idea of defining the African personality ‘­industrially’ consumed him. He began to plot with supporters to find a place to establish a program in industrial design and soon made his way to Nairobi. He continued to read and write; within months he had written another massive essay in which he worked towards a definition of the purpose of industrial design. He came to see ‘industrial’ as something more fundamental than either mechanization or industry. For Mvusi, industrial processes were social forms engaged in the organization of matter and materials. Slavery and colonialism had thus been industrial processes – those systems had organized matter and materials to suit their purposes – at African people’s e ­ xpense. Slavery and colonialism had fundamentally altered Africans’ relationships with usable things, such that they themselves had become ­machines – cogs in industrial development, not the generators of industrial systems. After much blood and suffering, he wrote at a time when those systems were over. Matter was open and free to be organized, and the global circulation of things (objects, information, etc.) meant that there were multiple points of entry. The industrial designer was to be contemporary Africa’s agent, by restoring the instrumentality of African subjectivity, by making things to suit African societies’ present demands and staking a claim to this most recent industrial age. Designer needed therefore to think big, even when contemplating objects of a modest scale. In his writings, Mvusi scoffed at those who suggested that quaint artisanal practices might somehow be monetized and gain purchase in the global ­industrial economy. “The sight of Nigerian and Moroccan sandal-making craftsmen, labouring away producing fairly well-designed leather goods, while themselves clad in gaudy plastic sandals, is most telling in this regard,” he noted.41 To him, theories about developing traditional craft economies and resuscitating precolonial aesthetics were mere escapism – flights from the challenges of the present. He was scathing of those “enamored of the spiritism of Africa.” If design was about responding to the present to create objects ‘natural’ to the now, then African designers could not rely on the 146

achievements of the past. “Born into this age, we belong. We are that much obligated and pressured to belong,” he insisted. Mvusi explained instead that designers needed to respond to the mid-20th century industrial era that was, in all of its complexity. The sandals on the craftsmen’s feet told the story. “There cannot, therefore, be design for underdeveloped countries standing apart and distinct from design in developed countries.” There were no such distinct and apart places. He was convinced that what was true under slavery and colonialism was true in Mvusi’s own time – as ever, “industrialization rests on calculated co-ordination of functions-to-functions, systems-to-systems.” It rests, in other words, on interconnection, and in an increasingly interconnected world, there were ample opportunities for African designers to regain the initiative that had been lost – or, if you prefer, to ‘re-construct.’ I should pause here to underline what Mvusi did not write about during his initial forays into design theory, and which he would never really write about during the years that followed. He did not write about specific objects that would offer solutions to specific problems. He did not write about branding or graphic design or typography or how designers ought to work within the confines and towards the ends of industry. His unfolding theories were not those of Donwin Teague or Raymond Lowey, or of Nathan Shapira, who had facilitated Mvusi’s entry into the discipline of industrial design. His public and private writings reveal that Mvusi had gone somewhere very different, because he was convinced that the times called for a different approach. Human beings had exploded atoms. They were developing computers that were capable of processing incomprehensible amounts of data. They were literally moving mountains to make rain and light. Design was not just a matter of making objects that fit perfectly into their assigned niches; design was about remaking nature, in its totality. The discourse on African art frustrated him because it evaded the heavy responsibilities of the present; it denied contemporary Africans’ capacity to “order all points of articulation and integration” in the interconnected contemporary world. One would be mistaken if one looked “at people in underdeveloped countries as being people outside the framework of commitment and necessity today.” Yes, most Africans lacked the resources of those that had exploited them for centuries. But “whatever our place or circumstance may be, and whatever the opportun­ ities or limitations attending our place and circumstance may be, our consciousness of time invariably transcends place and circumstance.” Therefore, design ought not “only look at […] place and circumstance;” instead, it needed to begin with the people’s “‘uneasy dreams’ which result from the opposition of realities – the realities of time conceived, and the realities of circumstance occupied by that people.” Designers needed to think about the total complexity of the now, when and where craftsmen wore plastic sandals while laboring at ‘tradition.’ Over the next three years Mvusi tried to turn his ambitious and decidedly abstract ideas into the sort of real, functioning designing program that ­ 147

l­ uminaries like Maldonado would have no choice but to visit. This was not easy to do. The design program’s basic proposition was that since all things were ­interrelated, students needed to learn, essentially, everything before they could even begin to design a single thing. So lectures ranged from subjects like the history of urbanization to the history of confucianism and Greek and Roman society; they learned about impressionism and the futurists, about the Bauhaus, about socialism and Nazism; in their studios they considered objects like tensegrity domes, in which the pressure and weight is distributed evenly across the entire structure (a metaphor for the way things ought to be?); and they conducted extensive mapping and network survey projects that sought to capture the entirety of contemporary Kenyans’ experiences. What archival sources remain suggest that he also adapted his 1964 essays into lectures that he shared with his students, and which they reiterated to him in assignments. What was design? “Design is civilization, civilization is infinite, design is infinite,” Patrick Kanyue, a first year student in 1965 reported.42 Many of Mvusi’s students had meandered their way into his classes, just as many of Shapira’s would in the 1970s. Surely many were confused by what they encountered there. But it is also easy to imagine how powerfully others would have been struck by his assertions that “at no time has man not designed to live. At no time may he live without design. At no time has he not lived from design. design is a fundamental human necessity at all times and at all levels of ­human existence.”43 The few who knew about the academic study of design would have thought they were going to learn how to conceive of and ­produce useful things. They found an instructor and a discipline that promised much more than that. It was not to last. Mvusi was never quite able to escape the University authorities’ suspicions that his lectures were not precisely what a university design program was supposed to teach. To be sure, he did have numerous international supporters, including a UCLA design professor who visited ­ ­Nairobi with his students; the local university authorities were altogether more conservative, however, and were concerned primarily that the ­university would hasten the development of a complex, professionalized economy in postcolonial Kenya, which would in turn be a model for a region of contested and unsettled politics. Eventually, their patience ran out, ­leading to incidents such as when he was denied funds to travel to attend a March 1967 ICSID seminar in Syracuse, NY in favor of Gregory Maloba, a lecturer in fine arts (and frequent Mvusi critic). “No harm in our having a new African face at the table,” one ICSID officer wrote to another.44 Still, even as the clouds gathered around what he called the “Faculty of Comprehensive Design,” in 1966, he was able to carry his ideas to a new audience in Dakar. At the First World Conference on Black Art he spoke again about “industrial” in a sense bigger than corporate industry, as a historical process 148

that had long shaped African societies and history. “Industrialization is the system co-ordination of matter processes in their relation to and with man,” he explained. You either made it work for you, or it worked on you. The challenge was to make industry, “in the interest of the welfare of man.” African societies had designed for the good in times past, but that was then and it was fruitful to “seek a personality lost through time.” Africans were still ­present and thus so was the African ‘personality,’ changing, evolving, but still responding to its current conditions. “It is in our interest to activate our present personality, therefore our concern is with method, tools and techniques.” He reached for the metaphor we saw at the outset of this paper. Once, we had climbed a mountain to pray for rain; now, we move mountains better “they ‘make’ rain in the interests of the general welfare.”45

Making Rain In December 1967 Selby Mvusi died in a car crash outside of Nairobi. The shock and sudden loss doubtlessly contributed to the emotional attachment that many of his students and colleagues already felt towards him and over time, there were tensions between these successive generations of designers. It is, of course, not hard to imagine their let down: Mvusi’s students were taught that designers, whether African or not, were poised to shape industry in the broadest possible sense of the term, which meant designing a way forward for human societies. Shapira’s students were taught to work with corporate and government industry to design brochures and begin to plan interiors, with an ‘African’ touch. And yet, students like Karanja and Kihara got jobs and made careers; they still employ the principles they learned at the University of Nairobi in their work today. Design students like Odoch Pido became instructors and in turn trained other designers and now, 52 years after Mvusi pioneered design ­education in Nairobi, the city boasts numerous places where young students can study graphic, computer, fashion, interior and other design. The University of Nairobi was the first, and now design is entrenched in universities and institutes across the continent; the annual Design Indaba in Cape Town is one of the largest such events anywhere in the world and African design and designers are regularly featured in glossy publications and retrospectives all over the globe. In 2013 a senior lecturer at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology became the first African elected to the president of ICSID. A Kenyan, Mugendi M’Rithaa was a student of Odoch Pido’s at the University of Nairobi. Shapira’s legacy is obviously a bit more complicated than the comparison with Mvusi’s vision suggests. Still, recent critiques by Pido and others suggest that design education and functioning in Kenya is far from ideal.46 From Shapira’s time until today, too often ‘Africanness’ is achieved through superficial design elements, rather 149

than consulting deeper meanings, or, more profoundly, by grappling with how and why the category ‘African’ has frequently been constructed and cohered in limiting and violent ways. Such identarian violence is of course not limited to African identities, but since the slave trade Africans have experienced it more acutely than most. Selby Mvusi knew this; in his Dakar talk he offered a long digression about how European-derived racial constructions continued to ‘haunt’ both Europe and the ex-colonial world. So in the halls of négritude he warned Africans “to be aware of those carrying gifts in praise of [Africa’s] personality because they are mortal enemies of the latter.” It was not productive for any people to “see themselves through the eyes of other[s].” He believed instead that Africans, ought to know and define themselves “through the results of their own actions.”47 The ongoing work of self-definition was the task of design. Even as we note and appreciate what design professionals have achieved in the decades since Shapira took his students to advertising firms, government ministries and ethnology ­museums, we must question whether, as a discipline, design and designers have met Mvusi’s demand that they also make rain. 1

Fred Karanja, 1972, My Ideal Home, April 4, 1–2, Shapira Design Archive, SFSU, San Francisco

2 Selby Mvusi, March 1966, Current Revolution and Future Prospects, Johannesburg Art Gallery, FUBA, p. 73 3

Fred Karanja, interview with the author, 2016, Nairobi.

4 For much more on Mvusi see Elza Miles 2015, Selby Mvusi: To Fly With the North Bird South, Pretoria; and Daniel Magaziner 2015, Designing Knowledge in Postcolonial Africa: A South African, Abroad, Kronos: Southern African Histories, p. 41, and Magaziner, The Foundation: Design, Time and Possibility in 1960s Nairobi, Comparative Studies in Society and History, forthcoming. 5

Shapira to Cressonnières, May 30, 1970, ICSID, Brighton Design Archive, 1

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Shapira to Cressonnières, November 26, 1971, ICSID, Brighton Design Archive, 1

7 J.P. Odoch Pido 2014, Pedagogical Clashes in East African Art and Design Education, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1: 125 8 Pido argues that this holds true, where many students register for design only because it is a path towards a university degree, and because “they do not qualify for the [more prestigious] courses they prefer.” J.P. Odoch Pido, Pedagogical Clashes in East African Art and Design Education, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1: 120 9

Grace Kihara, interview by the author, June 2016, Nairobi

10 Shapira to Goldsmith, December 20, 1972, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICSID collection, 3 11 Kenya Institute of Management, Industrial Design – a Major Tool for Industrial Growth, February 14, 1971 ICSID archive, Brighton, 1 12 Grace Kihara, interview by the author, June 2016, Nairobi 13 Grace Kihara, interview by the author, June 2016, Nairobi 14 Good Job Prospects in Design Careers, Daily Nation, May 8, 1972, ICSID, Brighton 15 Odoch Pido, interview by the author, Nairobi, 2015. On maridadi in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Elsbeth Court and Michael Mwangi 1976, Maridadi Fabrics, African Arts, Vol. 10, No. 1: 38–41+99. 16 Shapira to Cressonnières, May 30, 1970, ICSID, Brighton Design Archive, 1 17 Shapira to Cressonnières, March 30, 1971, ICSID, Brighton Design Archive, 1 18 Shapira to Cressonnières, July 5, 1971, ICSID, Brighton Design Archive, 1 19 East African Standard, January 14, 1971 20 Grace Kihara, interview by the author, June 2016, Nairobi 21 Esmail Jiwagi, Body Covers of East Africa, March 1972, Shapira Design Archive, SFSU, 5

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22 African Culture Can Be Married to Technology, The Sunday Nation, [obscured] 1972, ICSID, Brighton 23 Nathan Shapira, Industrial Design Education for Developing Countries, Tel Aviv, December 1973, Shapira Design Archive, SFSU, San Francisco, 8–9 24 The Interior of My Home, 1 25 Fred Karanja, interview with the author, 2016, Nairobi 26 Shapira, Industrial Design Education, 8 27 A Real Design for Living, The Daily Nation, June 1972, ICSID, Brighton Design Archives 28 Shapira, Industrial Design, 8 29 A Real Design for Living, op. cit. 30 Selby Mvusi, Design Study Group, June 1969, DLC, Nairobi, 1 31 Morgan to Mvusi, June 16, 1969, DLC, Nairobi, 1–3 32 Cressonnières to Mvusi, January 1, 1964, ICSID, Brighton, 1 33 Mvusi to Cressonnières, January 20, 1964, 1 34 For more on this period, see Magaziner, Designing Knowledge 35 Report on the Bruges Seminar, ICSID, Brighton, pp. 12, 40 36 Ibid., 49, 50 37 Selby Mvusi 1964, The Education of Industrial Designers in Low-Income Countries, SFSU, Shapira Collection, 1 38 Selby Mvusi 1965, Educating Designers Today: Prescriptive Perspective not Perspective ­Prescription, 16 September, SFSU, Shapira Collection, pp. 1, 2, 40 39 Mvusi 1964, Education of Industrial Designers 7:18 40 Ibid., pp. 52–53 41 Selby Mvusi 1964, Design Development in Africa Today: Problems and Programming, in: Miles 2015, Selby Mvusi, appendix, pp. 7–12 42 Selby Mvusi (ed.), Extracts from Students’ Essays, November 1965, Shapira Design Archive, SFSU, 2. For much more on the curriculum during Mvusi’s years at the University, and especially his collaboration with Derek Morgan jointly to teach designers and architects, see Daniel Magaziner, The Foundation: Design, Time and Possibility in 1960s Nairobi, Comparative Studies in Society and History, forthcoming. 43 Mvusi, Design Development, 7 44 Black to Pulos, March 15, 1967, ICSID, Brighton, 1 45 Selby Mvusi, Current Revolution and Future Prospects, March 1966, Johannesburg Art Gallery, FUBA collection, pp. 52–75 46 Pido, interview, 2016; Pido, Pedagogical Clashes, op. cit. 47 Mvusi, Current Revolution, 69

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On the Flows of Architectural Design: The Context and Making of an Exhibition Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

Tightly packed together, they line the edges of the main roads, nestle against the walls of buildings, fill the niches of the often spacious market districts and the older permanent infrastructure and architectures – the kiosks and vending stalls of “informal” trade form the urban furnishings of (West)­African cities. Informal relationships, networks and structures that function on a ­local as well as transnational level are emblematic of these cities – they even seem to constitute them. In this context, Edgar Pieterse speaks of a “­pervasive system of informalization – that is, partially outside of formal economies, conventional governance systems and enumerated areas – that flows from the unjust structures of opportunity in cities”.1 Instead of understanding ­African cities only in terms of lack and shortcoming, Pieterse and urban ­researchers like Flip de Boeck and AbdouMaliq Simone see informality – ­without glossing over the precarious living conditions of the urban poor – as “a zone of possibility and autonomy in various interstices of the city“.2 Until 1990 – and today the number is four times higher – more than half of urban populations were involved in non-formal arrangements. However, these ­often lead to formal structures and interfere with them.3 The forms of kiosks and other temporary architectures are oriented towards the goods presented as well as the available (building) materials. The ­displays therefore often take on an artistic format: shoes hang from cords like installations, fabric or clothes are strung up over or under one another so that the entire image gives the effect of a colourful collage. The goods that these informal structures offer cover the entire range of everyday needs: groceries, clothing, cosmetics, household wares, electronics, and much more. The ­simple, minimalistic displays are constructed from wood, the more stable ones are made of metal in different sizes and finished for different uses. The forms range from tables, shelves, filagree constructions, cabinet-like structures to small dwellings and various add-ons to permanent structures. They are always flexible and adapted to what is needed and what is at hand. In addition to the installation character of the arrangements and stacks of diverse products, the architecture itself has an almost object-like presence. It represents the aesthetic sensibilities of those who build and use them, as well as the often precarious economies in urban Africa. In the interplay between aesthetic and economic aspects they become objects of artistic ­debates: Portes Oranges (2005–2007) by Senam Okudzeto, for example, ­targets the special aesthetic of product displays as a manifestation of the 152

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Dakar 2016, © Zoe Schoofs, © Agnes Stillger

coping strategies of female orange vendors in Accra, Ghana and, according to Senegalese artist Cheikh Ndiaye, the informal is not a mere socio-eco­ nomic survival practice, but “an everyday Duchampian defamiliarization, a space where art is sutured to life“.4 On the other hand, in her digitally altered photos, Karola Schlegelmilch directs attention towards the architectonic form itself, its situatedness in urban space, as well as its particular materiality and towards an often conflicting aesthetics of mixing, copying, and modification.5 The architect and designer Ada Umeofia has devoted herself to these small architectures, studying their use and their “ideal form”: “Throughout the years, I have gone through several iterations and finally decided on a design for the ‘ideal market stall’; a singular unit embedding elements from the existing context, designed to accommodate variety within its form that dictates a system for seamless, organized aggregation in an open space.“6 The exhibition architecture of Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow is based on ­research and observation of temporary architectures during two visits to West Africa: on the occasion of Dak’Art 2016 in Dakar, Senegal and in­ Bamako, Mali during the workshop with Cheick Diallo. The architecture takes up in particular the flexible and additive character of the kiosks: sometimes they are presentation tables with or without a rear panel, sometimes a video­ box, at times covered showcases for the display of suspended objects. Spread across four exhibition spaces in Munich – the Architekturmuseum der TU München / Pinakothek der Moderne, the Museum Fünf Kontinente, München, at the Kunstraum München as well as in the premises of a private gallery – the furniture on site form microstructures, which in turn connect the individual exhibition venues at the macro level. In Museum Fünf ­Kontinente, they also take a “space in-between” as an intervention within the permanent exhibitions – as in urban space – that in this case opens a dialogue with the displays of the permanent exhibition.

1 Edgar Pieterse 2008, City Futures. Introduction: deciphering city futures, in: Edgar Pieterse (ed.), City Futures. Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development, London, p. 2 2 See Filip de Bock, Marie Françoise Plissart (eds.) 2004, Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City, Ghent-Amsterdam and AbdouMaliq Simone 2002, Die globalisierte Ökonomie, in: Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.), Dokumenta11_Platform 5: exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart, pp. 114–121, p. 114 3 See AbdouMaliq Simone 2002, Die globalisierte Ökonomie, in: Okwui Enwezor et al. (eds.), Dokumenta11_Platform 5: exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart, pp. 114–121, p. 114 4 Jana Beránková 2013, Cheikh Ndiaye - (I)n(f)ormal Visitation, Introductory Essay for the exhibition (I)n(f)ormal Visitation at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, Abidjan 5 See Kerstin Pinther 2011, Architekturen der Migration. Migration der Architektur. Künstlerische Annäherungen, in: Sissi Helff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet (eds.), Die Kunst der Migration. Aktuelle Positionen zum europäisch-afrikanischen Diskurs. Material – Gestaltung – Kritik, Bielefeld, pp. 169–181 6 http://www.artbaseafrica.org/issue/design-method/ada-umeofia-interview-, last retrieved 1rst December 2017

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© Photos: Thomas Splett

Fig. 1–3 Kunstraum München Fig. 4, 6 Museum Fünf Kontinente, München Fig. 5, 7–8 Architektur Museum der TU München / Pinakothek der Moderne Fig. 9, 10 Private Gallery

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Jules Wokam’s Aesthetics of Permeability Christian Hanussek

Born in 1972 in Yaounde, Jules Bertrand Wokam first trained as an architect in Cameroon before gaining experience in contemporary art in the Cercle Kapsiki collective and ultimately deciding to work in design. Today he lives and works in Tain-l’Hermitage, France and in Douala. Le Nomadisme, Mirroring Game Between Art and Design ... this object [JW describing one of his early artworks] comprises a multitude of objects I have assembled: a calabash, an old computer hard drive, an aluminium plate and kitchen utensils. All of them origin­ ally had a function, so I set out to change that function and give the object a new one. I make new objects out of them. I kill their former function and create a new object whose function is not overly clear, a little ambiguous. For example, this is an ashtray, but perhaps it isn’t really an ashtray, it could also be used for something else. And this rim of a car is an object that has already served its purpose. It’s a dead ­object – and I reanimate it. [...] In this case, I’ve turned it into a chair. When this process starts, I’m working as a designer. When I’ve succeeded in reanimating an object, though, my design work is over. If I wanted to, I could then connect this object as a prototype with an ­industry able to produce it in series. [...] But although I’m using a ­designer’s logic, this is actually just a pretext to do other things. I’ll use this object, for instance, as part of an installation. In that way, I kill the object a second time to do something different with it. Now this object is transporting my ideas.1 This was how Jukes Wokam explained his artistic strategy in a workshop in 2000, shortly before his first one-man-show Le Nomadisme at Doual’art. The paintings and objects in the show were assemblages of very diverse elem­ ents creating an accelerated vertigo of functions and meanings. Their multi-­level references ranged from citing such traditional features as the ­Sahel’s clay architecture to everyday objects, popular and fine arts in the Afro-modern tradition and – with a knowing wink – typical ‘African’ ways of fixing or assembling things, such as re-claimed ‘western’ or Chinese consumer goods. This mix was also notable for its ironic and playful treatment of those cultural and art stereotypes taken far more seriously in other, more identitarian African art practices and their reception.2 At that time, Wokam referred to his work both as ‘design’ and ‘art’, using these terms like a game of mirrors, although ultimately it was clear that his work was art and the ­concept of design merely a reference to the process of its unfolding. 164

Over the last two decades, Jules Wokam has gradually turned the elements he played with in his art into functional designs. Quite surprisingly in 2005, he launched too’maii, his prêt à porter fashion line, releasing two collections of medium-priced, young casual streetwear every year. Each of the collections has its own motto, from Favelas Chic in 2005 to No 21: Ikoij presented in December 2016.3 With all too’maii gear produced in its own workshop with six employees and marketed in four shops in Douala and one in Libreville, the label is absolutely unique in Central Africa. I started with fashion design in quite a small way. Getting into fashion was a much longer process and required a considerable technical ­effort on my part. Generally speaking, most African designers aren’t into the technical side. It’s not just about having people say: “that looks extravagant” but r­ ealising whether the material falls badly or doesn’t fit – and that took me a long time to learn. I taught myself. To begin with, I took clothes to pieces. I bought clothes by all the major labels and then took them apart to see how they were made, so I could understand their structure. Initially, it was just experimenting. It wasn’t functional at all – and I only spent as much time on it as I wanted. Then in 2005, I received an AFAA grant (Association Française d’action artistique) for a residency in France researching into street furniture – and that’s where I set about working on the basics. I think from the tenth collection on, we’ll have enough experience to know how to run this business. The brand style will get a clearer profile – with fashion it really takes a long time before you can see what you really want to make. I’m still trying out different approaches, but increasingly asking myself where it’s going. I think from the tenth ­ ­collection on the brand will have a mature style.4 In fact, too’maii is just part of a design company offering a full range of ­products and services from graphic design for logos and colour concepts to applications such as flyers, packaging and interiors right up to employee outfits. In addition, Wokam has designed a number of shops, hotels, houses and the interiors of around 100 branch agencies for the telecommunication giant Orange in Cameroon, Senegal and the Central African Republic. His most obvious translation into design is from the objects shown at Le ­Nomadisme to his manufactured furniture, as in the stools TOMBOUCTOU and YIN ET YANG, and the benches COTE À COTE and J’AURAIS DEUX ­INVITES.5 165

As part of the Douala artists’ collective Cercle Kapsiki, Jules Wokam was ­involved in a number of art installations in public space, linking art to the reality out on the streets. These included Hors les murs in 1998 on Douala’s Boulevard de la Liberté, organised by Doual’art with UNESCO funding. In 2000/2001 the collective was invited to the Ecole Supèrieure des Arts ­Décoratifs (Graduate School of Decorative Arts) in Strasbourg where the ­collective worked with lecturers François Duconseille and Jean-Christophe Lanquetin to develop Scénographies Urbaines. This series of interventions in public space started in Douala in 2002, followed by Alexandria in 2004 and Kinshasa in 2006–2007. But rather than just intervening in public space, ­Jules Wokam has increasingly taken public space as his field of inspiration and research. As a post-modern artist/designer, he is fascinated by the ­complex relations of use-value and symbolic value characterising the makeshift ­objects that are typical elements in ‘informal’ buildings and commerce in the streets of his city. For Utopies Urbaines, his second exhibition at Doual’art in 2004, he wrote this manifesto: Utopies Urbaines In the reality of our popular quarters in Douala, no object is defined exclusively by its utilitarian function. The functional aspects are the ­banal side of an object and do not do justice to the attitudes and behaviour of the inhabitants. Domestic furniture is often simply put out on the streets without worrying that its functionality could be vacillating or ambiguous. This custom’s intuition and poetics are highlighted voluntarily or involuntarily and relate to people’s assumed or real priorities. These objects are always at the margins of a private and a shared or public space. Submitted to this tension and oscillation, they neither drown in the chaos of urban space nor sink into decadence. The objects leave an imprint of a different rhythm, and different inhalations and exhalations. Through this transition, they gain a new status, and a new relation is established for those who use them for better or for worse. This process generates a new moral and physical attitude to the global village’s social codes far removed from those immaculate and pure forms corresponding socially to a hegemonic position and psychologic­ ally to a comfortable, arrogant, western stance. These attitudes must be classified and analysed.

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Fig. 1 MOBILIUM, 2004

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At Utopies Urbaines, he showed prototypes of chairs, benches, lamps and suggestions for street furniture as built prototypes, using large posters to place them virtually in the public space of African cities. They may seem somewhat futuristic, but their forms and functions actually stemmed from the artist’s careful study of the daily appropriation and use of space in ­Doaula. In a city with little formal regulation, people always have to test how far they can use a certain space until others contest the occupation. To begin with, they put out a chair or bench; then a light wooden structure, and eventually that structure becomes solid. Jules Wokam took his models for Utopies ­Urbaines from intermediary forms constructed in this process, as well as from the vernacular designs of street stalls. He not only emphasised their ­formal elements, but also highlighted cultural aspects expressed in the habits of daily life: My relation to Douala’s urban space is that I actually live in this space. Often, people looking at cities in Africa sociologically or anthropologic­ ally only see poverty and kludge; they blank out the actions of the individuals – whereas that’s just what seems so important to me. In fact, that’s my real focus – is there an aesthetic act inscribed in an object? Can we look at it simply for its quality and forget the people are poor? For example, take the case of someone carrying a ­pharmacy on his head; this is an attitude, let’s forget this guy is poor. Another guy, who sells shoes, puts a shoe on his head. I think this is an a ­ ttitude, and it shouldn’t be reduced to him simply not having the money for a stall.6 Some of the stools and benches presented at Utopies Urbaines emanated from the objects of Le Nomadisme and were later manufactured in series. One of Wokam’s most notable stylistic elements was his way of assembling lamps and chairs from a mass of small wooden bars by threading string though drilled holes and tying them together. This approach to assembly functions without other tools and saves materials such as screws or glue, and can easily be reworked. The objects gain flexibility and permeability, the qualities that I see as the most important feature of Utopies Urbaines. PROXIMUM is a narrow booth with seating on a circular base with a tall ­corner arc serving as a back support. A semi-circular roof of solar cells provides the energy for a lamp directed downwards. The vertical wooden grill, fixed with metal rods, holds the seat and curves inwards under the roof. The function of this seat with a lamp might not seem evident for anyone outside ­Africa, but given the uncertain electricity supply and pitch-black nights from 6 pm in Central Africa, it is common in many African cities to see people sitting under the rare streetlights to read in the evening. Reading in public space can also offer an undisturbed individual space as an escape from confined living conditions.

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In May 2004 at the 6th Dakar Biennial, Wokam presented a second ‘kiosk-like’ structure called MOBILIUM, which was awarded the EU Prize for Design. The hexagonal wooden base with its six vertical wooden arcs forms the lines of a domed pavilion, large enough to seat three people. Circular metal rods ­attached horizontally and with one segment left open define a space that is completely transparent. The structure is topped by an umbrella-shaped roof of sheet metal, with a lamp to provide illumination as in PROXIMUM. A series of posters contextualised PROXIMUM and other virtual stall designs such like MOBILIUM (Fig. 1): The Mobilium booth is a capsule to meet, relax, rest and meditate in the urban environment, an object in transit, private or public. It questions the problem of seclusion and commitment. It tries to give an unlikely whiff of evidence. The project questions the capacity of an object to liberate vernacular architectural forms without abandoning its mystic-fantastic aspects. It borrows its form from Mosgum houses in northern Cameroon. The forms are the subject of the manipulation of real images (originating from nearby or far away, from a different or dreamt reality) through crossing, superimposing, fusing, morphing. Utopies Urbaines proposes new relations between public and private, personal and common in urban space. For public space to become truly permeable, there must be respect between the individuals and groups populating it. The occupants of Wokam’s objects are both exposed by the design’s transparency and secluded because they are establishing a new realm which does not serve economic or traditional social functions.

1

In a workshop on artists’ concepts and practice at the Goethe Institute Yaoundé in February 2000.

2

Based on the idea of a genuine pan-African culture as propagated by L.S. Senghor’s “­Negritude”.

3 Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/toomaiishop/photos /a.147329352023359.34240.147321248690836/1237115076378109/?type=3&theater 4

Interview with the author, April 2009, Douala

5 http://www.wokamhandmadefurnitures.com 6

Interview with the author, December 2007, Douala

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Tracing the Quiet Cultural Activism: Laduma Ngxokolo and Black Coffee Erica de Greef

Posted on 29 April 2017. It is a striking image (Fig. 1) of an immaculately styled, ‘traditionally’ dressed man on horseback in the foreground of the photograph. The backdrop of trees and dry ground rises dramatically to the right. Three men are striding up the steep hill; two are dressed in casual ‘Western’ style jeans and jackets, and the third is wearing black trousers and a pale pink and grey Basuto1 blanket trimmed in black with a signature white stripe. This is Lesotho, the tiny mountainous kingdom, landlocked by South Africa. The profile post is Laduma Ngxokolo’s, twenty-eight-year-old South African fashion designer renowned for re-interpreting his cultural heritage.2 It is the caption though that pushes the image from mere self-promotion into a more complex terrain, blurring an authentic narrative and a marketing campaign, a collaborative ‘clash’ of defiant localism and global corporatism. The text reads: Riding from Lesotho to Jozi for my Design Business Talks with Chivas Regal that I will host on 6th of May to help emerging designers — to apply click here: http://www.maxhosa.co.za/blog/posts/ladumadesign-­­business-talks-with-chivas-regal The smooth mixture of ‘authenticity’, sincerity, marketing and quiet, yet ­productive, cultural activism commands my attention. I first take a closer look at the sartorial language in the image to explore some underpinning ‘contradictions’.3 What Laduma is wearing is in fact almost entirely, not ‘trad­ itional’. Instead, he is wearing MaXhosa by Laduma. “The idea was to give my interpretation of tradition, of how we would be dressing if we had never been colonised. We have a responsibility,” says Laduma, “to actually reinterpret tradition in our own voices, to rewrite the histories that were never written from our point of view.”4 In this photograph Laduma is wearing a signature, brightly coloured, knitted shawl – voted the most beautiful object in South Africa (MBOISA) in 20165 – combined with a classic, geometrically patterned MaXhosa sweater, dark brown MaXhosa track-pants, graphic patterned ­MaXhosa socks, and red Maria McCloy brogues with African print inserts. The only ‘traditional’ item he is wearing is a woven straw Basuto hat.6 The Chivas brand – a stamp of global circulation – and a cross-country, horse­back journey meet in this creative convergence of the online, social media promotion of Laduma’s brand. Where the traces of his creative origins remain particular and identifiable, South African fashion house Black Coffee’s 170

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© Laduma Ngxokolo

creative roots are multiple, abstracted and often, indistinguishably ‘African’. For almost the last twenty years Black Coffee have been crafting iconic fashion that deconstructs the conceptual, creative traces, fashioning instead, abstract assemblages of what it means to be South African. Black Coffee duo, then Jacques van der Watt and creative partner Danica Lepen, premiered a collection at Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week 2010, Counterpoint as part of the Arise Africa Collectives7. The collection, a mix of origami folds, layered pleats and voluminous forms was inspired by the African masks sold at markets and curio shops across Johannesburg8. Softly spiked and organic – at the same time sculptural, geometrical, even architectural – Black Coffee presented their collection of protective, almost talismanic cocoon-shaped coats in soft muted, dusty and powdery tones that “re-engineered the aesthetic conventions and functions of the coat”9. Showing no clear trace of ‘African heritage’ or reference to the masks, South African pop-culture critic Adam Levin recalls how they were “not African enough” for the New York public – they received a chilly r­ eception: “The 16 flawless pieces proceeded cohesively. There was no major applause, but rather a sense of unsettled surprise: the audience questioning, trying to cram this aesthetic into a preconceived stereotype. Alas, it did not fit10.” Describing them as beautifully hybrid, Levin called these coats post-African.11 Here, in line with post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s definition of hybridity as the ambivalent site where cultural meaning and representation have no fundamental unity or fixity12, Black Coffee’s coats aimed to unsettle the expectations of fixed or controlled cultural identities from, and of, the global South. Bhabha argues that cultural production is most productive where it is most ambivalent.13 In considering their debut in New York, Van der Watt and Lepen carefully chose the most ubiquitous of African signifiers: the ‘mask’, as a deliberate, ironic challenge. As a global stereotype of ‘African tradition’, the sign was fashioned into modernist, minimalist abstractions – its traces without definition – and in this collection, it was mostly misinterpreted and sometimes even missed altogether. According to Bhabha, a hybrid “is a trace of what is disavowed, that which is not repressed but repeated as something different”14. Writing almost sixty years earlier, cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the return of that which is repressed as being conspicuous in the realm of fashion.15 ­Benjamin calls these traces of the past found in the present the Tigersprung (the ‘tiger’s leap’) saying that “[f]ashion has the sense of the modern ­wherever it stirs in the thicket of what has been”.16 Fashion historian Caroline Evans expands on Benjamin’s Tigersprung in a seminal reading of the work of ­fashion designers in the global North, developing the idea of the ‘trace’ as the return of the repressed, which was invoked in contemporary fashion ­during the ­final and uncertain decade at the end of the twentieth century.17

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Design as Cultural Activism In their redefinitions of fashion from the global South, I contend that designers Laduma and Black Coffee draw on notions of the past and the disavowed via creative acts grounded in the need for social change. As designers, they present alternative socio-political and spatio-cultural imaginaries, akin to the work, actions and performances of twenty-first century cultural activists. Both Laduma and Black Coffee disrupt the Western dominance of the fashion system through their use of textiles, techniques, aesthetics, modes of wearing, and means of construction that are deemed ‘traditional’, or by ideas rooted in or relegated to a timeless past or ‘other’. The continued use of the word ‘tradition’ in discussions of dress in Africa has had a negative impact on the understanding of African fashion. According to art historian Victoria Rovine “whilst ‘fashion’, like modern or contemporary art, is always associ­ ated with the Western, industrial capitalist world … [African fashion] is still ­associated with notions of authenticity and adherence to tradition, acting as a concept diametrically opposed to the ephemerality of fashion”.18 As cultural activists, they – Laduma via a celebration of his cultural heritage, and Black Coffee through their ironic critique of stereotype and global hegemonies – craft materials and practices largely considered outmoded or irrelevant to a contemporary world of fashion as a means of engaging alternate modern­ ities. This is particularly significant when rethinking notions of taste, cultural capital and distinction in, and of the global South as fashion tendencies ­persistently favour predominantly Western aesthetics and discourse. Black Coffee and Laduma’s work, I further argue, differs from that of fashion designers who regularly or temporarily dip into and ‘borrow’ from other ­cultures19 as creative excursions. Laduma’s reworkings of cultural fragments (Fig. 2) and Black Coffee’s remixing of cultural outcasts, fashioned into contemporary identity narratives, articulate deeper socio-political concerns in post-apartheid South Africa. The need for reflection and redress is imperative to this post-1994 society trying to come to terms with the violence of its past imprinted onto the bodies of its citizens. Here, fashion offerings such as those by Laduma and Black Coffee, propose new ways of being that move beyond segregated and regulated gender, class and cultural homogeneities perpetuated by a Western-centric fashion discourse. I suggest that they are ‘decol­ onising’ fashion, following contemporary, decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo, who emphasises the imperative for changing the terms of the conversation, not only its content, to question the control of knowledge, and of knowing.20 In this sense, although they work within the confines and constructs of the modern fashion system, it is the political nuances of their efforts that push their reworkings of these fragments of instability and transience from other times and other places into the new. South African designers are not alone in working towards healing com­plex issues of national histories and identities through design. For a new 173

­ eneration of Ukrainian designers, writes Anastasia Fedorova, fashion is a g powerful interdisciplinary storytelling mode, and it has become the most earnest and relevant way to speak about the past.21 Similarly, twenty-nineyear-old Los Angeles-based designer Bethany Yellowtail is using fashion to encourage ­indigenous Native American people to be proud of their identity, and to stimulate and create mobility for ‘tribal’ artists within the reservation communities of the Great Plains.22 Using time-honoured and handmade methods passed down through succeeding generations, Yellowtail’s re-crafting of heirloom traditions forms the core strategy of her brand.23 Although it showcases the ‘story of his brand’, Laduma’s fashion film ­(produced in 2014) performs multiple functions – it is part preservation and imagin­ation, part mythology and autobiography, part story and history. My ­Heritage, My Inheritance explores the processes of a Xhosa initiation ritual, ending in the amakrwala24 dressed formally in MaXhosa by Laduma. Stick fighting, dancers, a reed hut and voice-over by Laduma feature in the film, narrated in isiXhosa with English subtitles. Laduma offers an ‘African’ identity for the amakrwala, choosing to break the brand loyalties to Pringle, Lyle and Scott and others, by re-crafting the ‘disavowed traditional’ into contemporary high quality knitwear. Laduma’s drive for social change – his cultural activism – underpins his work, he explains, as “[African designers] we have the ability to be the voice of change, which is what makes me excited as a designer”25. Speaking of epistemological and social change further afield, public intellectual Achille Mbembe talks of the development of future knowledges, and fashion forecaster Li Edelkoort proclaims that Western “fashion has lost touch with what’s going on in the world”26. Although these two conversations emerge from very different places, they share a critique of Western ­modernity and acknowledge other possibilities of being beyond Euro-Western domin­ ance. In his lecture, Mbembe describes Africa as the avant-garde, a place where the current junction of the technological and the human is at the source of a very different kind of being in the world.27 Old and new creative practices merge; ‘cut-up’ and collage through the digital realm remixes time, notes Mbembe, and perhaps surprisingly, there is a significant return to deep histories and indigenous epistemologies to find solutions for the new.28 In a radical move for Edelkoort, she presented a trend forecast in 2015 that read as a manifesto outlining why, in her words “Western fashion is dead!” and with it she sees a return to ‘real clothing’, work-wear and ‘slow’ ­fashion.29 Since this sartorial realm of the quotidien has accrued deeper meanings, longer histories and more interesting stories, claims Edelkoort, in the age of climate change, it has also proven to be ethically and environmentally more sustainable30. Concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ or non-Western clothing have shifted within these changing global contexts31. Edelkoort, amongst others, proposes that the focus of luxury and the future of sartorial standing will be led by handcrafted, indigenous and heritage crafts32, a position not 174

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© Laduma Ngxokolo

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© Black Coffee, FIVE Winter 2017, Photo: Ivan Laude

necessarily shared by critics of the Western fashion system always poised to re-tell its ‘newness’33.

Design, Longing and Afrofuturism Designer Van der Watt describes the latest collection (Black Coffee Five, ­Winter 2017, Fig. 3, 4) as an “amalgamation of handcrafted African and Japan­ ese influences deconstructed and combined with his signature geometric patterns, and that, by bending the traditional and injecting inspiration from #afrofuturism, #Basquiat’s personal style, and #Xhosa patterns he is able to explore new gender-blurring identities for increasingly precarious, urban ­environments”34. In times filled with political and social uncertainty there is a noted rise in new ‘style tribes’ or, following sociologist Michel Maffesoli, communities are forming neo-tribes or urban tribes as a reaction to the disruption and fragmentation of present-day postmodern societies.35 The Black Coffee collections present a kind of ‘afrofuturist’ yearning or longing, as a kind of fantastical coexistence between the past and the future, between the near and the far, between the known and the unknown.36 The collection references are never singular – they are multi-cultural and multi-­temporal, incorporating multiple narratives and, often, multiple origins. L ­ iterary and cultural critic Svetlana Boym notes that nostalgia, as a yearning for different times, “is a symptom of our age not necessarily opposed to modernity, but coeval with it”37. Boym identifies two types of nostalgia: the ­reflective and the restorative38. Black Coffee’s collectons bring to mind Boym’s reflective nostalgia that “dwells on diverse and ambivalent forms of longing”, nostalgia that does not shy away from modernity, and nostalgia that loves details or little notes, rather than sweeping symbols.39 MaXhosa by Laduma is however very different. His journeys of re-traditionalisation40 are restorative. These creative processes reflect Boym’s restorative nostalgia that “does not think of itself as nostalgia but as symbols of truth and tradition” aimed at protecting authenti­ city often through rhetoric; which is not about the forgotten past, but rather about ongoing values of family, ­nature, homeland and truth.41 It is this distinction of nostalgic difference that also separates Black Coffee’s work from other designers who draw on cultural and historical references, for example the work of Stoned Cherrie, Lalesso or Sun Goddess. The rhet­ oric of reflective nostalgia is “about taking time out of time and grasping the fleeting present”42, maintains Boym. During the xenophobic uprising in South Africa in 2008, Black Coffee presented their collection using Mozambican textiles, placing at centre stage what was politically scorned and socio-­ culturally rejected.43 Moving beyond a purely exotic or reflective gaze, I suggest that these offerings by Black Coffee seek ways to imagine or craft new ‘afrofuturist’ identities not necessarily invoking sci-fi futurism, but rather ­reclaiming lost identities or lost perspectives that have been subverted, 178

overlooked or denied.44 In terms of Benjamin’s formulation “it is the tiger’s leap into the past and the lost, as the topical that maps the modern”45. What resonates from Black Coffee’s work is this trace, this search for something mystical; a deep channelling of energies, of cultural memories, of nostalgia that is disruptive, demanding, and actively remembered. For the Imprint collection summer 2013, inspired by the patterns in Congolese Kuba cloths and contemporary central African ceremonial garments, Van der Watt explains, “we developed reverse appliqué techniques that included detailed needlework and individual leather elements, and re-created these as hand-rendered designs onto delicate mesh dresses”.46 As with Counterpoint, their patterned constructions and fluid, geometric craftsmanship afford the poetic possibilities of contemporary abstraction, ‘updating’ the traditional patterns by employing the immense potential of the digital. Via blurring, multiplication and abstraction, each Black Coffee collection aims to collapse the boundaries of cultural distinction and difference, inviting new spaces for cultural fusion. Bhabha names this space the third space, “a space which gives rise to something different, something new and ­unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation”, where new cultural identities are formed, reformed, and constantly in a state of becoming.47 In this sense, the cultural activism of both Black Coffee and Laduma, activates this third space of new meaning that Bhabha notes as being “productive; not merely reflective, a space that engenders new possibility; … an interruptive, interrogative and enunciative space of new forms of cultural meaning and production” (1994:103). This creative approach has its precedence. Anthropologist Jean Comaroff interrogates the interstices between the colliding cultures of the colonised and the colonisers in Southern Africa almost one-hundred-and-fifty years ago, proposing that nowhere “was the production of new identities, new bodily desires, new forms of faith, and new signs in society more visible, than in the realm of self-presentation, in modes of dress”48. Highlighting the ­ambiguous nature of the dress objects that passed between the two cultures, Comaroff shows that the “Tswana tailored a brilliant patchwork … [through] the selective appropriation of Western attire that harnessed the power of [the colonisers], yet evaded white authority and discipline”49. Comaroff identifies the threat that this selective bricolage posed to the ­ colon­isers, and the traces of various acts of resistance, innovation, mobility and self-expression in sartorial practice – which she terms ‘self-fashioning’ – that destabilised the colonial order of things.50 In 1860 the Scottish Christian ­ ­ missionary John Mackenzie records that Chief Sechele had “a ­singular suit tailored from a tiger skin in a European fashion” through which, Comaroff suggests, “the chief seems to have been making an effort to ­mediate two exclusive systems of authority at war in his world, striving, ­perhaps, to fashion a power greater than the sum of its parts”51.

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Equally brimming with animal motifs, the Black Coffee Five collection taps into yet another stereotype of South African heritage52 – ‘big five game’ – named by big-game hunters as the five most difficult animals in Africa to hunt on foot.53 The abstracted and synchretic animal prints and patterns rescript the iconic. In this collection, the stereotype is deconstructed and re-mediated, opening up aspects of the connotations to Africa, to re-write what it could mean. Van der Watt harnesses the power of the ambivalence of the stereotype to shift preconceptions and interrupt their seeming rigidity. Bhabha alludes to this power as ambivalent modes of knowledge and authority.54 I would suggest too that Van der Watt, as a result of the twenty-first century digital impact, is tapping into our changing relationships to things around us, and “to our increasing entanglement with objects, technologies or other living or animate things or beings”55. The Five collection offers an urban, global African camouflage through its non-conformist shapes, g ­ ender neutral forms and sheer mesh pieces, blurring the body boundaries usually structured by fashion.56

Fashion as Entanglement The blurring of corporeal and cultural boundaries by Black Coffee, and ­Laduma’s blurring of history, time and place reiterate cultural theorist Sarah Nuttal’s notion of the entanglement of spaces, practices, histories and ideas as an extended metaphor of hybridity.57 Moreover, Nuttal identifies a particular materialisation of entanglement as “the emergence of explicit forms of selfhood within the public domain […] [where] the local and the global ­intersect in South Africa” as Johannesburg urban youth cultures give voice to imaginative worlds via a practice of ‘self-styling’ forming a contemporary hybrid culture: one that is constituted through the ‘remixing’ of the township and the city.58 Through stylised reinterpretations, I propose that these designers are fashioning their own hybrid cultures, as conversations between here and there, between past and present, between tradition and contemporaneity, and ­between materials and memories. Laduma continues to translate the geo­ metrics of his heritage with their origins clearly rooted in his interest in traditions. His translations offer alternate, new, hybrid modernities. Laduma opens up spaces for fresh forms of cultural meaning, blurs the limitations of existing boundaries, and questions the set taxonomies of culture and ­identity. Via their distinctive and reflective hybrid collections, Black Coffee instead, invite negotiation, interruption and disruption, as Van der Watt’s geometrics refuse to ‘behave’, their roots obscured, abstracted and multiplied. These interrogative works at the cutting edge of design lead a re-migration of ­t­wenty-first century fashion towards the global South, as an innovative ­return or flow of forms.

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1 This blanket is most likely a Poone/Mealie blanket symbolising crops and wealth. For a detailed history of Basuto blankets, see http://www.aranda.co.za/catalogue/basotho-heritage-blankets/ (accessed on 16 June 2017) 2 In a similar mode of representation, Laduma is filmed and photographed on 11 October 2015 wearing MaXhosa by Laduma astride a white horse in Cape Town’s Long Street for 21 Icons: Season III – a celebration of South African youth leaders, influencers and role models. A striking pastoral counterpoint to the surrounding urban nightlife, the footage and final image invoke two images, firstly of monuments and men, and secondly of herders and horsemen, such as in Thom Pierce’s photographic series The Horsemen of Semonkeng (2016), see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLJCaBgvsSs (accessed on 12 April 2017) 3 In a post two days later Laduma poses again dressed in MaXhosa by Laduma, with a single shepherd dressed in a rural style plain dark grey blanket and head covering, with the text: “Fellow South Africans, let’s travel to our neighbouring countries more, learn from them, teach them and do business with them – in Maseru, Lesotho”. 4 Interview with City Press, 23/09/14. retrieved on 23 May 2017 from http://www.news24.com/ Archives/City-Press/Heritage-fashion-Laduma-scores-big-20150429 5 In a competition hosted by Design Indaba, South Africans were invited to vote for the most beautiful design object, see http://www.vm-central.com/maxhosa-shawl-voted-sas-mostbeautiful-object/(accessed on 23 May 2017) 6 National symbol of the Basotho people, and widely used in everyday dress, the straw hat is itself a hybrid object, arriving with missionaries and early colonial settlers in the 1850s, and through adoption and adaptation became associated with King Moshoeshoe I. See Daphne Strutt 1975, Fashion in South Africa 1652–1900. An Illustrated History of Styles and Materials for Men, Women and Children, with Notes on Footwear, Hairdressing, Accessories and Jewellery, Rotterdam. 7 Black Coffee was invited by Arise Africa International to showcase in New York Fashion Week together with XULY.Bët, Tiffany Amber and Stoned Cherrie. 8 The designers use the complex creative conditions that situate masks as stereotypes, and masks as signs of authenticity, and in this collection offer ways in which to critique and re-appropriate the mask as contemporary cultural expression. 9 See http://www.blackcoffee.co.za/runway-collections/counterpoint-fall-2011/ (accessed on 10 June 2017) 10 Adam Levin 2010, Africa Rising: Let’s Take Manhattan, Sunday Times Lifestyle Supplement, February 28, p. 9 11 ibid. Levin collapses notions of the post-modern, post-apartheid, post-racial and post-colonial in this term, post-African, as a reading of the shifting, fluid and re-imagined possibilities of African futures. 12 Homi Bhabha 1994, Location of Culture, New York, p. 66 13 Bhabha 1994, p. 86 14 Bhabha 1994, p. 111 15 To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger (Thesis VI). Walter Benjamin 1973 [1940], translated by Harry Zohn, Theses on the Philosophy of History, London 16 See also Ulrich Lehmann 2000, Tigersprung. Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge 17 Caroline Evans 2003, Fashion at the Edge. Death, Spectacle, Modernity, New Haven and New York, pp. 3–4 18 Victoria Rovine 2014, African Fashion, Global Style. Histories, Innovations and Ideas You Can Wear, Bloomington, p. 14 19 See Dario Calmese 2017, Fashion Does Not Need Cultural Appropriation, retrieved on 6 June 2017 from https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/opinion/op-ed-fashion-does-not-need-­ cultural-appropriation 20 Walter Mignolo 2009, Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom, Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 26 (7–8), pp. 1–23 21 http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/8070/post-soviet-aesthetic-fashion-trend-ltfrbelinskiy-yefimtchuk-bevza (accessed 10 May 2017) 22 http://www.latimes.com/fashion/la-ig-bethany-yellowtail-los-angeles-designer-20170609htmlstory.html (accessed 10 June 2017) 23 ibid. 24 Having completed the initiation ritual, the Xhosa youths return to society as amakrwala, is enacted through a new wardrobe suited to manhood, modernity and maturity.

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25 Bas van Lier 2014, What Design Can Do? retrieved on 12 June 2017 from ­ http://www.whatdesigncando.com/2014/05/10/design-needs-repositioning/ 26 In conversation with Professor of Fashion Studies Hazel Clark, 11 May 2017 to coincide with the exhibition titled fashion after Fashion Museum of Art and Design, New York 27 Achille Mbembe delivered the 2016 Abiola Lecture, titled Future Knowledges, at the 59th African Studies Association Annual Meeting, ‘Imagining Africa at the Center: Bridging Scholarship, Policy, and Representation in African Studies’, Washington, DC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6p8pUU_VH0 (accessed on 10 June 2017) 28 ibid. 29 http://www.edelkoort.com/2015/09/anti_fashion-manifesto/ (accessed 19 May 2017) 30 ibid. 31 See Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik 2016, Modern Fashion Traditions. New York 32 Sass Brown (2015) Can global craft and artisanship be the future of luxury fashion? retrieved on 12 June 2017 from https://www.academia.edu/13567082/Can_Global_Craft_and_Artisanship_be_the_ Future_of_Luxury_Fashion 33 The conference Re-Visioning Fashion Theories: Postcolonial and Critical Transcultural Perspectives held in Vienna, 2015 (coordinated by Elke Gaugele, Birgit Haehnel and Monica Titton) contributes to a body of critical thinking in relation to the dominance of Euro-American fashion discourse in the politics of appearance and global and local relationships. 34 Black Coffee, 01/04/17 https://www.facebook.com/BlackCoffeeZA/?ref=br_rs (accessed on 2 June 2017) 35 Michel Maffesoli 1996, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London 36 Shayna Watson 2016, How Afrofuturism progressed from Sci-fi Literature to Fashion, retrieved on 29 July 2017 from http://www.theroot.com/how-afrofuturism-progressed-from-sci-fi-literatureto-f-1790856546 37 Svetlana Boym 2009, Nostalgia and its Discontents, Hedgehog Review Summer 7, Vol 9 (2), p. 9 38 Boym 2009, p. 13 39 ibid. 40 I am using this term not as a form of anti-modernisation, but rather that tradition, being far from fixed, is consistently re-debated. This act of re-inscribing seemingly fixed notions of tradition, through rejuvenation, adaptation and invention, reaches back to the past, identifies important practices from that past, and brings them into the present where they reshape contemporary life. See Diana Butler Bass 2004, The Practicing Congregation. Imagining a New Old Church, New York. 41 Boym 2009, p. 14 42 ibid. 43 Violence erupted in 2008 in which sixty-two foreigners were killed, including Mozambican Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, burnt in the streets of Alexandra, Johannesburg. https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2015/xenophobiasouthafrica/ (accessed on 20 May 2017) 44 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism 45 Walter Benjamin 2003, Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940.Translated Edmund Jephcott et. al. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, Mass., p. 395 46 Email correspondence, Van der Watt, 20 February 2017 47 Bhabha 1994, p. 58 48 Jean Comaroff 1997, ‘Fashioning the Colonial Subject. The Empire’s Old Clothes’ in editors Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragoné, Patricia Zavella, Situated Lives. Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, New York, p. 401 49 ibid. 50 Comaroff 1997, pp. 409–411 51 Mackensie 1883, p. 35, cited in Comaroff 1997, p. 410 52 For a critical essay on the uses of heritage in post-apartheid South Africa, see Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins 2008, New South African Keywords. Johannesburg, pp. 116–128. 53 In Africa, the big five game animals are the African lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, African leopard, and rhinoceros. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_five_game (accessed on 22 May 2017) 54 Bhabha 1994, p. 66 55 Mbembe 2016, Future Knowledges lecture

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56 In this collection, Black Coffee not only offer new gender-neutral silhouettes, but also interrupt the classic Western norm of body visibility, where bodies of men are generally concealed and protective, and the bodies of women exposed or figure-hugging. 57 Sarah Nuttal 2009, Entanglement: literary and cultural reflections on post apartheid, Johannesburg 58 Nuttal 2009, pp. 110–113

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Cheick Diallo: Design between Politics and Poetics Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand

Cheick Diallo’s Fauteuil Mo (Fig. 1), whose characteristic net-like surface also inspired our book cover, is made of steel rods wound with bright red nylon thread. The rods are reinforced steel, found everywhere on the construction sites in Bamako, Mali, while the chair’s sculptural aesthetic quotes the ­wooden fish traps used along the banks of the River Niger. The Mo Chair thus not only stands for a very special form of material morphosis, but also distils the essence of Cheick Diallo’s most important design principle. The Mo Chair is entirely made by hand from readily available materials. Although based on an everyday object, it is interpreted in a new way and inspired by a know­ ledge of local materials and techniques. The result is a contemporary aesthetic which evokes both local as well as trans-local associations in design, for example, the lounge furniture of the 1960s and 70s or Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chair. “I refuse to make products,” Cheick Diallo said in an interview, “which reference ‘African symbols’ in some anecdotal or nostalgic manner.”1 His furniture and other designs are the result of circulatory models – an aesthetic inspired locally but fed globally and adaptable. The Mo Chair’s structure, a network inscribed with links between people, technologies, and cultures as well as continents, can be read as standing exemplarily for Cheick Diallo and his oeuvre. Cheick Diallo was born in 1960 in Bamako into a creative milieu. In the independence period, his father Seydou Diallo was the first “Mali” architect (the family originally came from Senegal), and his buildings can be found throughout Bamako. Not only did he design business premises and banks – sometimes with Brutalist influences – but also embassies, residential apartment houses and villas such as those built in 1968 in Niarela as well as town houses in a modernised version of the neo-Sudanese style. His designs, with a clear rhythm of their own ­created by his juxtaposition of walls and supports, contrast sharply with structures, now ­ lements. burned down, in the older colonial “marché rose” style with its fancy e Just like his father, Cheick Diallo also became an architect, ­studying in Rouen, France, before he trained as an industrial designer from 1992 to 1994 at the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (­ ENSCI) in Paris. In 1996, he joined others working in design to establish the Association of ­African Designers (ADA), remaining chair of the association until 2004. For the ­ Dak’art in Senegal in 1998, the ADA co-organised the ­second Design Salon including works by Kossi Assou, Sylvia Andrianaivo, Oumou Sy, Aïssa Dione and Cheick Diallo. In 1997, one year earlier, he ­founded Diallo ­Design with the goal of working “between northern and southern regions” and ­articulating “both traditional elements and contemporary ideas of d ­ esign”.2 Since then, 184

© Photo: Paul Schimweg, Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg

Fig. 1 Mo Chair

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Courtesy of Southern Guild, © Photo: Adriaan Louw

Fig. 2 Interior view villa in Niarela (Bamako)

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his designs have been shown in (group) shows around the world, with many of his works acquired by leading collections.3 Diallo himself has initiated and also led numerous design workshops held in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ruanda, Senegal and Tunisia, as well as Italy, Germany and Canada. Although to date Cheick Diallo has worked between France and Mali for many years, his studio is now in his old family home in Bamako – one of the impressive town mansions his father built in the early 1970s. The house is located in a side street in Niarela in the city centre, also home to ­other residences designed by his father. Set in a small, largely mature ­garden, the house’s architecture, with its curved arches and ­passageways, and pastel-coloured tones, radiates the assured yet modest a ­ tmosphere of town mansions of the independence era. Visitors are welcomed by an entrance with an almost sculptural quality. Black, filigree metal pillars support a massive, grid-patterned concrete roof, while the adjacent wall set with open oval spaces is decorated by a concrete Ciwara mask4 weighing several tons, left over from the renovation of the Koulouba Palace. In the interior, the living space, with its rhythmic zigzag wooden panels on the ceiling and floor-length semi-circular windows (Fig. 2), evidences a feeling for forms and movement; yet, even more so, with the layout offering the chance to host the extended family as well as numerous guests, it shows a knowledge of the requirements for social life and public display. On the terrace, which also serves as an open-air office, many chairs and stools from Cheick Diallo’s various collections are set around a low dining table. The circular indents in the table’s metal surface, shaped by hand, evoke the cooking utensils used to prepare beignets – a first indication of the intimate links between his designs and local traditions. The chairs and low stools vary in shape and colour and, as in his Mo Chair, the metal structures are wound in monochrome or multi-­ coloured synthetic threads or intertwined into different patterns. Cheick ­Diallo’s studio is on the narrow side of the yard, and his metal furniture is produced here in the open. The patterns for chairs and arm-rests are hanging on the walls, a reminder of a design and production process where, rather than working with detailed sketches or technical drawings, full-size models and chalk sketches convey the shape of the design in the original size (Fig. 3–4). The workers then produce the pieces from these models and in direct dialogue with Cheick Diallo. The pieces include, for example, the ­expansive Dibi or Sansa chairs, the slim little Pisa Woo table with its dyed leather ­covering or the Folani stool, whose name evokes the nomadic Fula people and cites the shape of the butterfly stool by Japanese designer Sori Yanagi. Just as was once the case in the 1960s, the present (temporary) ­(re-)­migration of designers is playing a part in updating the artistic and architectural ­practices in diverse regions across the African continent. Cheick Diallo belongs to those who have returned permanently, though with the difference that he has an on-going career of over twenty years as a designer working between Africa and Europe. The idea of a cultural intermediary or broker 187

is ­closely entwined with travel movements and migrations as well as the ­concept of the diaspora, which can be described as a simultaneous hereand-there and thought of more as an abundance than a lack.5 In this context, Achille Mbembe regards mobility between diverse locations, as well as digital flexibility and visibility, as crucial.6 In addition, he highlights the special ability of being able to move and mediate between locations and cultures, which also includes multilingualism. Here, then, one finds “translation as a cultural technique of dealing with cultural difference”.7 What is important, and indeed only too understandable for Cheick Diallo as an individual, is the “complex multi-polarity of the translation constellation”8, since this is not just about a mediation role between “Africa” and “Europe”, but also about translation between various cultural spheres, within social classes, already different in themselves, and, perhaps most crucially, within diverse knowledge systems: “For the vast majority of people in Mali, the idea of a trained designer is new – there is no corresponding term in any of the ­languages spoken in Mali. The best way to render it is to paraphrase it literally. Some years ago, I worked with a few other designers to organise an exhibition on design in Bamako’s National Museum.9 For our exhibition, we found the phrase so masiri from the Bambara, meaning design in the sense of household things, although masiri actually denotes all those accessories, those little things, you need to be ‘beautiful’. In this sense, masiri describes a functional aesthetic (esthétique utile).10 In Mali, Cheick explained, you are driven to make something from absolute necessity. “And then it’s not as if you follow some set form imposed on you. Instead, the design happens, as it were, as an ­intuitive process fuelled by practical need.”11 On Cheick Diallo’s terrace, he has an interesting example of how creative intelligence and functional aesthetics are linked. There, he has a device using the marbled plastic pitchers found everywhere across West Africa. Mounted on a simple frame, the pitcher can be titled with a simple foot mechanism to pour water into a basin. Invented during the Ebola outbreak, this ingenious device allows you to wash without contact to the pitcher or holder, and so without the risk of infection. One of Cheick Diallo’s design strategies consists of breaking open the r­igid boundaries between the craft trades, characterised to date by strict hierarchies, and initiating reciprocal exchange processes. The traditional production conditions could be described as a caste system with s­ eparated artisanal crafts (métiers), frequently linked to specialised groups formed through endogamous practices and which the craft workers were born into. Consequently, it was often Bambara men who produced wrought iron work, while their wives made ceramic vessels; silversmiths were usually from the Tuareg people, as were (and still are) the leather workers; the Fulani people weave wedding blankets, though this work is reserved for the men, while the Bambara people are associated with the bogolanfini, a firm textile in a range of brown tones produced by a mineral mud-dye. “Common to all these craftspeople is that they are all considered to deal with processes that involve the danger-ridden handling of materials (such as iron, but also turning 188

© Photos: Kerstin Pinther

Fig. 3–4 Open-air studio

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© Photo: Adriaan Louw

Fig. 5 Mintoo Cabinet

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intimate knowledge into spoken words) and that therefore require special, initiate knowledge.”12 Since the late 1990s, through his design projects, Cheick Diallo has been ­trying to bring the craft trades into a dialogue and process of mutual exchange. His designs range from cutlery, produced by silversmiths and ­ivory carvers, lamps in the same material combination, sometimes citing the filigree forms of insects, stools and tables involving metalworkers, tanners and women (fabric) dyers. The workshops or places of work of these trades are distributed in their own (popular) districts across Bamako, Mali’s capital city with nearly 1.7 million inhabitants, whereby some artisanal trades – as in the case of the women dyers – are organised in a neighbourhood context. Others, who make the so-called caretaker chairs and loungers from metal and nylon cord using a plaiting technique known as tressage, have settled in an area where they form a kind of production network. Their location and association are a result of the sequence of manufacturing steps. To begin with, the steel rods are bent into shape, then welded together and, in the final step, the cord is wound around the metal or the seats and backs are woven. The shops and workshops of the silversmiths and fine leather craft workers are located behind the large mosque. The products are made outdoors. ­Silver bangles are placed in little charcoal fires before being further processed; leather is cut and sewn, and belts punched with holes. Cheick Diallo points to the jewellery made from filigree silver wire, a technique he transferred to a wooden vase, covering it with a fine silver web. Here, you can also find the resist dyed leather skins which inspired him to transfer the same textile d ­ ying techniques to the leather itself, and which have become a characteristic feature of his leather-covered furniture (Fig. 5). The quarter of the metal workers and scrap metal processing spreads out across the slopes of Point G hill. Over 1000 people work in a large area ­covering over 200 hectares. The little workshops are clustered together, closely packed. Here, in workshops without power lines or any official infrastructure, over 80% of all of Mali’s household utensils and agricultural tools are made13. The many forges and fireplaces intensify the shimmering heat, while the metalwork, in its most diverse forms, creates a backdrop of sound resonating through the quarter, loud and rhythmic. Since the 1980s, all sorts of metal, from coke tins to Chinese metal bowls to car bodies have been cut up here and recycled. Characteristically, the products manufactured in this quarter have their own unique use of form, the result of experiments and wrestling with the material to find the ideal techniques for smoothing, folding and shaping it. In his view, Cheick Diallo also regards the preservation of these cultural techniques as his task and, here, he is equally concerned with sustainably improving his country’s economic situation. Rather than seeking to sell the designs created through cooperating with these artisans solely to Europe or America, Cheick Diallo wants to manufacture modern, affordable 191

and aesthetic objects and furniture for Africans, just as called for by Demos Nwoko or Selby Mvusi, with products aligned with local customs, ­preserving them and helping to update them.14 In his view, there is no site-­specific ­African vocabulary of objects of daily use: “Contemporary objects used on a ­daily basis come from outside Africa, and Africa suffers from its inability to ­produce its own new products. The goal of our agency, Diallo Design, is to propose new projects and new images through which a contemporary Africa will recognise itself.”15 In his approach of joining forces with artisans and local workers from dif­ ferent areas, Cheick Diallo’s design practices recall Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King Hammond’s “‘third way‘ to collective support and individual ­entrepreneurship, highlighting the strength of internal creative initiatives”.16 In this way, traditional skills become globally compatible and integrated. In an interview, Diallo emphasised the significance and enormous potential of handmade designs to preserve the older and more traditional craft skills and, at the same time, update them. The aim, he said, is to make them fit for the future.17 In this sense, hand crafted products also represent an ­economic alter­ native to mass production in other parts of the world. On the aesthetic level, his products evidence the tactile and idiosyncratic nature of manual work. Frequently, his experimental products are inspired by leftover m ­ aterials, as in the case of bags and holdalls woven from black plastic bags. These have an aesthetics that, ultimately, is far removed from the “­ conventional” or ­older products made from reused materials. By combining diverse ­materials and techniques, Cheick Diallo creates new aesthetics which, on the one hand, seem familiar, yet on the other are oddly strange. The surface of a circular wooden bowl is completely covered with pearls, metal vases in his M ­ etissacana series are given a coating of cotton – and in both cases, the m ­ aterial support ­ pproach is evident in the stools whose is no longer recognisable. The same a black surfaces are made of hardened cotton cord. In such lyrical defamiliarisation of the familiar, we are unable to judge the haptic ­experience or the weight – and it is with experiments with materials such as these that Cheick Diallo is constantly confronting and challenging his ­audience. For the Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow exhibition, Cheick Diallo has developed Partage 18, a circular object in several parts. The individual elements can be combined as seats or side tables in constellations as desired. Partage, designed in a moment of inspiration and produced together with the city’s artisans, offers itself for sitting together, for a joint meal, for sharing basic ­human activities. The work embodies a principle whose underlying idea can be adapted to the most diverse cultural contexts via, for example, the heights of seats and tables, or the application of local materials and construction methods. This object voices one of Cheick Diallo’s key principles of design, namely creating a design which builds bridges and connects. In this sense, his approach to design becomes a strategy of mediation, a communication strategy – between people, technologies, cultures and continents. 192

1

Interview with Cheick Diallo, 7.10.2016 in Bamako, Mali

2 Cheick Diallo 2010, Artist’s Statement, in: Lowery Stoke Sims, Leslie King-Hammond (eds.), The Global Africa Project, Munich et al., p. 216 3 For an overview until 2012 see the appendix in the first monograph on Diallo Design, published to accompany the exhibition entitled Made in Mali. Cheick Diallo, designer at the Mandet museum in France. The eponymous catalogue includes various insightful contributions by Roberta Chionne, Michel Bouisson and Simon Njami. 4 The stylised antelope mask originally came from the Segou San region, where it was associated with both agricultural and human fertility. Today, it has become an emblem of Mali. 5 Allan deSouza 2003, Name Calling, in: Laurie Ann Farrell, Looking Both Ways, Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, New York, pp. 18–21, here p. 20 6 Achille Mbembe 2007, Afropolitanism, in: Simon Njami et al. (eds.) Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Johannesburg, pp. 26–29 Doris Bachmann-Medick 2015, Transnational und translational: Zur Übersetzungsfunktion der 7 Area Studies, Berlin (= CAS Working Paper Series 1/2015), p. 6 8

Ibid.

9 The exhibition was organised in 2010 with Samuel Sidibé, then Director of the National Museum. For the accompanying booklet, see https://orientationtrip2011.files.wordpress. com/2010/09/catalogue-design-exhibition-musee-national-mali1.pdf; last accessed 22.12.2017. In addition to Cheick Diallo, the other designers included Balthazar Faye, Aboubakar Fofana, Aida Duplessis and Awa Meité. 10 Interview with Cheick Diallo, 7.10.2016 in Bamako, Mali 11

Ibid.

12 Dorothea Schulz 2012, Culture and Customs of Mali, Santa Barbara, p. 72. For more details, see various publications by Patrick McNaughton on Mande blacksmithing, Victoria Rovine 2008 on Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali, Bloomington, or Jean-Paul Colleyn 2008, Bamana. Visions of Africa, on sculpture and mask traditions. 13

Ibid.

14

For more details, see the Introduction

15 Keith Recker 2010, Utopian Process, Dystopian Premonitions: African Craft and Design Answer Questions We Have Yet to Ask, in: Lowery Stoke Sims, Leslie King-Hammond (eds.), The Global Africa Project, Munich et al., pp. 135–141, here p. 139 16 Lowery Stoke Sims, Leslie King-Hammond 2010, The Global Africa Project: Contemporary Design, Craft and Art, in: Lowery Stoke Sims, Leslie King-Hammond (eds.), The Global Africa Project, Munich et al., pp. 10–37, here p. 11 17

Interview with Cheick Diallo, 7.10.2016 in Bamako, Mali

18 Partage was created in the run-up to the exhibition during a workshop in October 2016 in Bamako with the curators and Corinna Sy, Sebastian Däschle and Michael Wolke, the design team of the Berlin model project Cucula. Its individual pieces are the result of design research in the métiers, the artisanal trades, which Cheick Diallo brings together in this object.

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Designers’ and Artists’ Biographies David Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect based in London. Amongst his recently completed buildings is the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington D.C. He is currently a visiting professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture. He has designed furniture and textiles for the design company Knoll since 2010. www.adjaye.com Àga Concept was founded by architect Moyo Ogunseinde und interior ­designer Olubunmi Adeyemi in 2015. Based in Lagos as a design and lifestyle agency, Àga Concept’s designs draw their inspiration from African culture and everyday life. agaconcept.com Kossi Aguessy was a Brazilian-Togolese designer (1977–2017) who lived and worked between London, Paris and the United States. In addition to ­artistic work, his diverse portfolio included industrial collaborations with brands such as Swarovski, Yves Saint-Laurent and Cartier. His work has been widely exhibited and was part of the Global Africa Project at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and Making Africa at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. www.kossiaguessy.biz Nora Al-Badri / Jan Nikolai Nelles are Berlin-based artists who have worked together since 2009. Their artistic practice includes visual art, d ­ ocumentary filmmaking and cultural activism. They participated in the 3rd Design ­Biennale, Istanbul; Off Biennale, Cairo; and presented public interventions at Biennale 4, Thessaloniki and Occupy Frankfurt. Kader Attia is an Algerian-French artist who lives in Berlin and Algiers. He exhibited his work at the 57th Venice Biennale; Documenta 13, Kassel; Tate Modern, London; and MoMA, New York. In 2016, he was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize. kaderattia.de Black Coffee is a fashion label founded by South African designer Jacques van der Watt. Considered one of the pioneers of fashion in post-apartheid South Africa, his collections have been shown at Fashion Week in South ­Africa, New York and Berlin, amongst other locations. Van der Watt has been awarded the South African Fashion Award twice and has also received the Mercedes Benz Art Award. www.blackcoffee.co.za

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Laurence Bonvin is a Swiss photographer and filmmaker who lives between Berlin and Geneva. Following a documentary approach, her work often ­focuses on urban transformation. Since 2001, she has been a photography pro­fessor at ECAL (University of Art and Design), Lausanne. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Paris, Sarajevo, Istanbul, ­Geneva and Berlin, and has won the Swiss Art Award. laurencebonvin.com Bulawayo Home Industries is a social organisation founded in ­Bulawayo, Zimbabwe in 1963. This self-help project empowers less privileged ­women and youths by providing craft production and skills training in basket ­making, thereby safeguarding the legacy of this knowledge. The results of their ­collaboration with French designer Matali Crasset were shown in the exhibition Basket Case II at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in 2015. Paolo Cascone is an architect who grew up between Italy, East Africa and the West Indies. He holds a PhD in environmental engineering and has d ­ eveloped interdisciplinary projects between Europe and Africa in the field of environmental parametric design and smart construction. In 2014, he participated in the Marrakech and Dakar Biennales with the African Fabbers Project. www.codesignlab.org CladLight/Michael Gathogo is an e-textiles start-up co-founded by Michael Gathogo Githinji with its roots in Nairobi’s maker scene. Financed by crowdfunding, CladLight develops smart wearable and interactive jackets for ­motorcycle riders to ensure visibility and reduce accidents. www.cladlight.com Sonya Clark is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. She has exhibited worldwide and has received numerous prizes, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2016. She is professor and chair of the Department of Craft and Material Studies at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia and is currently a member of the American Craft Council Board. sonyaclark.com Matali Crasset is a French industrial designer who lives and works in ­Paris. ­Before setting up her own design studio, Crasset worked with Denis ­Santachiara and Philippe Starck. Her innovative work ranges from exhibits, interiors and furniture to technological products and architecture. It has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the MoMA, New York and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. www.matalicrasset.com/ Cucula: Refugees Company for Crafts and Design is a pilot project that aims ­ ounded to empower refugees and to cultivate a refugee-welcoming society. F 195

in Berlin in 2014, it is both a workshop to provide craft and design skills as well as an educational programme. Cucula’s product range includes Italian ­designer Enzo Mari’s renowned DYI “Autoprogettazione” furniture. www.cucula.org Cheick Diallo is a Bamako-based architect and designer trained in France. He has been a pioneer of experimental design in Africa since the ­mid-90s and co-founded the Association of African Designers (ADA), which he has chaired since 2004. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Dakar Biennale, Design Biennale Liège, Gwangju Biennale and the Design Biennale in Saint-Étienne. Diallo’s designs are included in the collections of the ­Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Manchester Museum of Art. Dokter and Misses is a Johannesburg-based multi-disciplinary product design company established by industrial designer Adriaan Hugo and ­ graphic designer Katy Taplin in 2007. Their hand-painted limited-edition ­ ­furniture has been exhibited in Basel, Dubai, London, New York and Miami. www.dokterandmisses.com Front is an experimental Swedish design studio formed by Sofia L ­ agerkvist and Anna Lindgren. Their work has been exhibited internationally and is ­ represented in the collections of the MoMA, New York; Victoria and ­Albert Museum, London; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein and Centre ­Pompidou, Paris. Front was awarded the Design Miami/Basel Designer of the Future Award in 2007. www.frontdesign.se Fundi Bots is a Uganda-based organisation founded by Solomon King Benge in 2011 that uses robotics training in schools to inspire young Ugandans to be the designers, makers, and innovators of their future. Their latest innovation is an automated irrigation system for areas without power connection. fundibots.org Eric van Hove is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Marrakech, M ­ orocco. His work ranges from installation to performance, video, photography, sculpture, and writing. It was on display at the 5th and 6th Marrakech ­ ­Biennale and in a large solo-exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2016. www.transcri.be I.AM.ISIGO / Bubu Ogisi is a fashion label based between Nigeria, Ghana and France. Founded by Bubu Ogisi in 2009, it has been showcased at the Lagos Fashion and Design Week since 2011, London Fashion Week and South Africa Fashion Week Exhibition Durban, both in 2015, and was part of the exhibition Fashion Cities Africa at the Brighton Museum in 2016. www.iamisigoonline.com 196

Yinka Ilori is a London-based designer specialised in up-cycling vintage ­furniture inspired by traditional Nigerian parables and African fabrics. His work has been showcased at exhibitions around the globe, including at the Milton Keynes Arts Centre; Design Miami; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; The Whitespace Gallery, Lagos; and many more. yinkailori.com Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan filmmaker who forms a part of the new generation of African filmmakers and storytellers. Her films have received international acclaim and awards, such as Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture at the Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2009. Pumzi won the Independent Movie Awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. www.wanurikahiu.com Markus Kayser is a German designer trained in London who currently ­researches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on the combination of technological and biological processes. His work has been shown globally in institutions such as the Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Design Museum, London; and MoMA, New York. Kër Thiossane is a Villa for Art and Multimedia founded by Marion L ­ ouisgrand Sylla and François Sylla in 2002 to provide African artists with access to ­multimedia tools. As a space for exchange and collaborations, it regularly hosts artists and other socially engaged individuals and associations from around the globe. It is also venue for the Afropixel festival, initiated in 2008. www.ker-thiossane.org Lumkani is a social enterprise that promotes an early-warning fire d ­ etection device for informal settlements. Developed at the University of Cape Town, Lumkani was awarded the best start-up at the Global Entrepreneurship ­Summit in 2014 and won the overall prize in the Comfortable Home category for Better Living Challenge that same year. lumkani.com Michael MacGarry is a multi-award winning South African filmmaker and visual artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim Bilbao; VideoBrasil, São Paulo; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Bamako Biennale of Photography, and many others. www.alltheorynopractice.com Abu Bakarr Mansaray is an artist based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. His drawings reflecting upon the horror of the war years have been showcased w ­ idely, amongst others, as part of the exhibitions Africa Remix in 2004, 100% Africa at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2006, Taipei Biennale in 2014/2015 and the Venice Biennale in 2015. 197

Haldane Martin is a South African furniture designer based in Cape Town. His award-winning work has been featured in a range of exhibitions and ­collections from Design Indaba to Nando’s Design Collection to the Cape Town World Design Capital 2014. haldanemartin.co.za Ernst May was a German architect and city planner (1886–1970). He was a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund and in the 1920s was responsible for the pioneering social housing estate programme “Neues Frankfurt.” From 1930–1933 he directed the planning of new industrial cities in the ­former Soviet Union. From there, he emigrated to East Africa in 1934 where he soon started to work as an architect. In 1954, he returned to Germany to engage in the modern city planning of postwar Germany. Emo de Medeiros is an artist who lives and works in Cotonou, Benin and in Paris, France. His work involves a wide array of mediums, including sculpture, video, photography, performance, electronic music, drawing, ­ inter­active ­devices, performative installations, and others. It was e ­ xhibited at the ­ Venice Biennale in 2015, Marrakech Biennale in 2016, ­ Videobrasil ­Contemporary Art Festival, Sao Paolo in 2017, and many others. www.emodemedeiros.com Vincent Michéa is a French artist who lives and works between Paris and Dakar. In the 1990s, Michéa co-founded the graphic design agency 100% Dakar in Dakar, Senegal. His work has been shown in exhibitions worldwide, including the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels; Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt; and the Galerie Nationale de Senegal, Dakar; among others. vincentmichea.com Jean Katambayi Mukendi is an artist who lives and works in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. He has participated in several residencies worldwide. His work has been showcased at exhibitions such as the Dakar ­Biennale in 2014, Habana Biennale and the Lubumbashi Biennale, both in 2015, as well as at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The Nest Collective is a multidisciplinary arts collective founded in 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya. Their work ranges from film, music, fashion, and visual art to literature and was on display at Design Indaba in 2015 and Fashion Cities ­Africa, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton in 2016. Their film Stories of Our Lives has won numerous awards. www.thisisthenest.com Laduma Ngxokolo is a South African knitwear designer who established his brand MaXhosa by Laduma in 2011. His collections, inspired by Xhosa 198

­ ulture, have received numerous awards such as the Vogue Italia Scouting c for ­Africa Award in 2015, Fashion Designer of the Year South Africa: ABRYANZ Style and Fashion Awards in 2016, and the Pride of Africa: Africa Fashion Week Barcelona Awards in 2017. www.maxhosa.co.za Karl Ernst Osthaus was an important German patron of avant-garde art and architecture at the beginning of the 20th century (1874–1921) and the founder of the Folkwang Museum. He also played a major role at the Deutscher Werkbund and in the history of modern design in Germany. Osthaus founded the Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe in 1909 and the Photographien- und Diapositivzentrale as a visual archive for modern applied arts and architecture in 1910. Victor Papanek was an Austrian designer, teacher and author (1927–1998) who emigrated to the United States in 1939. He was a major protagonist of the social design movement in the 1970s and his publication Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) has become one of the most widely read design books to date. He travelled and published widely and worked in collaborative projects with UNESCO and the World Health ­Organization. Shem Paronelli was trained in psychology at the University of Lagos before starting as a designer for artisanal men’s and women’s shoes in Lagos in 2011. He challenges existing aesthetics with his minimalistic design and urban ­references. Simone Post is a Rotterdam-based designer who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2015. Her graduation project Post–Vlisco, which is based on textile and experimental research, won the New Material Award and the Dutch Design Award in 2016. In her current project she forms part of the Dutch collective Envisions that aims to find new ways of interaction and exchange in design. www.simonepost.nl Rethaka is a South African social start-up founded by Thato Kgatlhanye and Rea Ngwane in 2013. Their schoolbags bring together recycling and s­ olar energy to ensure access to education for children with limited ­resources at hand. Among other honours, the project received the Cartier Women’s ­Initiative Award in 2015, the Elle International Impact Award and the All Africa Business Leaders Awards, both in 2016. www.rethakafoundation.org Studio Sikoki is a multi-disciplinary design and research facility founded by industrial designer Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman who lives and works between Great Britain and Nigeria. She was creative director at the African Artist 199

Foundation Lagos, a senior curator for LagosPhoto Festival and editor of Art Base Africa. Her own artistic work has been widely exhibited and was part of the exhibition Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design. www.studiosikoki.com Palash Singh is an Indian designer and textile and weaving specialist trained at the National Institute of Design, India. He took part in the design inter­ vention programme with STEP Zimbabwe as part of his graduation project at NID. He worked as a design consultant for the International Development Association at the World Bank and is currently an innovation manager at the Center for Knowledge Societies in Ahmedabad, India. Siyazama Project is an arts-based intervention programme and a model for ­collaborations among artists, educators and health practitioners based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was founded in 1999 and has since been led by Kate Wells, professor at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) as part of Design Education for Sustainable Development. Today, the Siyazama Project functions as a bead craft collective. www.siyazamaproject.dut.ac.za STEP Trust is an environment and development NGO established in 2009 that mainly operates in Honde Valley in Eastern Highlands, Zimbabwe. It aims to foster rural development and community-based tourism in which local crafts play a key role. The collaboration with NID National Institute of Design, India was part of a design intervention programme focusing on bamboo ­basketry to revive and improve local products. www.stepzim.org.zw Studio Formafantasma is an internationally renowned Amsterdam-based design studio founded by the Italian design duo Andrea Trimarchi and ­ ­Simone Farresin in 2009. Their work is characterised by a research-based practice and experimental material investigations and has been commissioned by partners such as Fendi, Hermès, Droog and Lexus, to name but a few. It has been on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, A ­ msterdam; MAK ­Museum, Vienna; and many others. www.formafantasma.com Shade Thomas-Fahm is regarded as Nigeria’s first fashion designer. She was trained at London’s Saint Martin’s College and returned to Lagos in the year of Nigeria’s independence in 1960, where she set up a factory and boutique. She is one of the founders of the Fashion Designers’ Association of Nigeria (FADAN) and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Arise Magazine’s Fashion Week in Lagos in 2011.

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Fatimah Tuggar is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her work challenges cultural stereotypes and has been widely ­ ­exhibited at international venues, including the Bamako Biennale of Photo­ graphy, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Museum Kunst-Palast Düsseldorf, ­Centre Georges Pompidou, Moscow Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and MoMA. Obiora Udechukwu is a Nigerian artist and poet. He has been a leading member of the Nsukka group in Nigeria, known for experimentation with ­traditional Igbo uli mural and body design since the early 1970s. His artworks have been exhibited worldwide for nearly four decades and are part of public collections, including the National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian Institute and Nigeria‘s National Gallery of Art, Lagos. Marjorie Wallace is a Zimbabwean ceramic designer based in Harare. Her ceramic and porcelain objects are inspired by traditional basket making and have been created in her studio Mutapo Pottery since 1992. As a part of the Design ­Network Africa (DNA) her work has been exhibited internationally, for instance at the Platform Gallery, London or the Guild exhibition in Cape Town – the opening exhibition of Cape Town as Design Capital of the world 2014. DNA was awarded the grand prize at the Design Africa Awards in 2014. www.mutapo.com Jules Bertrand Wokam is a Cameroonian designer, architect and artist who lives and works between France and Cameroon. He has been part of an artist collective in Douala, run his own streetwear label, and has designed furniture for public space. His work has been on display at the Dakar Biennale; doual’art, Douala; and Musée Dapper, Paris. www.wokamhandmadefurnitures.com

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Authors’ Biographies Gui Bonsiepe is a German designer, teacher and writer. His publications are considered standards of design theory, especially in South America and ­Germany. Bonsiepe graduated in the information design department at the HfG Ulm in 1959, where he then taught as assistant professor until 1968. In the 1970s/80s he offered design and consultancy services for multilateral and bilateral organisations for technical cooperation and in government institutions in Latin America (particularly in Chile, Argentina, Brazil). From 1993 onwards he was professor for Interface Design at Cologne International School of Design in Germany and professor for Integrated Media at Escola ­Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI), Universidade do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, where he planned and established a Master of Design study ­ programme. Bonsiepe is the author of numerous books, among others: ­ ­Design im Übergang zum Sozialismus (1974), Diseño Industrial, tecnología y dependencia (1978), Interface – An A ­ pproach to Design (1999), Historia del Diseño en América Latina y El Caribe (co-editor with Silvia Fernández, 2008), and Do Material ao Digital (2015). Alison J. Clarke is professor for Design History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and founding director of the Papanek F ­ oundation. A former Smithsonian Fellow, and recent Graham Foundation grantee, she is co-founding editor of the journal Home Cultures: Architecture, Design and Domestic Space. Alison Clarke is the author of Tupperware: the Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (made into an Emmy-nominated documentary), ­ ­editor of Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition (2017). ­Catalogue essays for recent major exhibitions include Hippie Modernism, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2015), So You Say You Want a Revolution? V&A, London (2016), As Seen: Exhibitions that Made Architecture and Design History, Art Institute of Chicago (2017). A regular media presenter, including award-­ ­ winning BBC documentary series The Genius of Design, Clarke is presently heading a m ­ ajor research project on the historical networks of émigré ­architects and designers and completing a monograph entitled Design for the Real World: 1970s ­Humanitarian Design Activism (MIT Press 2018). Erica de Greef is a theorist, curator and lecturer in fashion. She ­contributed to the development of critical South Africa fashion research predominantly in the context of fashion education, promoting understanding in local­ fashion histories and practices. She lectured at LISOF School of Fashion in Johannesburg, South Africa, for fourteen years. Throughout this time, she ­ promoted “critical fashion knowledge with a strong local content”, affording the development of a local fashion discourse through innovative, interdisciplinary ­ ­ research, projects and exhibitions engaging notions of dress, history, society and identity at museums and other contemporary spaces. De Greef holds a Masters in Fine Arts from Wits University, South 202

Africa, a ­Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a National Diploma in Fashion. Among her publications are The Fashion ­ Fusion Project: Forgetting & Remembering (2009) and The Hybrid Tiger Of South African Fashion (2010). She is ­currently completing a PhD in African Studies at the University of Cape Town, ­investigating the complex challenges of, and opportunities for, South ­African museums to work with their dress/fashion collections. Christian Hanussek is an artist, writer and curator based in Berlin. He studied art and art-theory at “Städelschule”, Frankfurt/M. and “ateliers ‘63”, ­Haarlem, The Netherlands. His art comprises and combines painting, drawing and film or video. Since 2001 he has published a series of articles on art from Africa and curated several presentations of art from Africa and elsewhere. In 2005/6 Hanussek curated the project Gleichzeitig in Afrika ... with exhibitions, seminars and discussions in various German cities. Several ­exhibitions have resulted from his longstanding collaboration with the artist and sculptor Salifou Lindou (Douala), including Alt Délices du Wouri (2007). Since 2011 he has been part of metroZones, Center for Urban Affairs, an ­independent association for critical urban studies. Its mandate is to bring together different approaches in research, knowledge production, cultural practice and political intervention at the interface of art, academia and ­politics, and to provide a forum for their public discussion. ( www.metrozones.info) Daniel Magaziner is a historian of 20th century Africa and professor at Yale University. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2007, and taught at Cornell University before moving to Yale in 2011. Daniel Magaziner published his first book, The Law and the Prophets: Black ­Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977, in 2010. The Law and the Prophets is a history of political thought in 1970s South Africa, focusing especially on the ways that young South African activists deployed radical Christian, ­indigenous African and global 1960s ideas to reinvigorate resistance to the apartheid state. In 2016 his book The Art of Life in South Africa was published in South Africa and the United States. The book reframes the image of black cultural and intellectual life under apartheid. He is currently writing an ­intellectual biography of the South African artist, designer and technology theorist Selby Mvusi, tentatively entitled World Man in Africa: S ­ elby Mvusi and the 20th Century. Kerstin Pinther is Professor of African Art History at the Art History Department of Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich. From 2010–2014 she was ­Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Assistant Professor for the Arts and Visual Cultures of Africa at Free ­University Berlin. Her research activities ­focus on urban cultures, contemporary art and architecture in Africa and design histories. Among her publications are Afropolis. City, Media, Art (with Larissa Förster and Christian Hanussek) and New Spaces for Negotiating Art 203

(and) Histories in Africa (with ­Ugochukwu-­Smooth C. Nzewi). (Catalogue) essays include a text on the architecture of Francis Kéré, (The Architect als Cultural Broker, 2016), on artists’ archives in Cairo and Algiers (World Art, 2016) and on Textiles and Photography in Westafrica (Critical Interventions, 2007). She is head of a DFG project (German Research Foundation) on ­(fashion) ­design and ­urbanism in Lagos and Douala. Kerstin Pinther is also a curator and is ­currently working on a film project on design and ­architectural ­histories in Bamako, Mali (with Tobias Wendl and Alexandra Weigand). Susan Mullin Vogel, PhD, has curated many exhibitions, published many books and written several of her own. She also has five documentary films on contemporary African art and architecture in distribution with Icarus Films. She has served as Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Founding Director of the Museum for African Art, Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She received the Leadership award for lifetime achievement from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and her book Baule: African Art / Western Eyes (1997) received the Herskovitz Award. Her last project, a film and a book was on the artist El Anatsui – El Anatsui: Art and Life (2012). A few years ago, she began to make pottery which gave her a fresh perspective on the history of ceramics in Africa. Her current project is writing a history of African art in the art world in America, mid 1960s – mid 1990s. Alexandra Weigand is a Munich-based interdisciplinary designer, r­ esearcher, lecturer and curator. She studied Fashion Technology and Art History and worked for designers such as Kostas Murkudis and Konstantin Grcic as well as in the field of interior and architectural design. Her practical knowledge became the basis for her theoretical interest in how design reflects societal transformation and upcoming issues. Part of her ongoing research is for instance the publication Virtual Asthetics: Considering Perception at the Dawn of the 21st Century (2008), or the lecture series Habitus, Abito, Abitare – ­Handeln in der Gegenwart (2012/2013/2015). For Munich’s Design Week she curated HIT THE FUTURE_Design beyond the borders (2014) and HIT THE ­FUTURE_Metropolitan Design (2015) with a focus on speculative design. She is a board member at the art space Kunstraum München. As a researcher at the Art History Department of Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich she is currently focusing on design and urbanism in West Africa.

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Imprint This publication appears on the occasion of the exhibition Flow of Forms / Forms of Flow. Design Histories between Africa and Europe. München Architekturmuseum der TU München / Pinakothek der Moderne, Museum Fünf Kontinente, Kunstraum München as well as in the premises of a private gallery, 3 February – 12 March 2017 Hamburg Museum für Völkerkunde, 6 April – 19 August 2018 Exhibition Idea and Conceptual Design, Curators Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand Co-Curation Hamburg Barbara Plankensteiner Curatorial Assistance Katharina Ehrl, Agnes Stillger Student Research Assistance Munich Ronja Merkel, Zoe Schoofs, Mareike Schwarz, Jana Katharina Walter, Niklas Wolf, Nicola Zierhut Consultancy Museum Fünf Kontinente Stefan Eisenhofer, Karin Guggeis Projectpartner Cheick Diallo / Diallo Design, Bamako / Mali, Cucula. Refugees Company for Crafts and Design, Berlin / Germany Project Management Hamburg Carl Triesch Project Assistance Hamburg Sofia Vogelhaupt, Nadine Wagner, Elisabeth Kirchhoff Public Relations Ronja Merkel, Jana Katharina Walter, Nina Holm (Munich), Julia Daumann, Christine Ziesmer, Julia Dombrowski (Hamburg) Blog https://formflowblog.wordpress.com Jana Katharina Walter (Exhibition) Photography Thomas Splett (Munich), Paul Schimweg (Hamburg) Graphics Gundi Schillinger Exhibition Design Hanne Rung Production Munich Roger Mandl and Team, Schulen für Holz und Gestaltung des Bezirks Oberbayern Cover: Based on a design by Cheick Diallo (Mo armchair, 2011). Catalogue Supervisory Editors, Text and Image Kerstin Pinther, Alexandra Weigand Project Assistance Katharina Ehrl, Agnes Stillger Translations into English Andrew Boreham, Jesi Khadivi, Christine House (Editing) Layout and Typesetting Gundi Schillinger Published by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld transcript Verlag, Hermannstraße 26, D-33602 Bielefeld Fon (05 21) 39 37 97-0 Fax (05 21) 393797-34 E-Mail: [email protected] © Texts, images and graphics with authors and artists. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-3-8376-4201-8

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Printed by F&W Druck & Mediencenter Holzhauser Feld 2 83361 Kienberg

The catalogue was generously funded by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung as well as by the Freundeskreis des Kunsthistorischen Instituts.

The exhibition was supported by:

2018 © transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

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