Utopian Processes, Dystopian Premonitions
Photo of a single tie-dyed knot by Birgitta de Vos
Between forty-five and eighty thousand years ago, a band of Adams and Eves left Africa. We cannot know, really, what they were looking for. But they and their descendants found a world whose unceasing demand for adaptation and invention corresponds to our species’ narrative. The still-unfolding story of human creativity includes some especially compelling (and more recent) African chapters, one of which is being written now by artists, artisans, and designers working there. Some of the most interesting stories result from international collaborations that bridge the gap between peoples and their social differences, and blur the lines between traditional and contemporary impulses.
Much of the Africa-based collaborations between designers and artisans look back to techniques (and sometimes) materials that predate the industrial and digital eras, but they may also foreshadow important aspects of humankind’s future. The best of what comes from Africa today is compelling for its appearance and its originality, and this is part of the secret of African craft’s growing success. As art critic Roberta Smith commented recently, all art “tend[s] to get and hold our attention through [its] abstract, or formal, energy.”[1] The magnetic appeal of collaboratively made design objects, however, also comes from subliminal messaging about hopeful human responses to unsettling suspicions about our future as a species. Africa is certainly our kind’s starting point. It may also show us where we are headed.
Blue Notes
Every May on Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Jacques, a cult of devout fetishists celebrates an annual ritual. The object of their obsession is indigo—fabrics artisan-dyed in Benin, fashions designed in Paris, and items loyally purchased by a generous number of fashionable Western cognoscenti. The ritual is the annual sales exhibition of Heartwear, a sixteen-year-old non-profit collective of ten creatives from the worlds of fashion, home, and publishing.[2]
Shown in the light-filled studio of Li Edelkoort, a trend forecaster and educator, artfully clothed mannequins suggest a fusion of ancient and modern, of ebullience and restraint, of Cotonou and Paris. A cool white linen kimono explodes with a single indigo supernova. A blue-black jacket pricked with white tie-dye spots becomes the starry night sky. The long, irregular stripes of a pair of pants reveal (if you look closely) all the colors of the indigo process, from sky blue to interstellar darkness. The theatricality with which everything is arranged suggests reverence for the product, the process of creation, and the artisan partners whose skills and traditions are on display.
This blue-and-white perfection began in 1993 in the ruddy dust of Benin, with a group of textile experts and designers on a study trip. The group’s textile connoisseurship attracted attention: artisans were surprised that these strangers could identify their best pieces at a glance. So few people, African or European, showed any interest in their traditional ways of dyeing and weaving and crafting. Across many happy encounters in ateliers, tin-roofed market stalls, and even in the middle of crooked village lanes, the group came to an unhappy realization. Much of the beauty they were discovering was in danger of extinction.
As in the rest of the world, West Africa’s old ways of handcrafting were being supplanted by manufacturing processes which meant low prices as well as goods usually imported from abroad. The influx of cheap African-looking machine prints and a flood of used clothing from the West had begun to erode the cultural value placed on traditional textiles, which began to look old, out-of-date, undesirable. Makers of natural indigo dyes and handmade fabrics no longer had much of a market. And when there is no livelihood to be had from a trade, its days are numbered.
Before the study trip ended, the group had invented “Heartwear,” which would be devoted to finding, developing, sustaining, and promoting the living artisanal expressions left in the world—within the disciplines of interior design and fashion. One member of the study group stayed behind in Benin, to work with the dyers, weavers, and tailors in developing a collection of indigo products. These were later sold at the first Heartwear sales exhibition in Paris, in 1993.
Heartwear was well received by the press and sales from that first exhibition were sufficient to fund the next design and development effort. This has been repeated nearly every year since, and the group has continued its work in Benin, still the primary focus, while expanding at times to include collaborations in Bosnia, Morocco, Kenya, and India. The long, steady relationship between Heartwear and Beninese artisans has assured these artisans a regular income and has breathed new life into the traditional art form that so impressed Heartwear’s founders in 1993. Alphonse Ahouado, a weaver in the old royal city of Abomey in central Benin, commented on Heartwear’s work: “Artisanry occupies a central place in Beninese culture—and in our economy, too, though this is little understood. A quick tour of the courtyard of the historic palace museum of Abomey reveals a veritable crowd of experienced, talented artisans devoted body and soul to their métier, to their culture—especially in textiles. Heartwear is like a dose of oxygen for us. Their way of partnering has brought us orders over a long period of time.”[3]
“Their way of partnering” has been defined by textile designer and illustrator Karen Petrossian, the organizer of the original trip to Benin and a founding member of Heartwear: “You must get to know an artisan first: you show interest in what he does, you appreciate his savoir faire, you take time to visit his workshop. You ask questions about his techniques and products, about how he acquires his raw materials. You get acquainted with his family situation, and even with how he plans to pass his skills on to the next generation.”[4] With this intimate base of information, Petrossian and other Heartwear members put together a design brief of drawings and photographs especially for each Heartwear artisan. “If we have prepared properly, there are generally no problems in generating prototypes from our designs. You just have to give the artisans time to do the work,” he explained, adding, “Sometimes an artisan doesn’t make exactly what we’ve requested. Usually, just by revising a detail or two, things come out right. Sometimes, however, the artisan reinterprets the work in his own, unique way—and the result is surprisingly good.”[5]
What is not surprising is the friendship and trust that have developed between the participants—knot-tyers in villages south of Abomey, indigo dyers and tailors in Cotonou, Heartwear’s coordinator in West Africa, and designers in Europe. In today’s commercial world, a seventeen-year relationship between designers and makers is practically unknown. And one that unfolds in an atmosphere of mutual respect and even caring is truly a rara avis. Rare birds, however, are not an industrial commodity. The intimacy of every step of the process, from conception to sale, more or less dictates that Heartwear’s financial impact remain modest. The results here are only partly economic.
Heartwear’s mostly Parisian customers place a high value on the unusual nature of the product and the process. Some loyal Heartwear aficionados come to the sales exhibitions year after year to purchase new indigo (and other goods). Many of them come from the address books of the founding members and are themselves designers, retailers, journalists, and critics, for whom the uniqueness of the product is a major draw. All seem, whether they say it or not, to come not to buy a disposable, anonymous T-shirt, but rather to nourish themselves for a long while with something of authenticity and depth. They recognize the value in something that clearly expresses the humanity that has produced it.
Edelkoort, who was one of the founders, offered an explanation for Heartwear’s artisanal magnetism: “The world is now a market, governed by mega-mergers and mega-brands. Suddenly, almost naturally, men and women are looking again at handmade, man-mastered, artisan arts, as a refuge from mega-monotony. In terms of economy, employment strategies, and social development, we believe that quality arts and crafts will have a very important revival.”[6] Edelkoort’s global reputation as a futurist invites prolonged consideration of this remark, and suggests that Heartwear’s appeal is emblematic of what will power future purchasing decisions (and aesthetic judgments) of much of the buying public—especially in largely discretionary categories such as fashion for body and home. The artisanal product, expressing cultural depth and backed by careful economic and human relationships, may provide an essential and humanizing tonic to our globalized world.
Straw and Gold
“If we don’t find ways of improving people’s lives, it will affect us negatively. If we do, it gives everyone involved nourishment, learning. And purpose,” explains Adri Schutz when asked why she started Mielie Studio, her Cape Town-based, artisan-made fashion and home accessories business.[7] As a white South African committed to her country’s future, Schutz felt compelled to address the poverty around her, saying that “You can’t live in South Africa and not be affected by poverty—whether it’s through crime or doing something good or just seeing what’s going on around you. But along with the difficulties, you see right away that the most amazing traditions of beading and sewing and design are handed from generation to generation by the poorer people of our country.”[8] In 2002 Schutz, who had no formal business training, founded her artisan-based business. Mielie now employs fifty South Africans and relies solely on South Africa’s strong tradition of hand skills.
It is also built on recycling, which, in Africa, is not a fad or a trend but a thrifty and creative response to consistently tough economic conditions. Trash is looked on as potential treasure. Mielie Studio recycles fabric scraps from South Africa’s fashion and textile industries. They collect all the rags they can get their hands on and turn them into hooked rugs, handbags, pillows, and stylish ottomans. The Fluffball, a rainbow-hued globe of shaggy scraps that can serve as a footstool, is Mielie’s North American hit. It has appeared in the Amaridian Gallery in New York and in a handful of Anthropologie stores.[9] Mielie has also developed a line of yarn, appropriately named T-Shirt, made from strips of recycled T-shirt material.[10]
International sales aside, commerce is neither the beginning nor the end of Schutz’s relationship to her artisan partners. She uses the word family at least as much as any other in describing her business. Every artisan’s face, name, and abbreviated “Proust questionnaire” are posted on Mielie’s website.[11] You learn about their favorite foods, the size of families, their dreams and aspirations. Since every product carries the name of its maker, customers can learn about the people whose hands fashioned their acquisition.
In the midst of the economic downturn, the “Great Recession” of recent years, the demand for Miele’s goods has declined. Rather than fret, apologize, or just hope for better times, the Mielie “family” planted a communal organic garden. “If we can’t create demand, we can create a way of making everyone’s cash go further by putting food on the table,” explains Schutz.[12] The idea that all must thrive in order for any to thrive comes through in Mielie’s very personal approach to business.
Shutz and her group are truly energized by “creating something beautiful from stuff no one wants anymore.”[13] This creative effort often blurs the Western distinction between designer and artisan. Schutz is the primary designer, but as her artisan partners review the designs, things change. The very act of making—with sometimes jazzlike improvisations from many hands, materials, eyes, and imaginations—can also yield unexpected results. One of Schutz’s favorite surprises came about when she designed a smooth wave pattern for a handbag and the prototype weaving came back from Mielie artisan Manyawuza with unexpected twists and turns.[14] In its own way, it was too beautiful to be cut up and sewn into a bag, and Schutz asked for an entire rug to be made, giving the intense and varied pattern its own field. One of her theories is “that the elevated status the rest of the world has given the Designer is quite a foreign concept in Africa. Mostly design happens when some problem is fixed.”[15] This means that design is happening all the time, and on many levels, at Mielie Studios.
Old and New
“The street is for me is an inspiration and a research laboratory, an underlying thread to everything. However my job involves a permanent confrontation between reality and cultural past,” says Cheick Diallo of his designs.[16] The “street” in Diallo’s world is in bustling Bamako, the capitol of Mali and his birthplace, which serves a visual buffet of color, texture, improvisation, resourcefulness, and style. The “confrontation” takes shape as Diallo’s African sensibility meets his university training at prestigious French architecture and design schools. Doing his “job” means designing furniture that is at once traditional and modern, African and international. His manner of melding “reality and cultural past” gives him a unique design voice.
Diallo would be happy with nothing less. He frequently posits that "Most Western designers do the same thing, and I do not see the point of design if it merely remakes what already exists.”[17] What does not exist, in his view, is an African vocabulary of objects for 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 recognize itself. We produce objects that transcend borders.”[18]
Diallo’s design work first received broad recognition as a result of Africa Remix, a 2004 exhibition of pan-African art and design. His chairs and tables, made of steel frames with surfaces handwoven in brightly colored synthetic cord, furnished the exhibit’s reading room. The show, which shifted international perceptions of what is unfolding in the visual arts across the continent, premiered in Dusseldorf, and over the next three years made its way to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Johannesburg.
The Africa Remix chairs, which seduce the sitter into a relaxed, broad-shouldered, wide-knee slouch, proved to be predictive in two ways. Firstly, the invitation to lounge has infused much of Diallo’s subsequent chair designs. Indeed, it is a hallmark of his work. Secondly, the bright, handwoven mesh transcends borders and has inspired other designers.[19] Diallo’s work, however, remains unique. The body language encouraged by his seating captures what you can see on any given night at any given boîte, or nightclub, in Bamako’s music scene. A certain amount of cool is required to take in the overwhelming combination of people and layered rhythms, flirtations and quarrels, beer and cigarettes, colored lights and lyrics that shift back and forth between lament, humor, and protest. Diallo’s chairs are thrones of this sort of cool: their backs recline just enough, their arms flare out to encourage a broad lean in whatever direction you wish, and their low-to-the-ground seats invite you to stretch your legs out to claim as much space as you need. In a full-circle affirmation of Diallo’s observation of human behavior, several Bamako night spots are now furnished with his work. What was inspired by the boîte now belongs to the boîte.
Another of Diallo’s lines quite literally embraces “the street” of his imagination. After watching large trucks crush street litter, Diallo began to see flattened soda cans as stone-like forms. He welded them together, stretched them across rectangular steel frames, and enameled them in black or red. These street-savvy tables double as recycling statement and an ingenious recognition of the virtues of a common, and commonly overlooked, raw material. They do not carry the penitential weight of much (most?) recycled product, but instead achieve their own formal value, their own energy as designed objects. They are not merely what they are made of.
As a designer, Diallo describes his work in professionally low-key terms of daily observation, material exploration, environmental responsibility, and human production. But the work itself suggests something richer. It opens new avenues for design that are inexorably African, and also universal. As he explains: “The soul of Africa is visible in its design – in its creativity and materials, in its manner of occupying space, of proposing its universe…and its modernity.”[20]
Answers and Questions
Heartwear member Karen Petrossian suggests that touching an African product provokes “something emotional. I don’t imagine artisans, I don’t imagine an exotic country, I just feel something hand made, a non industrial product.”[21]Mielie founder Adri Shutz thinks that African craft “is the opposite of mass manufacturing, which has completely removed any human touch.”[22] Fraser Conlon of Amaridian Gallery in New York suggests that the magnetism of African goods “may have something to do with their not speaking in familiar Western metaphors of status and wealth, but rather their own language of identity, authenticity, ingenuity, perseverance.”[23] They are all, of course, right.
Something else, however, underlies the current magnetism of African craft. Embedded in its layers of culture and genius, of traditional identities unfolding in the contemporary era, of beauty and skill, is a subliminal set of messages about the next chapters of human existence. Because Africa faces some of the worst natural and man-made circumstances on the planet, its most desirable and relevant objects suggest something instructive about the human response to crisis. And the crises we see unfolding in Africa may make their way around the world, just as humans did.
The future is likely to see available natural resources shrink. If we fear the consequences, we will at best need to amend the way we use our resources, or at worst we will deplete them entirely. African craft suggests a solution. Beautiful objects created with little more than human skill and a stringently efficient use of raw materials, or an ingenious re-use of trash, show us how humanity can create what we need or desire out of nearly nothing. As our species looks at a future where we must embrace environmental responsibility and stretch our resources to satisfy an ever-growing population, such optimism is invigorating.
If we see the future of our species as fraught with conflict over differences in identity, politics, and wealth, African craft offers a way forward. The collaborative nature of designers and artisans working across racial, cultural, and economic lines—and the prevalence of artisan cooperatives as structures in which successful economic activity can occur—may suggest how we can conduct future business with a sense of equity, inclusion, patience, and humanity. Cooperation and collaboration may even increase the likelihood of success and minimize personal risk. This could be the future road to success—at the personal, community, and national levels.
If we wonder whether our social norms can contain the pressure resulting from diminishing resources, population growth, climate change, alienating technologies, and ongoing conflict, African craft may give us a useful tool, a model. We may need to ingest and embody the "cool" of African design, the public composure of face and body and presentation, as we anticipate the changes likely to come our way. We may begin to look at what we use and what we wear not so much as the source of our public identity (as twentieth-century consumerism would have it) but as a tool to give us the stance, the strength, the élan, we need to survive mentally. African handmade goods contain needed doses of all of these things.
The West has focused too long on Africa as a place of problems, and this habit blinds us to the solutions it offers. In a connected and complicated world, and we cannot look away from good and beautiful ideas. We are attracted now to African design, we embrace it now, because we need what it says about the interplay between Spirits and Things—what it tells us about the migration of our own identity as we move into this new century. As a people, we can all claim Africa as our starting point. If we look closely, we will see that adapting and reinventing ourselves for the future will make us African again.
This essay appeared in Sims, Lowery Stokes, and King-Hammond, Leslie. The Global Africa Project. Museum of Arts and Design, New York City. 2010.
[1] Smith, “It’s Not Dry Yet,” New York Times, March 28, 2010, New York edition, p. AR1.
[2] A version of this text appeared in Keith Recker, “Rites of Spring,” HAND/EYE Magazine (June 2009), 30-31; online (April 21, 2009), http://www.handeyemagazine.com/node/19. New material has been added for this catalogue.
[3] Ahouado, e-mail communication with the author, April 2009.
[4] Karen Petrossian, interviewed by the author, Paris, January 2009.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Quote from Philip Fimmano (Edelkoort’s assistant), e-mail communication with the author, March 2009.
[7] Some of this text appeared in a substantially different form in Karen Gibbs, “Happy Chaos,” ed. Keith Recker, HAND/EYE Magazine (June 2009), 8; online (June 3, 2009), http://www.handeyemagazine.com/node/44
[8] Adri Schutz, telephone interview with the author, March 2009.
[9] For Mielie at Amaridian, see www.amaridianusa.com. Anthropologie no longer carries the Fluffball.
[10] For information on Meilie’s T-Shirt yarn in the United States, see Be Sweet, http://www.besweetproducts.com/product_type.php?cat=1&prod=151094
[11] See http://www.mielie.com/index.php?page=people
[12] Adri Schutz, telephone interview with the author, March 2009.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Adri Schutz, e-mail communication with the author, April 2010; and Schutz, “Inspiration is what you get when you don't get exactly what you were expecting,” blog entry, July 29, 2008, http://fa.mielie.com/index.php?entry=entry080729-181011.
[15] Adri Schutz, e-mail communication with the author, April 2010.
[16] Cheick Diallo, e-mail communication with the author, April 2010.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] In 2009, for example, Moroso, a prominent Italian luxury brand, successfully launched a line made from the same synthetic fishing-net cord first used in a furniture context by Diallo.
[20] Cheick Diallo, e-mail communication with the author, April 2010.
[21] Karen Petrossian, e-mail communication with the author, March 2010.
[22] Adri Schutz, e-mail communication with the author, April 2010.
[23] Fraser Conlon, telephone interview with the author, March 2010.