Disegno #39

The Journal of Design #39 Short stories about survival and design Spring 2025

The Journal of Design #39 Short stories about survival and design Spring #0#5

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The Courage of the Cucumber Words Oli Stratford

In considering survival and design, allow me to say a few words in favour of the sea cucumber, our tubular friend in the waters.

When a sea cucumber is threatened by sea bullies, not least the hated pufferfish, it neither backs down, nor sinks to the appalling level of its predators and goes on the offensive. Instead, it simply stands its water, and does what all right-thinking people would do when faced with adversity: it propulsively voids a significant portion of its digestive organs from its own anus.

The elegance and efficacy of this survival mechanism barely require comment. After all, who amongst us would willingly suffer the digestive tract of our enemies? Certainly not the pufferfish, I can tell you that for free, who finds the cucumber’s discharge unpalatable, deterring them from further predation. Happily, the effectiveness of the sea cucumber’s auto-evisceration is matched only by its temporariness. The wily cumber swiftly regrows its organs in a matter of weeks, rendering it ready to void again at a moment’s notice.

Survival can take many forms, but its greatest form is the anal expulsion of one’s own viscera. I’ll tell you for why.

Firstly, the sea cucumber endures and stands up for itself, Survival

refusing to surrender to puffed tyranny. Secondly, the cucumber evaluates what is truly important in a situation.

There is no sense in clinging to the past when existential threat arrives – sometimes, we must give something up (in this case, a digestive tract) in order to ensure a future.

Thirdly, the cucumber recognises that survival goes hand in hand with adaptation, renewal and regrowth. To survive, to flourish, aspects of the old may need to make way for the creation of the new (in this case, a genetically identical digestive tract).

These ideas are not unique to the sea cucumber. Survival in all its varied forms is a dialogue between the past and present. What has been must be weighed against what might be, and decisions taken as to what will endure, and what price we are willing to pay to ensure that. Whatever we are seeking to preserve – be it communities, traditions lives or knowledge – survival is active, responsive and ever changing. It is sensitive to context, function, emotion, and lived experience, and responds to both the world as we find it, and the world as we would wish it to be. It is, in this respect, fertile ground for design.

As such, this issue of Disegno is proudly devoted to this most important of topics: designers and institutions who have also voided their digestive organs from their own anuses. Or, if we must mince words, “survival”.

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Contents &

Introduction The Courage of the Cucumber

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Contents

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Contributors

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Masthead The people behind Disegno

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The Return to the Collection Permanent collections take centre stage at ArkDes

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Through a Glass Darkly Studio Brynjar & Veronika make glass windows into translucent nebulae

10) Hard Work, Soft Spaces Comfort and survival in design for childbirth

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Incomplete Dreaming up alternative uses for abandoned spaces with Ghana’s Limbo Museum

Jach’a Qhatu Trading at a Bolivian market with El Alto Aesthetics

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Where’s Your Cow From?

Studio Saar’s gaushala houses an indigenous breed

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To Survive Death Attempts at cryonic preservation, captured by Murray Ballard

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Opa A family odyssey to reclaim a forgotten designer

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Surviving What?

Mudac’s preppers exhibition critiques consumer culture

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Nature Does Not Exist Samy Rio designs for human life and sylvan health

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Competition and Compassion Playing non-hierarchical sports with Gabriel Fontana’s Multiform

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All Eyes Studiomama’s face castings stare back

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Threading History Aissa Dione preserves Senegal’s weaving traditions

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In Search of the Long-Armed Chair Tracing a shapeshifting chair from its colonial origins to modern deconstructions

DISCOVER AIR SYSTEM, THE WALL PARTITION SYSTEM AND DOOR PANEL. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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Contributors Murray Ballard is trying to photograph the future, but is stuck in the present. p. 65 Helen Gonzalez Brown is busy smiling at daffodils. p. 38 and &7 Marco Cappelletti has accepted that the seagulls are in charge now. p. 45 Danielle Caputo looks at everything, all the time, everyone and beyond. p. 8) Richard Davies is squandering his time on Earth loitering with a camera. p. &7 Djibril Drame loves broccoli and coffee. p. ))3

Rachel Lee likes putting her feet up. p. )2) Etienne Malapert is after the record for the biggest trout caught in a Swiss river. p. 8) Tiiu Meiner is feeling all the feelings. p. 8& Stiliyana Minkovska is currently designing, researching, mothering, and wondering if sleep is just a concept. p. )06 Michael David Mitchell just drove across Europe for the first time. It won’t be his last. p. 65 Bisila Noha and mosquitos: a love story in West Africa. p. ))3

El Alto Aesthetics will be at El Alto’s Feria )6 de Julio market until the end of April 2025. p. )6

Alfred Quartey will brb; he is in the middle of a quest for coffee. p. 58

Eshwarya Grover’s cat keeps bringing her squirrels and sparrows as presents. p. 24

Rupal Rathore can’t wait to feast on mangoes this summer. p. 24

Jonathan Hagos is not his real name ;). p. 3)

Hugo Revollet relentlessly explains his job to his relatives. p. )2)

Marianna Janowicz is putting up the defences. p. )06

Samy Rio is slowly turning into a tree. p. 38

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Leonhard Rothmoser used to make art under the name Leo & Björn with Björn-Achim Schmidt.

Cover Björn-Achim Schmidt did the same as Leonhard Rothmoser – just switch the names round.

Cover Brynjar Siguðarson, as a child, put )5 blueberries up his nose, but only got )3 out again. p. 5) Veronika Sedlmair loves blueberries. p. 5) Felix Speller is framing design and unframing his sleep schedule. p. )06 Oli Stratford is not a person of interest. p. 7, 5) and 8) Sarita Sundar, when it’s hot, places her G&T on the armrest. p. )2) Ama Benewaa Tawiah often daydreams about hot tea bread and butter. p. 58 Eleanor Watson is pregnant and cranky. p. 45

The Journal of Design #39 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali ak,.com

Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@ak,.com

Distribution and stockist enquiries MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk

Contributors Tin Ayala, Murray Ballard, Helen Gonzalez Brown, Marco Cappelletti, Danielle Caputo, Richard Davies, Djibril Drame, El Alto Aesthetics, Noemi Gonzales, Eshwarya Grover, Jonathan Hagos, Marianna Janowicz, Rachel Lee, Etienne Malapert, Tiiu Meiner, Stiliyana Minkovska, Michael David Mitchell, Bisila Noha, Alfred Quartey, Santos Miranda Ramos, Rupal Rathore, Hugo Revollet, Samy Rio, Leonhard Rothmoser, Björn-Achim Schmidt, Felix Speller, Veronika Sedlmair, Brynjar Siguðarson, Oli Stratford, Sarita Sundar, Ama Benewaa Tawiah and Eleanor Watson.

Thanks Many thanks to G F Smith for providing beautiful paper for this issue of the magazine; Mudac for organising our trip to see We Will Survive; Samy Rio for all of his support; Shewa Hagos for sharing her family photos; Studio Saar for facilitating our visit to the gaushala; Stiliyana Minkovska for her wonderful imagery; and El Alto Aesthetics for a fantastic collaboration.

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong to Disegno Publications Limited, and to the authors and artists featured.

If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Assistant editor Helen Gonzalez Brown helen@disegnojournal.com

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Pureprint on Munken Design Lynx Rough Natural White 1#0gsm; and Max Ultra White Matt 115gsm, both

by G . F Smith. The cover is printed on Colorplan Twilight #&0gsm, also

by G . F Smith.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made this issue of Disegno possible – not least Sasha, the delightful squirmy reverend.

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Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 (DZ disegnojournal.com Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works.

Jach’a Qhatu Words Tin Ayala with El Alto Aesthetics,Photographs Santos Miranda Ramos and Noemi Gonzales

Dawn arrives like an icy blade over the Altiplano. The wind cuts through, lifting the dust from the empty avenue, dragging plastic bags discarded last week, twisting old posters of candidates without legitimacy. At (,000m above sea level, in El Alto, Bolivia, the sun is a dagger, blinding before it warms.

The first vendor lays out her aguayo,1 a minimal square-metre territory of market ballast stretched over the open ground.

With movements steeped in memory, she unfolds the blue plastic sheet, pulls out bags filled with coca leaves, and arranges with care this plant that has withstood conquest and racism. Then another woman sits beside her. Then another.

And so, with no other call than the light warming the hills, the Jach’a Qhatu2 begins to take shape, one of the largest markets in South America – a vast trading ground that no one ever sees in its entirety because it never stops shifting, piling up, winding its own labyrinths.

By the time the sun rises fully, the market is a human river. Women in polleras with children tied to their backs, young

men in smuggled sneakers, uncles with eyes accustomed to the logic of this disorder. In its narrow and wide streets alike, stalls overflow with Chinese toys, Taiwanese radios, Brazilian underwear, cellphones recycled just the day before, medicinal herbs brought from Sorata, avocados from Cochabamba, evangelical Bibles printed in Colombia. The market is a fragmented map of the world, a geography of objects without passports.

The ch’iwiñas3 and makeshift stalls turn walking here into a journey across a mountain range of merchandise. There are piles of second-hand clothes, bundled up and shipped from the United States and Europe – garments discarded by a gringo and reborn here with a new owner.

There are car parts still dripping with oil, brought from clandestine workshops where stolen vehicles from across the border are dismantled.

In the Feria 1! de Julio, its o(cial title, di)erent territories and timelines are chewed together in a single bite.

Objects never meant to meet – born in opposite geographies, designed for di)erent purposes – coexist. Carefully

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selected coca leaves from the Yungas are sold just meters away from plastic Chinese toys with Mandarin labels.

The ancestral and the globalised, the handmade and the industrial, do not cancel each other out; they absorb, empower, and transfigure one another.

The market is an abigarrado landscape, a ch’ixi& fabric where the Indigenous and the global do not ask permission to overlap. Here, the popular economy is a defiant cry against the formal structures of banks, contracts, and exclusionary systems.

El Alto’s thriving economy is no accident. It is upheld by thousands of migrant bodies and the children of the rural migrants who turned this highland into a city – mostly urban Aymaras, people whom the white elites have chosen to call “cholos” with disdain. But to be cholo is not a defeat, nor an insult. It is the embodiment of a modernity the state never wanted to imagine – one that does not erase its Indigenous roots, that refuses to be domesticated by whiteness, that inhabits the urban without abandoning the rural. In Peruvian sociologist Aníbal

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Quijano’s terms, here, the customs of the original community and the codes of the modern city are lived simultaneously.

There is no contradiction. There is survival.

There is strategy.

As El Alto Aesthetics, a collective composed of historians, sociologists, artists, architects and activists, we seek to create a space for the analysis of the design emerging in the city of El Alto.

We read the 1! de Julio market as more than just a trading ground. Yes, it is an economic engine, but it is also a cultural epicentre, a laboratory where the futures of the Andean city are being designed.

In this context, we understand design as a survival tactic, a way of negotiating culture in a system that has systematically stigmatised our identities.

This year, we have become part of the Indigenous-led Design Fellowship Program at the CCA (Canadian Center for Architecture), a grant that allows us to test our understanding of design by opening a collective stall in the market.

This is not a nostalgic or folkloric gesture; it is an action that challenges the colonial narrative that has imposed an imaginary of marginality upon us. For the next two months, our stall will serve as a space for experimentation. We will be proposing redesigns of local cultural products, such as polleras, giving kids the possibility to wear the traditional clothing of Aymara women; Chicha music mixes, exploring the racism and marginalisation that this musical genre su)ers; and an architecture agency, giving passersby the opportunity to design their own house with local

building techniques. We are seeking to investigate the agency of these vernacular businesses and expand their possibilities within the city. Our aim is to redefine the legitimacy of cultural production by rooting it in a surrounding context of popular economies, those that have developed their own modes of production and distribution, which lie beyond o(cial recognition. We seek ways to sustain our work as a collective without relying solely on cultural institutions and grant funding.

We aim to design economic models that support self-managed creative initiatives, models that learn from the market and its ability to constantly reinvent itself.

Today, Sunday, 2 March 2$25, we ch’alla5 our stall in the 1! de Julio market.

We dress it for the occasion, hanging up streamers and colourful balloons on its sides. At midday, brass bands flood the space with the roar of cymbals, trumpets, and drums. Moving to the sound of the music, the ch’utas parade through the city streets, merging into the collective stomping of carnival. In our two square metres, the Qullatron – our collective’s sound system – resounds its geometric shapes, a superposition of Tihuanacotan architecture and electronic card patterns.

Its speakers amplify the mix of DJ Achachi and DJ Ch’iyara, a selection of chicha that gets passersby dancing.

This is how we begin the ch’alla. In the four corners of our stall, we scatter flowers, fava beans, and golden corn kernels. We pour beer, letting it spill and soak into the earth, the wood, the tarp.

I remember how, in our collective potato

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chakra! by Lake Titicaca, we ch’alla-ed the crops, o)ering beer, coca leaves, and the best potatoes to the land in hopes of a good harvest. We weren’t just expressing gratitude; we were also recognising the land’s agency.

Likewise, we ch’alla our stall – we treat it as an entity with will and destiny, trusting that it will return our gesture with good fortune. Through its invisible lines, the ch’alla traces a way of relating to what surrounds us – a design strategy that understands that everything that we bring into the world also transforms us.

What we create a)ects us, shaping our practices and our ways of inhabiting. As Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar would say: design designs us. May it be in good time.+END El Alto Aesthetics is a collective analysing the visual, social, and economic forces shaping contemporary aesthetics in El Alto, Bolivia.

Tin Ayala is an Andean designer and cultural producer who explores cholo aesthetics and design as tools of transculturality.

Noemi Gonzales, born in the Bolivian territory, is a photographer exploring interculturality and anarchism through visual research.

Santos Miranda Ramos, graduated as an architect, is a self-taught artist and photographer from El Alto.

An Andean textile made of wool or cotton, traditionally used by Indigenous peoples of the Andes to carry objects, transport babies on their backs, or as a shawl.

An expression in the Aymara language meaning “great market”. It refers to large-scale popular markets in the south of the Andes.

Small improvised vending stalls in the popular markets of the Andean highlands.

A concept developed by Aymara sociologist and thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, describing a form of non-assimilationist mestizaje, where di)erent cultural elements coexist without merging or canceling each other out.

An Andean ritual of reciprocity, in which o)erings of food, coca leaves, flowers, and beverages such as beer or chicha are made. The ch’alla is an ancestral practice that rea(rms the relationship between people and their environment.

A traditional Andean agricultural space and system based on polyculture.

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Where’s Your Cow From?

Words Rupal Rathore,Photographs Eshwarya Grover

The Studio Saar gaushala, designed to house a herd of native Gir cows.

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Anyone who has lived in or visited India will note cows to be a common feature of the streetscape.

They are hard to miss as you find yourself slamming on the brakes of your car when one suddenly steps down from the road divider or, if you decide to walk, dodging blobs of dung like a game of hopscotch.

Cows, it seems, are a survivor of the country’s rapid urbanisation: they have not disappeared in the process of wetlands being swapped for parcels of real estate and clusters of brick houses being replaced with swanky towers. Una)ected by it all, they huddle together on sidewalks and munch over jumbles of kitchen waste and plastic, all while enjoying the title of gaumata (cow-mother) bestowed by Hindu culture. Keeping up with the times, most have had their ears punched with a bright yellow tag displaying the 12-character identification number that helps the government keep track of the cattle count in the country, which was recorded at 1,3.5m in the 2$1, census.

The survival of the country is also tied to the cows’ own, given that milk production makes up & to 5 per cent of the national GDP. India’s current position as the world’s largest producer and consumer of milk can be traced back to the East India Company setting up its first military farm in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) in 188, to boost the dairy supply for British troops stationed in colonial India. This, and the subsequent military farms that cropped up across the country, introduced systematic crossbreeding of India’s indigenous cows with European, high-yielding varieties – a practice that continued well past independence, when the Indian Army assumed responsibility for their operation, until the closing of the last such farm in 2$21. This practice alone, however, is not why more than a quarter of India’s entire cattle population is crossbred.

In 1,-$, the Indian government launched a phased programme, Operation Flood, intended to turn India from a milk-deficit nation dependent on imports into a self-su(cient one. While the initiative is today deemed to have been a success – it facilitated linking new and existing cow sheds with more than -$$ towns and cities, setting up farmer-owned cooperatives, and improving access to feeds and veterinary service – it still continued to promote crossbred cows such as Holstein Friesian, Jersey, Brown Swiss, and Red Dane. These breeds are known to have more productive value as compared to those that originated in India, but are not as well adapted to the warmer climate, therefore requiring

more water-intensive care to protect them from the heat and remain healthy.

Crossbred or not, the omnipresence of cows has resulted in many of us in India having daily or weekly rituals of feeding or petting them. I, for one, begin my Thursdays scouting for a cow to o)er food to: a fresh roti laced with ghee and jaggery. On spotting one, I stand a couple of feet away and extend my arm to present the roti as ready for the take. The cow never hesitates before swirling its tongue to scoop up the snack. The whole a)air is oddly fulfilling, despite being predictable.

Admittedly, beyond my brief Thursday interactions, I had not given much thought to how these animals are cared for regularly, what breed they are, and whether they have somewhere to go in the evenings after their daytime wander. My childhood memories of visiting a gaushala, or the shelter in which they are kept and milked, are a fuzzy mix of the familiar smell of dung cakes spread out to dry in the sun and the dimly lit aisle under a tattering tin shed, feeders installed on either side from which cows could retrieve their food as and when they pleased.

How have gaushalas today changed from what they were 2$ years or even 2$$ years ago, given the upgrades that agricultural and dairy practices have received in terms of technology and machinery? What does a mid-sized shelter with the capacity to supply milk locally, door-to-door, look like? And how does such a facility engage with traditional communities to revive their connection to land and support ruralurban economies? With these questions scribbled into a notebook, I visited a gaushala designed by Studio Saar in Delwara, Rajasthan, around 25km north of Udaipur.

On a bright January afternoon, I accompany the firm’s co-founder Ananya Singhal on the drive up to the gaushala. The highway leading toward Delwara is flanked by marble processing factories as well as tourist resorts, and, as one gets closer to town, the large complexes give way to more intimate houses and shops. Taking a sharp turn onto a quieter road, we halt in front of the entry to a 5$-acre, privatelyowned property comprising farmland and untouched green hills. The main gate faces a large banyan tree, its trunk encircled by a chaupal, a common public space element in rural India that serves as a pause of sorts: a place to rest, have your meal, or chat with friends. We walk around the chaupal to ramp up to the gaushala’s blue paint-coated steel doors that have been slid open for the day’s activities. I can hear the

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cows mooing from inside the building, and manage to catch a glimpse of them standing by the chain-linked openings that capture a panoramic view of the fields and hills beyond. Before we can get any closer, however, the gaushala’s caretaker informs us that one of the cows is in labour and would be best given privacy. “We could have built this anywhere on the farm,” says Singhal, whose family own the property and commissioned the gaushala in 2$22, “but here, we have some building ruins and an old well close by.” He pauses, waving his hand to gesture in the direction we came from. “Let’s look at those first.”

We retrace our steps and take in the gaushala’s surroundings. Piles of stone and pieces of repurposed steel mark the trail up to a two-room structure that is currently under renovation. It is to function as a dairy and ghee-making facility to support the gaushala’s target population of &$ cows. “We want to have all the systems in place before reaching that number,” explains Singhal, “and of course, get the locals more involved to take up charge.” The gaushala is part of the vision of Singhal’s family, who are behind the multinational Secure Meters energy company, to build a commercial quarter of the farm that will be accessible to the people of Delwara. The building’s size and capacity are a result of this future brief.

We hike up to reach a set of two concrete terraces that top the service area which lines the back of the gaushala, and which are level with the steel white roof perched over the rest of the free-flowing space like a light summer hat. One of the terraces functions as a platform to sun-dry hay and the dung cakes that are used both in the fields and as fuel for outdoor cooking; the other is a provisional space to mount solar panels to meet the increase in energy demand in the years to come. Standing here, I can better appreciate how constraints of the land have informed the building’s design, with its orientation catching the prevailing westerly winds to keep the gaushala cool and ventilated.

“The building’s form came as a result of it wrapping around the edge of this hill,” Singhal continues, “and for that, we needed a lightweight roof that could change direction without any funny joints. Easily drain o) the rainwater too.”

The alternating pitched roof, with six ridges and neat gutters in between them, could be compared to a folded origami sculpture, were it not for a large rocky outcrop that looms inside the building and divides its volume, almost into two halves. “We let the landform

interrupt the building instead of carving into it, but then, a key challenge was to make all that open space panther-proof,” Singhal adds. “The chainlink can take the weight of three panthers at once.” These wild leopards are not a rare spot in and around Udaipur’s scrub-forested landscape and, once in a while, they make their way into inhabited settlements to steal easy prey. I could certainly imagine why a somewhat remote gaushala like this one needs complete sealing from the outside.

The building partially sits on land, with a 3m overhang propped up on steel columns. The semicovered space below stores cow dung for biofuel generation, which will make the operation net-zero in the future. “You see those granite starters that raise the steel columns o) the ground to keep them from rusting?” inquires Singhal as we walk past this alley to return to the gaushala entry. “They cost us nothing as they’re from a mining site’s overburden – stu) that can’t be used to make slabs and usually goes to waste.”

The rest of the building has also been largely built out of structural steel and rubble stone procured from demolition sites within a 3$km radius.

After going around the gaushala and viewing it from di)erent angles, it is time to take the actual building tour and meet the resident cows – two originally brought from Gir in Gujarat and the others born here. “We grew up with cows as part of our lives because my grandmother used to keep some,” says Singhal, “but back then, there wasn’t much of an understanding of breed and what di)erence it made to the quality of milk we consumed.” This new facility, he tells me, will keep the cows genealogically pure, with the project specifically focused on rearing the Gir, an indigenous breed. The Gir cow is distinctly recognisable by its reddish coat, long pendulous ears, and slightly domed forehead, and has been favoured for having better disease and heat resistance, as well as a higher milk yield, when compared to other indigenous breeds of India. To address the declining numbers of the Gir and other such native breeds, the Indian government launched the Rashtriya Gokul Mission in 2$1& to support the conservation of indigenous cattle through selective breeding. “There is now a lot of established value in reintroducing the milk from the Gir cows in our diet,” notes Singhal, “not only because of its low lactose content, but also because these cows use approximately one-tenth of the water required to care for, say, the Jersey cow.”

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The gaushala has been designed to sit sympathetically in the landscape, with minimal disruption to the surrounding site.

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Dung cakes, used in both the fields and as a fuel for cooking.

The design borrows many lessons learned from traditional gaushalas, such as soft sand floors.

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Walking through the shelter’s pleasantly shaded interior, sandwiched between its sand floors and the &m-high steel roof punctuated with tree trunks that were carefully preserved throughout the 12-month construction period, I can hear the unfamiliar grunting of the newborn calf, only minutes old. Since its mother has assumed a defensive stance, we don’t venture near it and, instead, start to explore the back of the building.

This portion retains the earth against which the building has been constructed and has a series of ancillary service spaces flowing along the curve of the land – including a caretaker’s accommodation, silos to store cow feed, and rows of feeders for food and water. The excess water from the floor and feeders drains into a gutter that channels it to the fields, making use of the cow’s waste as natural manure. “When we started designing, I didn’t want to be stuck in the typical gaushala type,” says Singhal, “but at the same time, we weren’t looking to mechanise everything like the West does.” Some of the features that this gaushala borrows from traditional ones are a sand floor that provides a soft surface for the cows to walk on, and the size and shape of the feeders, which have been ergonomically optimised over centuries. “It was about reinventing the process of taking care of cows in a way that would be safe for the cowherds, as well as more productive in running the facility.”

The gaushala allows for “a more humane approach to taking care of cows,” as Singhal puts it, with simple design gestures like a wooden railing mounted on the stone bund wall that runs the length of the farm-facing side of the building. The top of the railing comes just under eye-level for the cows, giving them the impression of being level with the fields instead of elevated o) the ground. “Otherwise they’d get scared of the height, you see,” Singhal smiles knowingly. At the same time, the gaushala incorporates certain process-based upgrades by combining Studio Saar’s exposure to dairy farms in the West and the Singhal family’s experience in manufacturing through their work with Secure Meters.

One such upgrade is introducing feed silos with a first-in, last-out system, which prevents feed from going stale if left at the bottom of a tall pile, as is usually the case in gaushalas.

“It was a struggle for me to get the workers here to use something as simple as wheelbarrows instead of carrying everything on their backs,” Singhal remarks once we are out of the gaushala and seated at the edge of the open well, by the side of a vegetable patch.

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“This balancing act between e(ciency and tradition, and getting the culture change in place, was kind of interesting.” Saar’s gaushala embraces the survival of the land, the people, and, naturally, the Gir cows in an uncomplicated yet rigorous way. The property’s banyan tree, in many ways, served as the reference point to chalk the pathways out and position the gaushala, and the structure’s bay sizes were adjusted to accommodate the tree roots that penetrate deep in the ground. “This is a building that we had designed a heck of a lot, and then redesigned for what we found on site,” laughs Singhal. The multi-purpose concrete terraces, for example, were initially planned to be very lightweight and therefore not suited to carry any live load, but seeing where they came up against the hill, they were assigned uses – a decision that helped avoid any additional hardscaping of the site.

The building is a product of its place, both in its design and execution, and including its employment of local fabricators and stone masons, and its continued engagement of men and women from semi-rural Delwara for ongoing farm- and gaushala-related chores. As more cows join the existing ones, the facility aims to establish links with a resort in the vicinity that is interested in sourcing organically produced ghee. “I think mid-sized cow sheds like this one can become a really important part of the dairy economy of our country,” Singhal tells me.

With the recent launch of the government’s 2$2& programme dubbed “White Revolution 2.$”, India has doubled down on its e)orts to promote indigenous bovine species, build new gaushalas, and introduce certain state taxes to maintain existing ones. Currently, milk demand is catered for by either large-scale milk cooperatives or else singly owned shelters that are not economically sustainable. “We’re missing something in the middle, where gaushalas are sizeable enough to invite volunteers and children to see where their ghee and ice cream comes from,” says Singhal. The gaushala

by Saar, beyond being a climate-ready architectural prototype, also strives to become a viable, profitable model for the town to adopt and self-sustain.

In this part of the world, where cows hold so much cultural significance and are an intrinsic part of people’s living, it is time for gaushalas to enter formal design discourse and for their potential as community assets be explored properly. Feeling inspired the next morning, I catch a few moments of conversation with our milkman, Dharmendra, who delivers a litre each to some 1$

Milk churns in the gaushala.

households from a volunteer-run ashram in the outskirts of Udaipur. As he’s swiftly swapping the empty glass bottle kept on the kitchen windowsill with a milk-filled one, I ask him what made him leave his village to help out at a not-for-profit gaushala with 15 cows. He shakes his head slightly, as if to dismiss the question, then pauses in order to meet my eye. “I learned to care for cows from a very young age,” he tells me. “I understand them, and in turn, they bless me with good health.”+END This article is a tribute to the newborn calf, who sadly passed away the morning after the author’s gaushala visit having been born four weeks premature.

Rupal Rathore is an architect and writer based in Udaipur.

Eshwarya Grover is an independent filmmaker and visual artist based in India.

3$

Opa Words Jonathan Hagos

Architect Jonathan Hagos, photographed as a child with his opa, designer Johan de Boer.

Survival

For as long as I can remember, I have grasped at a sense of belonging. I have often looked for surrogate forms of identity to call my own, to compensate for being from Eritrea, a place that no one in 1980s south east London had heard of, and which didn’t feature on a world map as a country during my lifetime until my early teens.

Instead, I borrowed an identity that incorporated the Netherlands: the country in which I was born, where most of my immediate family live, and where my godfather, the Dutch interior and furniture designer, Johan de Boer, was from. Aside from the few stories I’ve been told and retold about Johan, I have never known much about my “Opa”, aside from the fact that it was in part through his actions that my family and I survived. Nevertheless, he is someone who I often find myself looking to for guidance in my own career as an architect.

The story of all Eritreans is one of survival. From the country’s conception in the late 18$$s, when Italian traders colonised our lands, established our borders and gave us our name, all generations of Eritreans born in the country have been raised to be subjugated, to fight or to flee. For those like me, growing up in the diaspora, there are countless political obstacles preventing our return; we cannot look back. I’ve not met a fellow Eritrean for whom these principles do not apply, and where loss, trauma and injustice aren’t deeply intertwined in their stories.

My mother fled war-torn Eritrea in 1,--, travelling alone by foot to the northern border with Sudan, before recuperating in Khartoum. Making her way to Italy and then onto the Netherlands via safer means than those available to people in peril today, she arrived in Purmerend, close to Amsterdam, in August 1,-,. Here, she stayed in sheltered accommodation before being introduced to Johan and his wife, Geertje (who I can sadly no longer remember), both of whom were strong supporters of asylum seekers and had hosted many refugees in their home. My mother lived with them in Amsterdam for three years before moving into her own apartment, close to the hospital where I would later be born. When my parents got married in Amsterdam, my mother asked Johan if he would walk her down the aisle. His importance as a paternal figure to our family cannot be overstated.

Opa died in 1,,3, the same year that Eritrea achieved de jure independence from Ethiopia. One strand of my

I have been influenced by stories my mother has told me about her time spent living in the small loft room above Opa and Geertje’s apartment, seeing design students come there for tutorials, and participating in expansive conversations with him about art, atheism, politics, and human rights. I’ve been told tales, possibly exaggerated, of Opa helping many Dutch Jews escape from persecution in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the Second World War. I imagine a fictitious narrative of him with a host of his artist contemporaries, such as typographer and Stedelijk museum curator Willem Sandberg, artist and author Willem Arondéus, and conductor Frieda Belinfante, who amongst others made up the Raad van Verzet resistance group that helped to forge documents for people wanted by the Gestapo.

Having a designer in the family who combined creativity with social responsibility has shaped my own approach towards a more equitable form of practice.

At Freehaus, the architecture practice at which I am a director, we are committed to fostering agency for the marginalised communities that our buildings serve. We share design authorship with local people in ways that are defined by them and on their terms, often creating 32

Photographs: Courtesy of Jonathan and Shewa Hagos and family.

heritage blurs into another, giving rise to a conflation in my sense of identity that has remained. In the decades since, Eritrea has been a country to which Eritreans cannot easily return. At independence the country openly adopted a single party form of governance to help emerge united from its 3$-year war with Ethiopia.

This, however, quickly descended into a paranoid dictatorship, one that continues today, and which has never held an election or allowed any formal political opposition. An enforced and indefinite military service has inflated the country’s armed forces, which are stationed in dire conditions across its borders, escalating tensions with neighbouring countries and causing hundreds of thousands of Eritreans to flee. I have visited Eritrea only twice in my life, and it is likely that if I ever return, I will face immediate military conscription or, as someone whose family has been involved in vocal opposition to the dictatorship, imprisonment, torture or even death.

And so, as I find myself midway in the journey of my life, with the path towards my ancestral lands seemingly obscured, I look back to the gaps in my understanding of those who shaped me – my Opa – in order to help carve a route ahead.

Johan and Geertje with Jonathan.

Jonathan with his father on Amsterdam’s Rooseveltlaan.

Survival

paid opportunities for residents to support our projects in varying capacities and o)ering young people pathways into creative professions through provision of training and mentorship. I have also taught and lectured at many schools of architecture and various institutions, promoting an approach to design that is communityled, contextually focused and ethically aware. As the production designer and art director for the 2$1& feature film Simshar, we spotlit the experiences of migrants in the Mediterranean and arising sociopolitical tensions. As a design advocate for the Mayor of London, I support the shaping of policy and the oversight of capital investment that seek to help those most in need. Across all of these outputs, I can see an approach and ethos that has its genesis in my Opa. Nevertheless, I can’t remember when exactly I learned that Opa was a designer. He established his own practice, Ontwerp de Boer, in the late 1,5$s, but a 1,!$ edition of the Dutch design publication Ons Huis – which was given to me by my mother when I started university – was for many years my only evidence of his work. Across eight or so delicate pages are a handful of black and white images. The first shows Johan as a late middle-aged man, standing tall and in profile, wearing a tweed overcoat and black scarf with a camera and tripod to his left – perhaps taken when he was on a photoshoot for one of his projects. Others in the article portray pieces of furniture that he had designed: a series of elaborate rattan chairs, a glass inlayed rattan co)ee table, a bent plywood chair, a living room suite with a crisp glass dining table, a mirrored vanity unit, a daybed, and a couple of photos of what looks like a hotel bedroom suite (but which I would later learn is a concept for furniture in elderly housing). Another series of images show a more domestic bedroom set-up, replete with white tubular framed single beds and a bunk bed. It is only as I write this that I’m noticing new details, such as the playfully articulated ladder detail leading to the top bunk. When I translate the text from Dutch, I learn that he was described by the writer as “experimental yet controlled, with the innovation in his work only being discoverable by the insider.”

On a drive along the south coast of England in 2$12, passing somewhere close to Littlehampton, I came across a piece of rattan furniture in a house clearance shop that caught my eye. I put it in the back of my car and returned home; it was only a few years later that my mother would recall that Opa had designed similar pieces. Referring back to Ons Huis, cross-referencing

and translating online, I learned that the chair I had bought, referred to as “Model 1&,”, was designed by Dirk van Sliedregt and made in the same rattan furnitureproducing region of the Netherlands, Noordwolde, where my Opa also had designs manufactured. Whilst the many celebrated Dutch designers these producers collaborated with frequently come up in my online searches, my Opa did not. Seemingly, he didn’t leave much of a legacy behind.

My mother, however, has described in detail the loving inventions that Opa created for Geertje when she became ill later in life, which enabled her to live in their apartment more comfortably. In particular she remembers a mirrored device mounted within a stainless-steel frame that Opa a(xed to the brow of Geertje’s reading glasses, which allowed her to watch TV while lying down in bed in a di)erent room. It has also been recounted to me that in the early 1,,$s, several years after Geertje had passed away, my Opa was diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided to end his life through euthanasia. I don’t know how or where he chose to do so, but I do know that assisted dying would not be legalised in the Netherlands for another nine years. Like many of the stories I have learned about him, there are aspects that will remain unclear. When pressed, my mother remembers that Opa told her he was scheduled to die on a Monday at 1$am. She remembers that she didn’t ask anything more, because she didn’t know what to say.

I remember visiting Opa’s home in Amsterdam at the age of 1$, knowing it was the last time we were going to see him. I remember the palette of materials and colours in his apartment – the faded orange that defined the period and the rich walnut paneling lining the doors and walls. Tall articulated floor lamps sat alongside rattan furniture and the deep brown velvet armchair on which he sat. I can remember the light that filtered through the windows of his home, but I can only visualise it in the way it appears in the few photographs I have in my possession.

In my odyssey to discover more about Opa, I decided to return to his former home. I arrived in Amsterdam on a wet November morning, which later made way for snow. In the afternoon, as the snow subsided, I headed to Opa’s old apartment in the south of the city. On the way I unexpectedly passed through the De Dageraad housing estate, a highlight of the 1,15 Plan Zuid scheme which informs the character of this part of Amsterdam.

3&

Designed by Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer of the Amsterdam School, this social housing is representative of an architecture that resonates with me: generous entrances to legible buildings, with an expression of communal stairways and large windows, and brick detailing that is more ubiquitous in the city’s grander, canal-side buildings. These are communal attitudes to architecture and placemaking that resonate with my own practice, and I think of the influence that these gestures would have had on my Opa as a designer, living only five minutes away.

My mother had directed me to his apartment, no.8, Rooseveltlaan. The street is wide, a generous avenue lined by tall trees now looking bare at the end of autumn, their remaining red leaves glowing in the low sun. Looking up the street, I could see a stark stretch of sca)olding lined in a chemical blue coloured tarp, shielding the building. As I counted the door numbers, I saw that no.8--,1 were completely obscured by the sca)olding. There was nothing to see.

I slowly walked around the block, deflated, yet taking note of details such as the way the communal stairs met the ground and how the doorstep thresholds on the ground floor had been appropriated by residents.

Chairs and tables, alongside well-loved pot plants and unlocked bikes, adorned the pavement, showing signs of an actively used and shared streetscape. Eventually I gathered my courage, making my way up the staircase to no.8, and rang the doorbell; waiting a beat, I felt relieved when no one answered. On the way down, I thought about my mum’s recollection of Opa giving away all his possessions in the run up to his death, and how he had to rent a bed from the nearby hospital because he had given his away. I wonder how disrupted the few memories I have of him would be if I had entered his old apartment.

I decided to take the long route back to my rental accommodation, passing by the Stedelijk museum where I spotted two rattan chairs in their pre-1,5$s collection, one of which was designed by Gerrit Rietveld for another Noordwolde-based fabricator.

Taking this as a good omen, I continued walking past the former Institute for Applied Arts Education (now the Gerrit Rietveld Academy), which was built by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, one of the fathers of the Amsterdam School and where I would later learn my Opa took evening classes to become a designer.

Dusk had now settled and, in true Calvinist style, I was greeted by theatrical views of domestic life,

made visible through the large windows of the tall homes that line the streets. I’m reminded of the fact that the view of my Opa’s old apartment was so clinically obscured, while the legacies of his contemporaries have so openly survived.

A few years ago, and after many fruitless online searches, I decided to investigate the archives of the village of Noordwolde, once an important manufacturing centre for Dutch rattan furniture production. Harry Komduur, the chair of this archive, initially told me he couldn’t find anything regarding Opa, but at the beginning of 2$2& he emailed to say that the local Vlechtmuseum, a museum dedicated to preserving the area’s rattan history, had one of his chairs in its collection. Over the next few months, the director of the museum, Iwan van Nieuwenhoven, and I shared information about my Opa, addressing gaps in each other’s knowledge. To further my research, I planned to meet with van Nieuwenhoven and Komduur in Noorwolde. It is a visit fuelled in part by a desire to see my Opa’s furniture in person, and in another, perhaps more highbrow way, inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist’s practice of conversations and a motivation to find out more about “figures (now deceased) who we don’t realize are still linked directly to the living present”.

It is a wet and grey day and as I walk into the village from the bus stop. “Wind Lust”, a tall decorative windmill dating from the 18$$s, emerges through the treeline. The Vlechtmuseum sits in the centre of the village inside a grand 1,th-century civic arts and crafts inspired building that was once the training school for apprentices learning rattan-weaving, and now houses a public library, an internet cafe, and the local archive, as well as the museum. A contemporary barrel-vaulted extension serves as the entrance, which is where I meet van Nieuwenhoven and Komduur.

Carrying out the role of museum director for only 12 hours a week, van Nieuwenhoven has a spritely and endearing energy, and regularly stops to greet passersby.

Komduur volunteers twice a week at the archive, which operates an information desk in the museum. He is tall, calm, and purposefully spoken. Together, they have a remarkable knowledge of the history of Noordwolde and its rattan production, which they share as they show me around the museum. A temporary exhibition tells the history of Gebroeders Jonkers, one of the major rattan furniture producers in the area. Curated by van Nieuwenhoven and his team of volunteers, it

Survival

Johan de Boer’s Conferentiefauteuil 537.

Johan and Geertje.

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charts the Jonkers brothers and their commissioning of leading contemporary designers. To my surprise, Johan de Boer was one of them.

It is here that I see my Opa’s chair for the first time in person, positioned prominently on a central plinth.

It is a beautiful and elegant rattan lounge chair with a striking and repetitive series of sweeping curves that form hairpins wherever the material changes direction.

The chair carries the moniker of Conferentiefauteuil 53- (conference chair 53-) and its wide armrests meet the back in a broad shoulder formed of four curves of bent rattan. I have the urge to sit, but settle for caressing one of its armrests, which carries a well-worn patina.

Despite Opa having designed a number of chairs for Gebr. Jonkers, this is the only piece that forms a part of the museum’s collection.

As only one chair of many in the exhibition, and countless more in the museum’s collection, I didn’t expect van Nieuwenhoven and Komduur to have an encyclopaedic insight into Opa and his life. Yet over lunch van Nieuwenhoven generously hands me a booklet that accompanies the temporary exhibition, and one of the pages features my Opa, with a profile detailing some of his career highlights, including furniture and interior design for a noted photography shop in the centre of Amsterdam. It also notes some of his influences, such as the Italian rationalist and polymath Franco Albini, who was renowned for using simple, raw and inexpensive materials in his designs, as well as for his integrity.

On my way to leave, Komduur asks me on which side of my family I’m related to Johan. After a pause, I remember that “Opa”, the name by which I a)ectionately call him, translates to grandfather.

I have been on a family odyssey to better understand what remains of him, and from disparate strands I’ve tried to piece together a sense of him, his ethos and values. Unlike many celebrated designers and design pieces of his generation, his legacy as a designer is modest, as are the designs themselves: humble and quiet in their focus on function and comfort, with joy in his expression of materiality across a restrained palette of rattan, plywood, steel and glass.

Waiting for a tram that will take me to the airport, I reflect on the fact that our memories tend to gravitate toward iconic designs rather than the lives of the authors behind them, and the way in which the design industry platforms the zeitgeist and the extrovert, allowing some legacies to survive over others.

I got to know my Opa as a humanitarian first and foremost, someone utterly concerned with the care and nurturing of people most in need. It is a principle that guides my outlook in life and informs my ambition as an architect. Whilst my ongoing explorations have shone new light on my Opa’s life as a designer, it is his kind and generous acts as a person that have survived, acts which have allowed me and my family – his legacy – to thrive.+END Jonathan Hagos is an architect and director of Freehaus, currently living in Malta with his family.

Like many others in the Eritrean diaspora, I didn’t have grandparents growing up. Two (one on either side) passed away when each of my parents were children and I was separated from the remaining two until their deaths, by thousands of miles. I can see that in Opa, beyond just a namesake, I had a surrogate for a missing generation in my family tree. Through finding out more about him, I have discovered more about myself, my family, and the fragility of our collective memory.

Opa ensured he left nothing behind. He didn’t want to burden anyone with his possessions or any tangible reminders of his life – this was implicit in the way he chose to die, but also in his approach as a designer, where authorship is only subtly evident in his work.

Survival

Nature Does Not Exist Words Helen Gonzalez Brown,Images Samy Rio

38

Species of humans have lived amongst the peaks and valleys of the Cévennes forest in the south east of France for at least (00,000 years. As such, the forest has long been entwined with industry. In the 19th century, mulberry trees were grown to feed silkworms and produce stockings fit for the calves of European royalty; chestnut trees, locally nicknamed “breadfruit trees”, were used to make flour; and maritime pine trees – which grow quickly and as straight as arrows – were planted to buttress coal mines. But by the mid-twentieth century, French silk had been replaced by cheaper imports; fastergrowing crops such as potatoes were favoured over chestnuts, and the coal mines closed down. For the first time in 1,000 years, vast swathes of the forest were left untouched by human intervention.

This sounds like it would have been a good thing, but it wasn’t. The highly flammable pines dominated the forest, leaving it susceptible to fires. Meanwhile, ink disease, a destructive fungus that has been linked to climate change, killed o) many of the chestnut trees, and the dead were left standing. Three-quarters of the woods and forests in France are privately owned, and without any financial incentive for the Cévennes’s many landlords to tend to the forest, its paths disappeared into the thicket. The forest has become so overgrown that it is now di(cult for people to enter and make helpful interventions.

The fates of the surrounding villages, towns and small cities are intimately linked to the forest; the region’s summer heatwaves and droughts derive, in part, from its poor health. Designer Samy Rio grew up near the Cévennes, and first noticed when a teenager that the river in which he used to swim all summer had started to dry up by mid-July. “As a kid, you just think, ‘Oh, I can’t swim there,’” Rio says. Only as an adult has he considered how the local farmers who use the river’s water for their crops would be forced to dig further underground or to source water from another valley. “It creates this butterfly e)ect, where one thing happens and then the humans try to find a short term solution, but the short term solution becomes another part of the damage,” he says.

“And that’s something which takes time for people to realise.”

Rio is known for his previous work applying industrial manufacturing methods to bamboo to create lamps, benches and consumer electronics out of less damaging

materials. His bamboo bluetooth speakers and hairdryer earned him the Grand Prix at the Design Parade festival in southern France in 2$15, which was soon followed by residencies in Japan and Taiwan researching further into the material’s craftsmanship and environmental context. Rio continued his interest in craftsmanship, industrial design and natural ecosystems through work with the circular design and biomaterials lab Atelier Luma in Arles, where he developed a shelf, a tray, a bench, and a table made out of invasive plants found in Camargue National park in southern France. “I realised after a few projects that something was missing, and that was actually knowing the territory and the place really well,” Rio says, explaining why he wanted to apply his knowledge to a project in the Cévennes, near his hometown.

Rio also wanted to create a project which would develop beyond prototypes or a limited series. “Me alone as a designer, I don’t have the power to come up with a way to concretise everything,” he explains. As such, Rio set up Standards Autochtones, an association of foresters, scientists and researchers, to explore the possibilities of reenergising the Cévennes’s forestbased industries. By revitalising the economy of the forest, Rio aims to take the first step towards caring for it better: creating paths and small roads into the forest so that people can access it easier on foot or by truck. “If there is economical interest in using the trees, people will collectively pay to make the track,” he says. While businesses in the 1,th century were focused on extracting goods from the forest, Standards Autochtones’s goal is to preserve its long-term health by coming up with uses for the dominant chestnut and pine trees so that foresters can replace them with other species and create a more resilient forest. Part of the profits from any successful products will be funnelled back into Standards Autochtones, and the organisation will continue to adapt according to the needs of both the forest and the marketplace.

Searching for a potential use for the chestnut trees, Rio got in touch with Arnaud Mainardi, founder of manufacturer Atelier Chatersèn, whose furnituremaking methods lie at the intersection of craft and industry. Mainardi draws upon traditions such as basketry and barrel hoop making alongside steam bending to create furniture which preserves the dark bark of the chestnut tree and its strikingly pale knots.

“What I really like is this naturally black stain of the chestnut,” Rio says. “For me, it’s what gives its identity

Survival

Harvesting resin from pine trees in the Cévennes to make a bio-based wood glue.

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Furniture designed by Samy Rio and produced by Atelier Chatersèn using traditional methods that preserve the dark bark of the chestnut tree.

Survival

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Outdoor furniture made from locally harvested larch trees (left) and maritime pine (above).

Survival

to this type of making, and that’s why I designed a super simple table and chair.” To harvest the trees responsibly, Mainardi uses a traditional process known as coppicing, a woodland management technique which encourages the growth of young tree shoots that are quickly replaced when cut. To create Rio’s pieces, Mainardi whittled the tips of the shoots into arrow shapes to allow the frame of the chair to join together without glue or screws, and steam bent a shoot to wrap around the edges of the circular co)ee table. While the pieces will be part of a limited series, Mainardi will also add the designs to his catalogue and sell them made-to-order.

But Rio has also been working on another project in Cévennes which has the potential to be produced on an industrial scale. “[For much of the project] I felt like more of an interface,” Rio says, explaining how he got in touch with Clément Lacoste, an assistant professor at engineering school IMT Mines Alès, to explore the possibility of creating a natural glue out of pine resin.

In southwest France, people have long harvested pine resin to create aromatherapy oils, skincare treatments and turpentine, but Lacoste and his team created a glue out of the excess resin which would normally be thrown away after creating these products. “It’s really a collaboration between two regions,” Rio says, explaining how experts from southwest France taught Lacoste and his students how to harvest resin without damaging the trees. The resulting glue can be used to make plywood or particle board, which Rio plans to use to make repairable harvest crates to replace the plastic ones currently used in the region to transport yields of apples and sweet onions.

A central force in Standards Autochtones is Jeanine Bourrely, a forester who has successfully enriched the soil of her land in the Cévennes over the last 25 years by experimenting with di)erent planting techniques, adding leafy trees such as red oak, mountain ash, and maple to protect from fires and encourage more biodiversity. “The way people see the forest is what has evolved the most,” Bourrely says, reflecting back on her four decades of experience in forestry.

“Now we are a society of city dwellers, we have fake ideas about how to take care of the forest.” She gives the example of people who are horrified by the idea of cutting down trees, believing that nature is best left untouched. “We need to find a way to coexist,” she says. “If you give back to the forest, the forest will give back to you.” Bourrely gave her grandchildren small plots on her land and allowed them to choose what

they wanted to plant. “They all went for fruit trees – plum, peach, apple, pear, cherry,” she says. “It’s intuitive for them that the forest should be nourishing for people.”

Forestry lends itself well to metaphors about societal ills: the domination of a particular species of tree has been compared to colonisation, gentrification, and the stranglehold of Big Tech and other monopolies which concentrate power and wipe out multiplicity.

“The forest is like society,” Bourrely says. “The more diversity you get, the better the quality.” Perhaps this is more than just an analogy: the word “nature” is defined as everything in the physical world apart from humans or human creations, yet many conservationists and indigenous groups argue against this division. As the history of the Cévennes shows, treating the forest as separate to humans has only ever led to overuse, neglect, and mutual harm. “When we choose human exceptionalism, we turn our backs on the reciprocal joys of loving kinship,” plant biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her 2$13 book Braiding Sweetgrass.

“Instead, we endure the burden of estrangement from the ones who give us everything we need.” Nature, then, does not exist: we are a part of the forest, and it is not a metaphor but a mirror.+END Helen Gonzalez Brown is Disegno’s assistant editor.

Samy Rio is an industrial designer based in the south of France.

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The Return to the Collection Words Eleanor Watson,Photographs Marco Cappelletti

The redesign of ArkDes’s exhibition halls, carried out by Arrhov Frick.

Survival

I have recently come to the conclusion that curators do not like to talk about collections. Or, more accurately, curators who like to talk publicly about their work do not like to talk about collections.

a begrudging return to the collection is underway. As with most things, it appears to have been spurred by necessity, with the unholy trinity of COVID restrictions, financial austerity and environmental collapse pushing institutions to reconsider what had become increasingly expensive and wasteful modes of operation. Museums large and small have been forced to look again at their own assets, engaging once more with the mountains of content they have been silently storing and think more carefully about what they can o)er their audiences as they seek to survive within a shifting and often precarious landscape.1 Since 2$21, for example, the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Dresden has been hosting an annual summer school inviting design practitioners and students to engage with its holdings, while the V&A in London will put much of its reserve collection on display in a dedicated space in May of this year.

What a time, then, to find myself on Stockholm’s Skeppsholmen island, where I am visiting ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, just as the institution is preparing to put a revolving selection of about 5$$ objects at a time from its vast collection on public display. At the time of writing, the museum has been closed for just over a year in order to undertake a complete overhaul of its exhibition spaces, the new galleries being the final chapter in a multi-year redevelopment project that has seen the institution bring its architectural collection from the periphery to the centre of its activities. ArkDes has one of the largest architecture collections in the world, with current holdings estimated at &m objects. Prior to the redevelopment, only a tiny fraction of these artefacts had been shown to the public, with the previous iteration of the collections display being dominated by exhibition props and facsimiles. The new display, then, is the centrepiece of the museum’s redevelopment, and its yellow Drill Hall, a 1,th-century naval building that houses the display, is humming with activity as the team prepare to share the fruits of their labour with the public. The energy is the same as with any exhibition install – part euphoria, part jangly chaos – as curators and technicians rush about in a seemingly desperate attempt to bring the galleries into order.

In the vast and ever-expanding sea of curatorial literature, for instance, from institutional histories to exhibition reviews, there appears to be only a tiny subset of texts that discuss collections in any meaningful way. In Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating (2$$8), for example, there is but one reference to collections within its 5$ years of insights gleaned from its pantheon of curatorial greats. That sole mention is provided by Pontus Hultén, former director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, who pithily remarked: “The collection is the backbone of an institution, it allows it to survive a di(cult moment – like when the director is fired.” This silence around collections is strange, not only because working with them is at the core of many curators’ work, but also because of the financial resources that have to go into developing and maintaining these assemblages. The UK alone is estimated to care for 2$$m museum objects, and that is understood to be a conservative estimate.

Truth be told, collections are not very sexy. Sure, we’ve all been drawn in by Gursky-style images of endless symmetrical stacks and mysterious drawers full of Tyvek-covered treasures (there is nothing more alluring, after all, than being behind the scenes), but the realities of daily collection care are dusty, relentless and, frankly, a little dull. I suspect that few curators on the panel discussion circuit would willingly devote themselves to looking after hundreds of mid-century home electronics for the rest of their lives, yet that is the type of object many design collections consist of.

I say all of this from a place of genuine intrigue as a design curator who is now two years deep into a PhD about the curation of collection displays. I spend four and a half days a week thinking about and researching design collections, and currently have a folder on my desktop titled “Panton and On and On”, in which I have saved every single record of a Verner Panton chair in a museum collection (spoiler: there are too many). It’s partly a game invented by someone who spends too much time alone, but it’s also been a way to ask myself questions about why and how we collect design.

Change is afoot, however, and it now seems that after what has felt like several lifetimes of blockbuster temporary exhibitions and immersive installations,

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Cynical pragmatism aside, the global introspection sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement has also meant that museums have been forced to reengage with their institutional holdings, and histories, to acknowledge, question and take accountability for the discriminatory and extractive principles on which many of them were founded – a vast topic that warrants its own essay.

The main entrance to the museum’s Drill Hall space.

It is pure theatre and makes me miss my more active curating days very much.

All is calm backstage in ArkDes’s wider Rafael Moneo-designed campus, however, where I am hiding out in a peaceful o(ce overlooking Stockholm’s watery landscape, enjoying a quiet chat with acting director Karin Nilsson. Nilsson took over the redevelopment project following the departure of previous incumbent Kieran Long in February 2$2&, and is sharing some of her hearty pragmatism as we tuck into fika (that’s co)ee and biscuits to any non-Swedes). Redeveloping a museum, it turns out, is somewhat akin to a serious bout of spring cleaning, and a strong appetite for organising is fundamental. “Me and my husband were arguing about things in the attic,” she tells me. “He says, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ and I say, ‘No, no, no – it’s on my mind!’ I am just that type of person.”

Nilsson is remarkably candid in asserting that the current redevelopment was born out of necessity, stating that “ArkDes has a history of being a bit in trouble.” As a government-funded institution, the museum is somewhat at the mercy of the vagaries

of state support, with constant fluctuations in funding and priorities making it historically di(cult for the institution to find its feet. In 2$$,-2$1$, the museum’s remit was expanded to include both architecture and design, although the latter is not represented in its collections, and in 2$13 it was given the further task of “following up the national policy for architecture and design” according to its website. These rapid changes in scope left both sta) and the public unclear about the museum’s direction, a situation reflected in floundering visitor numbers and a loss of institutional confidence.

A renewed sense of energy appears to have been brought in when Long assumed the directorship in 2$1-, with a slew of high-profile exhibitions, while the slow and heavy work began backstage. As Nilsson shares: “A few years ago we decided that we needed to make a big change, and we needed to make the change at every level.”

And so began the deep clean. Acknowledging the scope and limitations of an institution with a total sta) of just &$, the team at ArkDes has set about redefining every line of work within the museum over a period of five years, reviewing everything from the collection

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Above: A 1962 illustration by architect David Helldén.

Left: Display infrastructure

by Arrhov Frick for ArkDes. Below: Post-Capitalist Architecture

TV, by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo.

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management to IT systems, financial model to hiring procedures. The overall goal? To ensure that the museum reaches a sustainable operational model – financially, environmentally, and in terms of personnel – and can continue its work in the long term. All of this has been paired with an overhaul of the institution’s internal communication and decision making processes, allowing sta) to work more e)ectively within an agreed set of expectations and resources. It’s not the sexy stu) that curators like to write about in their exhibition manifestos, but I can promise you that from the trenches of curatorial work – where, as a dear friend once put it, “They give you money for juice and ask you to buy champagne” – it sounds nothing short of miraculous.

As Nilsson says: “It’s possible to do one exhibition on pure will, but not possible to work like this in the long run.”

A quest towards sustainability is underway then, not only in how the museum manages its human and financial resources, but also in terms of its broader environmental impact as an institution. It will come as no surprise that temporary exhibition programmes produce phenomenal amounts of waste, whereas a return to permanent collections is an elegant way of marrying financial restrictions with environmental aspirations. This form of hopeful pragmatism is bountiful in the exhibition galleries, where Stockholm-based architects Johan Arrhov and Henrik Frick (Arrhov Frick) have created a light, airy space punctuated by silver curtains and moveable display furniture. The lion’s share of the galleries is dedicated to an evolving display of ArkDes’s collection, and temporary exhibitions are now changed only annually, occupying a modest space beside “Torget”, a sort of town square within the museum where internal meetings linked to its research activities are delivered publicly. The ambition is for the collection display to also operate on an annual cycle, with all 5$$ exhibits swapped out every year to make way for new fields of enquiry. Discrete spaces within the gallery are dedicated to specific aspects of the collection, whether that be a particular architect or theme, which are also changed annually. The overall narrative structure of the display is fittingly capacious, covering every stage of the design process, from first imaginings through to a design’s afterlife.

Far from typical museum displays, in which a set canon is presented as definitive, and often left to gather dust, the ArkDes collection is o)ered up as a set of prompts for a process of continual public discussion.

As the museum’s chief curator Carlos Mínguez Carrasco puts it, “We want to avoid the museum as a place that is pedagogic and explains to you what architecture is.

We don’t know what architecture is, we are actually wondering what architecture is, and we hope that we can discuss it with the public.” The prompts themselves are pretty spectacular for the museum’s first iteration of this idea, with the usual suspects from Swedish Modernism joined by a joyful cast of previously marginal characters. A Sigurd Lewerentz drawing of Stockholm’s Skogskyrkogården woodland cemetery looks elegant and composed beside a case filled with miscellaneous travel sketchbooks by several generations of Swedish architects; a beautiful gouache painting on cardboard of the 1,3$ Stockholm Exhibition by Max Söderholm neighbours a dollhouse made to showcase the feminist possibilities of communal housing in the 1,8$s.

Throughout the display, the sleek, accepted surface of Swedish architecture is punctured by the brash, messy and lively realities of what it means to practice architecture in the day to day, casting aside the idea of inevitability or perfection that is so often repeated in museum displays. It is like being in a particularly well-stocked sweet shop, in which the overall scene excites and individual items draw you in according to taste. My treat of choice would probably be the cork board placed outside a display focused on architect Léonie Geisendorf, evincing an enviable gathering of the flotsam of a life well lived: a brochure from the 1,-- Nureyev Festival sits next to a thank you note from Ralph Erskine, some nude sketches are surrounded by kitschy postcards from Paris and Venice. It gives a flavour of what the architect’s o(ce must have felt like, but also imparts a sense of curiosity which serves you well when wandering the rest of the gallery.

It is no mean feat to redevelop a collections display, let alone to repeat this undertaking on an annual basis.

But Mínguez Carrasco appears undaunted by the task, in no small part because of the exhibition infrastructure his team has developed in conjunction with Arrhov Frick.

“They told us from the beginning,” he says, “‘We are not going to give you the exact design of how the museum is going to look. What we think we should do is provide a series of tools, a series of modules, a series of furniture pieces, which will be able to accommodate everything you need. But that’s then on your side: you will have to choose the location of those objects, you will have to decide the circulation processes, the lines of sight.’

It’s been beautiful to work with them.”

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Rather than opting for the heavy and extremely high-spec display cases usually seen in collections displays, the team collaboratively developed a series of flexible furniture pieces made largely from materials left over from previous exhibitions in the museum. These pieces – which include wheeled tables and display boards –were produced through a series of workshops with the entire museum sta), ensuring that they met the practical needs of the teams who are going to use and maintain them. Every individual piece can be easily handled by just two people, allowing curators the freedom to update displays without the need for large technical teams. The imposing vertical vitrines for example, which smack of Duchamp’s Grand Verre, are in fact ingenious magnet boards whose contents can be slid out and swapped in a matter of minutes.

Acting as co-designers was initially a little jarring for the museum’s team, who were used to being delivered final products, but Arrhov notes that once they accepted that they were going to be responsible for seeing the galleries through for themselves, “It became so easy, and fun. It just started to create itself.”

The display as whole reminds me of a very high-end pin board, which is perhaps why I find it so compelling.

My favourite part of putting together exhibitions has always been the pin-up, which is the moment where you print out all of your anticipated (or merely dreamed of) exhibits and place them on the wall to play around with layouts. It is a highly physical experience, where items that had previously only been entries on an Excel spreadsheet assume some degree of materiality and you are able to begin to imagine what it might be like to experience them as objects within a gallery. It is a rare moment in which you are allowed to play and, in some senses, represents the truest version of the exhibition: it presents everything you hope to create before the realities of budgets and timelines come crashing down.

The ArkDes galleries feel like a public display of this joyful experimentation, as vitrines can easily be handled and remodelled, while the gallery as a whole can be reconfigured by wheeling all its various elements around.

Plinths might be grouped to create one imposing bloc, or else broken apart to make a pleasing flat field à la Lina Bo Bardi at São Paulo’s MASP. Arrhov has also suggested that curators might want to use the furniture to create hidden rest spaces within the gallery – even within a space like this, museum fatigue is real.

This dynamic constellation, of course, poses interesting questions about the role of the curators,

who are now being drawn out of the archive or o(ce and into regular contact with the gallery space and its visitors as they maintain the exhibits during public hours. This leap out of the ivory tower is taken to yet another level with a new public programme strand titled “Unboxing”, a discrete space within the collection gallery where every afternoon, from 13.$$ to 15.$$, members of the public are invited to sit with curators and discuss collection items as they are removed from storage to be photographed and digitised. Treats shared so far include interiors from the 1,5$s ocean liner Kungsholm; Gunnar Asplund and Elsa Gullberg’s designs for the rugs at Gothenburg City Hall; and a plethora of material that relates to Léonie Geisendorf’s great unbuilt masterpiece, Stockholm’s new Catholic Church.

Described on the museum’s website as its “nerdiest spot”, Unboxing represents an unusually direct mode of engagement with the humdrum of museum activities, and also requires a shift in relation between the curator and the museum visitor. Not only must curators now spend a notable portion of their time within the gallery space, which in my experience they are often loath to do, but must also face their publics head on and engage with views and concerns beyond the usual echo chamber. It is an exercise that will require humility, and one that I’m sure all curators could learn from.

Leaving Stockholm to head back home, I can’t help but think that Hultén may have been onto something in describing the collection as a museum’s backbone – its life raft in di(cult times. Directors come and go, funding fluctuates, curatorial fads change, but the collection remains, a compulsory but often neglected component. It has been ba.ing to me as to how many museum curators and directors I have spoken to in the past two years have openly admitted that they find design collection galleries boring and interchangeable, while o)ering no suggestions for a more satisfying alternative. They are expensive and slow to produce, and so, the story goes, they will continue to be riskaverse and conservative. Yet the e)orts underway at ArkDes suggest that another way is possible, if only we were to choose this steadfast companion as our first rather than our last resort, and see where some poetry and pragmatism might take us.+END Eleanor Watson is a curator and academic based in London.

Marco Cappelletti is a photographer based in Venice.

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Through a Glass Darkly Words Oli Stratford,Photographs Studio Brynjar & Veronika

A pâte de verre window, desinged by Brynjar Sigurðarson and Veronika Sedlmair.

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Glass colour samples, developed at Cirva in Marseille.

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Presenting through a Zoom window on my laptop screen, designers Brynjar Sigurðarson and Veronika Sedlmair are, curiously enough, showing me a presentation of windows.

Sedlmair clicks a button and my screen is filled with colour: a window of raspberry glass rippled with electric blueberry and honeyed amber. Another click, and this pane is replaced with a sheet swirled with glass nebulae of deep violet, into which fold seams of indigo and lime. “Right from the start, we knew this was about colours,” Sedlmair explains from their studio in Immenstadt, south Germany, as the next window appears, its blooms of candied peach growing around sprays of golden pear. “You enter the colour,” Sigur/arson adds. “You don’t look at it.”

Sedlmair and Sigur/arson’s windows, produced under their Studio Brynjar & Veronika banner, are the fruits of a longterm research project with Cirva, an international glass research centre in Marseille. “The biggest part of Cirva is glassblowing, but at the back there is a kind of room dedicated to glass casting,” says Sigur/arson, who began the project during a residency he undertook in 2$11 – an award for winning the Grand Prix at the Design Parade ! festival in Hyères, France. It was in Marseille that Sigur/arson discovered pâte de verre, one of the oldest surviving modes of working with glass and a technique that breaks with contemporary preconceptions as to what glass is or could be.

In contrast to the molten material used for blown glass, pâte de verre is produced from a paste made of crushed or powdered glass that is mixed with a binding agent. This paste is layered up in a mould and then fired to fuse the glass particles and create a material whose aesthetic runs contrary to the brilliance of contemporary glass. Rather than transparent and glinting, pâte de verre is opaque or lightly translucent, with a texture that seems igneous or sedimentary, its firing revealing colours that recall minerals dredged from the earth. “It’s an aesthetic that somehow looks not like glass,” Sedlmair notes, with the technique having been used widely throughout antiquity as a form of decoration, and exploited for its capacity to mimic the textures and colours of semiprecious stone and rock. “Emulation is always the first thought for making with all new materials,” note glass artists Max Stewart and Tone Ørvik in their 2$22 book Pâte de Verre: The Material of Time, “and for the majority

of its 5,$$$-year history, glass’s main purpose was as a simulation.” This, Sedlmair notes, is the appeal of this approach towards glassmaking. “The material can look like stone or have these more milky, mineral textures,” she explains. “In glassblowing this would be a defect, it’s seen as not ‘clean’. But in our case, we really like these e)ects.”

Sedlmair and Sigur/arson’s interest in using pâte de verre and associated techniques is comparatively unusual. With the advancement of glassblowing and the development of transparent glass during the Roman era, pâte de verre’s usage, as well as its perceived value, declined sharply. The ingenuity and artistry of earlier pâte de verre was gradually hollowed out, such that by the Middle Ages little was left beyond its capacity to cheaply imitate gemstones. “Instead of relishing the fact that glass was a man-made material, which could be made to rival the original,” write Stewart and Ørvik, “it was the disguise, the chameleon nature of the substance, and the act of deception that became the principal guiding factor; the mimicry made it appear vulgar and cheap.” Even with a resurgence in popularity during the late 1,th century, when sculptor Henry Cros was credited with resurrecting the technique and giving it the name by which it is now known, pâte de verre has remained in the shadow of other glassmaking traditions. “There’s not so much knowledge in this area,” Sedlmair suggests, with pâte de verre’s aesthetic running counter to contemporary preconceptions around glass. “[We] are living in a curious age where glass’s primary characteristics are considered to be transparent, colorless, and shiny – or variants of those three things,” Stewart and Ørvik note. “[…] In the modern world the ‘glassiness’ of glass is considered its true value. Invisibility is everything. But throughout its own particular history, pâte de verre was not that.”

This contradiction in the nature of pâte de verre intrigued Sigur/arson during his time at Cirva, with initial experiments resulting in Spectrum (2$12), a vase whose glass form sees forest green di)use through smoked white. When Sedlmair joined the studio in 2$1&, the pair resolved to revisit this technique – something they achieved in the summer of 2$1, when they began working with Valérie Olléon, a glassmaker at Cirva specialising in cast glass, as part of a new residency focused on the technique. In particular, the group were keen to explore the colour potential of this form of glassmaking. “It has some sort of a nature to it that you don’t really achieve in glassblowing,”

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Pâte de verre has previously been celebrated for its capacity to mimic natural stones.

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Sigur/arson explains. “In the end, glass is made from minerals; it’s something that [ultimately] comes from a mountain. To close that circle, or to bring out a new nature in this material, we were quite intrigued by colours that are a bit ambiguous. Colours that are like minerals or which remind us of moss or clouds or dirty snow – things that you would not find in a classic colour catalogue.”

Over the course of their second residency, the designers worked with Olléon to develop colour recipes, gradually building an archive of close to 1,$$$ di)erent glass swatches. Each tone is created using carefully determined ratios of coloured and transparent glass powders, which are then fired to produce the desired tone. “The glassblowing colours that you get are already a mix of di)erent minerals and densities, so it’s just about how they react [to heat and time],” Sedlmair says, explaining how the team experimented with di)erent firing conditions to achieve their goals. “Our research was in how you can get colour that is stable, both structurally and as a colour.” While bright, clear colours such as reds and yellows are challenging to create using the technique, it lends itself naturally to more mineral, complex tones. “We have a lot of greens, blues, purples, pinks, brown tones and grey – colours that are earthy,” Sigur/arson explains. “They have some sort of a nature to them that is unusual in glass.” The pair now intend for their colour library to be made available at Cirva for other practitioners, allowing for the survival of the technique in the future.

“It reminds me of alchemy,” Sigur/arson adds. “This idea of making a recipe to create something beautiful.”

Having developed this colour archive, Sedlmair and Sigur/arson’s attentions have turned towards the practical application of windows. “A window is quite pure in its use of material,” Sedlmair says, explaining the studio’s motivation to create coloured glass panes that can show o) their material’s aesthetic qualities.

“We have this feeling that with a window, the colour can become the object,” Sigur/arson adds. As such, the pair have begun mixing di)erent recipes for their glass powders and arranging them in patterns before firing, with the resulting colours bleeding around one another like watercolours. When unlit, the panes resemble sheets of rocky marble, but as light passes through the material, these windows ignite, burning into candy-bright whorls of colour. The opportunity to install these windows within contemporary architecture, Sedlmair says, is their “ultimate dream” with the

project. “At that scale,” she explains, “there can be that feeling of being overtaken by colour.”

Sigur/arson and Sedlmair’s glass windows are not a traditional pâte de verre, inasmuch as they are not made from glass paste, but rather fire their powdered material directly. As such, the windows could, the designers acknowledge, be seen as a belonging to a di)erent tradition of fused glass. “It’s an in-between thing,” Sedlmair notes. “They don’t fall into a clear category.”1 Nevertheless, Sigur/arson and Sedlmair are also clear that their experiments owe a debt to pâte de verre’s aesthetic and processes – as well as itching at its perceived limitations. “[If] the dominant forms of glass are transparent and blown and liquid, pâte de verre is opaque and compressed and fine grained,” writes glass curator William Warmus in his essay in Pâte de Verre: The Material of Time. “These characteristics have in the past seemed like confounding flaws. You certainly cannot make a cellphone screen from foggy and murky glass paste, nor even a window.”

And yet, seen through the window on my laptop screen, Sedlmair and Sigur/arson have done just that.+END Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno.

Brynjar Siguðarson and Veronika Sedlmair are designers and artists working between Reykjavik, Iceland, and Immenstadt, Germany.

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It is worth noting, however, that the category of pâte de verre is not clear cut either. “[Any] definition and perception of ‘one true methodology’ [within pâte de verre] is nonsense,” write Stewart and Ørvik. Instead, over the course of the technique’s history, they argue, “the general processes of pâte de verre making would often disappear below the surface and the glassmaker’s consciousness for centuries before being rediscovered, reinvented, and renamed.”

Even if Sedlmair and Sigur/arson’s windows are not a traditional pâte de verre, this is not to say that they do not have a place in the tradition itself.

Incomplete Words Ama Benewaa Tawiah,Photographs Alfred Quartey

The Limbo Museum by Limbo Accra.

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At least once a week I work from a community library 1.&km away from where I live in the Adenta-Frafraha area of Accra. The commute there is ( minutes by car and ## minutes on foot – at least according to Google Maps. The main road is under construction and, as progress has slowed, the road is dustier than it was before the work started. These days, on my #9-minute leisurely walk to the library, I count more than 1# uncompleted structures on both sides of the road.

At various stages of incompletion, these buildings are intended to be a combination of apartments, shops, and who-knows-what-else once they are finished.

Uncompleted and/or abandoned buildings are not a strange phenomenon in Accra. Like churches, they are nearly everywhere in Ghana; there are even churches that gather in buildings undergoing construction, with the congregation periodically raising money for their construction, the pace dictated by the flow of funds.

For various economic, geological and sociopolitical reasons, some of these unfinished structures have been left untouched for more than a decade. A prime example is La Beach Towers, a 1--storey building that was intended as a luxury beachfront residential project on Accra’s Atlantic coastline. The project halted abruptly about a decade ago. Since then, the building has remained unfinished, and there are currently no plans for its further development. Bright Bessa-Simons, the Ghanaian sociopolitical commentator, researcher, and vice president of the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education thinktank, cites spatial decisions and financing strategies and their attendant problems as reasons why the project has stalled: the project, he concluded in January 2$25 is “long moribund”, and any hopes for its completion “felt now like a distant memory”.

While such structures are common in the makeup of cities around the world, there are variations in the ways they are perceived and hence interacted with.

I grew up watching Ghanaian and Nigerian TV shows and movies that portrayed unfinished structures as places where young lovers would secretly meet and spend time together, away from the prying eyes of their parents and other community members. They were also often depicted as being spots for scheming, receiving bounty, or sharing loot from robberies. And if the communities illustrated in these films and TV shows had so-called bad boys who indulged in illegal

substances, the uncompleted buildings were presented as safe and secure spaces for their indulgence. As a teenager, I had a healthy fear of unfinished buildings, especially ones in quiet areas away from home. My fear was rooted in the idea that abandoned buildings were hideouts for thieves and, at any point in time, they might attack me too, just like the characters in the movies and TV shows I watched. These fears are not unfounded. Unfinished buildings are typically unlit, sport thick overgrown weeds that seem impenetrable, and cast petrifying shadows when night falls.

In sharp contrast, uncompleted structures are home for some people – that is, until the buildings’ owners secure enough funds or eliminate whatever other obstacles might stand in the way of finishing construction. In exchange for accommodation, these occupants are trusted to mind the space in the interim, maintain the cleanliness of the surroundings, and prevent any unauthorised entry and use of the space.

There might be no electricity or running water, important amenities, but the occupants make it work nevertheless.

Growing up, one of my friends lived in an uncompleted building with their family. I remember spending a good number of Saturday afternoons with them in parts of the building where we could not be seen (and, most importantly, heard) chatting about boys, school and everything in between. In some communities, unfinished and abandoned structures become sites for recreation and play. My friend, the lecturer and DJ Kobby Ankomah Graham tells me that in the late 1,8$s, when he lived with his grandmother in the Ayifua estate, down the hill from the Wesley Girls’ School in Oguaa/Cape Coast, he, his brother and cousins found enough room to play chase and hide and seek in an unfinished building that sat across the street from their home. The elders and other community members who cared for them had no concern with them playing there – if the surroundings were weeded, and if they could be seen and heard, there was no problem.

The first time it dawned on me that unfinished and abandoned spaces could take on uses beyond makeshift housing and recreational grounds was in 2$1!. I was in the final year of my undergraduate studies at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and visited the group show if you love me…

(2$1!), staged at the Loco Shed at Adum in Kumase.

Curated by Robin Riskin, Selorm Kudjie and Nii Okanta Ankrah, the exhibition managed to transform a defunct and abandoned railway station into a working art gallery.

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It shifted my perspective on exhibition design, space in general and unfinished or abandoned structures.

Economist Erich Zimmerman’s famous assertion that “resources are not, they become,” became clearer to me then. Two years later, I visited another group exhibition in an uncompleted house in Adjiriganor, an a.uent suburb of Accra. This exhibition, Adjiringanor Activation, was curated by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip, the founders of spatial design and research studio Limbo Accra. The show opened during the day with artworks such as Nana Osei Kwadwo’s video installation inside of a trotro, a mid-sized van that transports people and goods from one place to another within cities in Ghana, and closed late in the evening with a small party. By nighttime, after a full day of seeing Accra’s young and old waltz in and out of the unfinished building, listening to readings by artist and writer Adjoa Armah, and trading stories (some horrifying) about navigating the trotro system and its Nigerian equivalent, the danfo, I was convinced that beyond contributing to the expansion of ideas of exhibition making and sharing, interventions like Limbo Accra’s could also become non-transactional gathering points in a city that is fast losing its free shared spaces.

In November 2$2&, six years after their debut project in Accra, Limbo Accra launched their latest venture, the Limbo Museum, with a three-day event. The museum was founded by Petit-Frère and Grip, along with curator Diallo Simon-Ponte and architect Lennart Wol), and currently lives in an uncompleted house in Labone, which is one of the oldest and fastest redeveloping neighbourhoods in Accra. Like many others in the city, it is a contemporary residential building influenced

by Western architecture, whose owner and caretakers have graciously granted Limbo permission to use it. In its unfinished state, its shape and bare concrete walls present as brutalist. Sandwiched between two finished and occupied properties and surrounded by the same, the museum has no physical collections and may remain as such as it evolves over time. “There is no art work, there is nothing,” Petit-Frère tells me. “It is purely just a skeletal space, a raw canvas.”

The Limbo Museum is not a separate venture to the studio’s previous work, but simply the institutionalisation of Petit-Frère and Grip’s long running e)orts to reimagine and recontextualise the existence of uncompleted and abandoned spaces in Ghana and beyond. Their ongoing Liminal Archive, for instance, is a digital repository of incomplete building projects and modernist ruins from

across West Africa, using photogrammetry to scan the structures and create models of their skeletal frames.

Similarly, their Super Limbo installation during the 2$23 Sharjah Architecture Triennale explored the vast, unfinished Sharjah Mall, while their Duho Pavilion (2$2&) is embedded in the overgrown landscape surrounding a ruin on Grand Cayman in the Caribbean. Slowly and subtly, the studio is exposing the possibilities of such unfinished structures to others. “Most people, when they see uncompleted buildings, first and foremost, they see it as a point of failure,” Petit-Frère tells me. “If you speak to any Ghanaian person, they will not even turn their eyes on an uncompleted building. They will even ask you, ‘What are you doing there? What business do you even have there?’” She notes that the situation means that “it is a huge process in terms of having to re-educate people, having to bring an awareness that these sites are not failures but an opportunity for us to progress in more sustainable and equitable ways.” She considers her practice legacy work and is not looking for overnight success.

The museum has numerous programmes in its future. Later this year, the Limbo Architecture Lab, one such programme, will create opportunities for researching, exchanging ideas, and constructing new viable and just futures for the built environment in Ghana and elsewhere. This iteration of the programme is being conducted in collaboration with London’s Architecture Association Visiting School and KNUST, and its canvas will be an unfinished structure on the latter’s Kumase campus. “The future of [the] Limbo Museum is decentralised,” Petit-Frère says, adding that “there are so many uncompleted buildings in Ghana. There are so many uncompleted buildings around the world, and the idea is to activate them all simultaneously to showcase that the uncompleted buildings can be museums wherever they are in the world.” Petit-Frère and Grip hope that as their work continues to spark conversations about spaces in limbo, others will be encouraged to respond to the call to make alternative uses for them. Their goal, she says, is for the practice to become “a laboratory for not just locals, but also for people on the African continent, and internationally, to engage with these spaces.”

I am struck by the Limbo Museum’s invitation to everyone to dream. I get flashes of privately and state-owned uncompleted and abandoned structures, like the silos and factories I have encountered across the country. But my mind specifically transports me !$

The space has been created in an unfinished residential building in Labone, Accra.

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to the street in Oguaa/Cape Coast that is home to the abandoned John Evans Atta Mills library. The facility sits across from the Cape Coast Castle and was inaugurated in July 2$1! by then-president, John Dramani Mahama. The library has not been used much since the end of the Mahama-Amissah-Arthur administration in 2$1-, and there were reports that the developer of the facility had refused to formally hand over the building due to non-payment of fees.

In 2$23, however, the Ghana News Agency reported that the issue had been resolved – the developer had handed over the facility and the Ghana Tourism Authority, Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, and the Ghana Library Authority were going to work together with other stakeholders to renovate and put the facility to use.

I imagine the library reopened. Apart from its everyday function as a place where individuals can go to read, borrow books and learn about John Evans Atta Mills (d. 2$12), the former president of Ghana, the library could also hold book readings and fairs, as well as after-school and weekend programs that o)er civic education to young and old indigenes of and visitors to the city. In that same vicinity is a massive abandoned tropical modern structure. Erected on stilts, it is popularly said to be the old post o(ce building. When I think of that concrete building, I see children and adults playing and resting in and around it while it remains in limbo. I also see the building playing host to teach-ins on the history of Oguaa/Cape Coast and some of its notable people. Considering its proximity to the sea, it could very well be the starting point for conversations about geography, building design and construction.

Economic conditions around the world will continue to contribute to the capital freezes that stall building construction projects. But Limbo Accra’s successes in exploring unfinished structures as sites for imagining and crafting new possibilities around the world is an indication that their vision is not unattainable. On my walk back from the library the other evening, I stopped in front of one of the unfinished apartment buildings and imagined chatting about media I have enjoyed over a period with others in the neighbourhood in one of its rooms. I saw in my mind’s eye an intimate crossgenerational gathering where people could share their thoughts and feelings about music, films, books, and other phenomena they have experienced. As I looked up at the terrace of the same building, I imagined

learning to dance to afrobeats with others in the community, in a class led by one of the teenagers I have chanced upon a few times recording videos for TikTok. I thought about how wonderful it would be to gather up there on weekends to do nothing but catch our breath, and watch the sky change colours as the sun sets. I think about the other buildings that will become shops and o(ces once they are finished.

I consider their endless prospects as community gathering places while they wait to be finished, and a smile spreads across my face.+END Ama Benewaa Tawia is a writer and photographer based in Accra.

Alfred Quartey is a lifestyle photographer who lives in Accra.

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To Survive Death Words Michael David Mitchell,Photographs Murray Ballard

The photographer Murray Ballard gravitated towards the subject of cryonics – the process of freezing a deceased person’s body at very low temperatures in the hope of later reviving them in the future – through his fascination with Susan Sontag’s concept of photography as memento mori. “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt,” Sontag writes in On Photography (19&&). The objects and portraits in Ballard’s book, The Prospect of Immortality (#01)), similarly hold this tension between preservation and decay.

Twenty years have passed since Ballard first embarked on his study of cryonics.

Looking for inspiration in a university library, he had come across a newspaper article about Remy Martinot, whose parents’ bodies were kept in a freezer in the cellar of their chateau in the Loire Valley region of France. Martinot’s father, who had built the rudimentary cryonic chamber for himself a decade before his wife met an early death due to ovarian cancer, believed that their bodies could be revived by the year 2$3$. When Martinot returned to the family chateau in 2$$! after an extended absence, however, he found that the freezer had failed, and his parents’ bodies had thawed. The emotional landscape of this incident would spark a 1$-year journey across the globe, with Ballard documenting extreme attempts at life preservation, from high-tech facilities to DIY freezers in backyard sheds, from the extremely wealthy to the working poor.

Ballard’s book borrows its title from the 1,!2 foundational work on the topic by academic Robert C.W. Ettinger. In purely speculative theory, once a person has been declared legally dead, cellular death can be halted by extremely low temperatures, and they can be thawed and revived with their personality and memories intact at a later date.

“If civilization endures,” writes Ettinger, “medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other causes of death.” To this extent, cryonicists have designed a system to give the greatest chance to future regeneration, including processes to ensure that dead bodies are preserved as quickly as possible.

One photo in Ballard’s book, for example, shows a repurposed epilepsy monitor, which is normally used to alert caregivers to seizures during sleep. This monitor, however, has been engineered to call a nearby cryonics facility in case the individual succumbs to a more final form of slumber.

Ballard’s photographs preserve an eerie reminder of the very real desire to see our ultimate inevitability as a design flaw in the human machine. Or to survive death. Today, the burgeoning anti-aging industry hawks techniques such infrared saunas and oxygen therapy as ways to extend lifespan, and research is underway into using gene editing tools to delay or reverse our decline. What was once limited to a fringe population has now entered mainstream tech culture through TikToks and Netflix documentaries, with the ultra-wealthy spearheading research into blood transfusions, nanomedicine, and DNA repair – technologies that cryonicists believe could also help to revive their preserved bodies.

For many of us, the idea of freezing your body, or even only your head, is just another weird white guy pipe dream.

(Cut to cartoon Richard Nixon’s cranium perched atop a giant robot’s torso in Futurama). It is one of those ways of thinking that is infinitely attractive to some and undesirable quackery to others.

Though perhaps what is most troubling for cryonic nay-sayers is the fact that converts are often highly intelligent.

Ettinger himself was a university physics professor, and the majority of adherents

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have advanced degrees in science and engineering. “I am convinced that man will remake himself [genetically],” Nobel Prize winner Hermann J. Muller says in Ettinger’s book. “We may attain to modes of thought and living that today would seem inconceivably god-like.” One could argue, however, that the scientific positivist bent is already a precondition for fantasies of techno-utopist kind.

Ballard’s photographic approach follows the deadpan tradition, suspended between medical document and the emotional resonance of an artistic study.

“Keeping an artistic distance was always extremely important for me in this project,” he tells me. He did, however, often feel drafted as the cryonics movement’s uno(cial photographer – and had to deftly balance between observer and insider. “The running joke,” he recalls, “was that I would have to be preserved myself to finish the project, so I could take the final portraits when they all wake up.”

Ballard says that from a technical point of view, Ettinger’s famous quote that “the freezer is more attractive than the grave” does hold true. His guarded ambiguity about the feasibility of cryonics shows in the way he chooses his words during our conversation. Rather than say someone has passed away, Ballard carefully notes she has “completed her first life cycle” and is now cryonically preserved. The wording makes my ears prick up. Has he, too, signed up for an afterlife on ice?

The short answer, he tells me, is no – but nearly so. A wealthy cryonicist once o)ered to sponsor his cryopreservation, but Ballard turned him down. Listening to his story, I sense that he wanted to finish the book first, then weigh the possibility of signing up for immortality later. Considering a cryonics contract carries a hefty price tag, his hesitation suggests a deep fidelity to his process – he wouldn’t let the prospect of a paid trip

to personal resurrection influence the objectivity of his lens.

Now a father of two young children, Ballard explains that he is no longer as personally interested in life extension as he was before. His prospect of immortality is embodied in his children, in the knowledge he passes onto them and in their ability to carry on his memory in infinite ways. “Many people show an interest in cryonics in their twenties, a time in one’s life when this idea seems to be the most attractive. But when they have children, the allure drops o),” he says. “While I don’t have the statistics,” he continues, “it’s very clear from the conferences I’ve attended that the vast majority of adherents are older, single men without children.”

We wonder together: Are they betting on being able to do things di)erently next time? Is cryonics, for some, a promise of a second chance to live life on one’s own terms, having sacrificed too much to the gods of conformity and work the first time around? What pushes someone to bet hundreds of thousands for a slim chance of a second life cycle? Ballard admits that “the idea of coming back to life with my

memories intact but without my friends and family terrifies me. I think the people who sign up are incredibly brave.”

Every photograph in his book could be expanded into a novella: the shed of an undocumented Norwegian national in Nederland, Colorado, that contains a frozen grandpa whose legend has spurred the town’s yearly Frozen Dead Guy Days festival; a portrait of the cleaning lady of 1$ Downing Street sitting on her bed at home, dreaming of future regeneration technology to turn her ageing, overworked body into a pop music starlet; an MIT graduate rocket scientist tinkering with a projectile in his garage, with 1,!$s space-age aspirations of a second life cycle; a box of photos from an ageing jazz drummer who moved all of his belongings in an old van to finish his first life close to a cryonics facility – every single one of them drawn to the prospect of their own immortality. “There is a whole spectrum of personalities that I met during these 1$ years,” says Ballard. And his careful juxtaposition of portraits and objects leaves enough space to allow for individual interpretation of the images, while still telling a fascinating, incomplete story.

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Ballard’s detached, objective lens captures the bare vulnerability of the desire to live forever, leaving even the most cryonically skeptical among us to ponder its premises with a new perspective. His photographs capture human engineering at the intersection of design, bricolage, and existential dread. Death becomes a tinkering space, the body an intimate interface where the machina humana can be repaired as it fails; a continual switching out of replaceable parts in an ongoing battle against decay. Someday, future earthlings might shake their heads at our antique attempts at cryopreservation, or applaud our ingenuity with the tools we had at hand. Ballard’s images urge the viewer to connect to their own sense of mortal dread, and ask the final question: is it possible, or even desirable, to survive “time’s relentless melt”?

Michael David Mitchell is an independent writer living in Lugano.

Murray Ballard is a photographer who spent 10 years photographing the practice of cryonics.

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1 Temporary storage container, KrioRus facility, Alabushevo, Moscow, September 2010.

2 John Bull, a prospective patient, records a video testimony, Terasem Movement Inc., Melbourne Beach, Florida, April 2010.

3 Patient storage demonstration, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, August 2009.

4 Portable perfusion kit, standby team training, Peacehaven, East Sussex, December 2006.

5 Checking Grandpa Bredo’s dry ice levels, Rocky Mountain Cryonics Facility, Nederland, Colorado, December 2012.

6 Cat-Stat, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan, March 2007.

7 Hugh Hixon, facilities engineer and research fellow, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona, April 2007.

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8 Ted, holding a model of the Saturn V rocket at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, December 2012.

9 Flower box, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan, April 2010.

10 Bed alarm system, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan, April 2010.

11 Martinot’s freezer, Le Chalet de Preuil, Nueil-sur-Layon, Pays de la Loire, April 2007.

12 Fred’s suitcase, George’s house, Roseville, Michigan, December 2012.

13 Maria, Cryonics Institute member, at her home in Brixton, London, April 2011.

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L’Inconnue de la Seine (The Unknown Woman of the Seine), Raymond Martinot’s study, Le Chalet de Preuil, Nueil-sur-Layon, Pays de la Loire, April 2007.

15 Fred, outside George’s house, Roseville, Michigan, December 2012.

16 Cryostats #2, Cryonics Institute, Clinton Township, Michigan, April 2010.

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Surviving What?

Words Oli Stratford,Photographs Etienne Malapert and Danielle Caputo

Survival Condo 1, built inside an Atlas ICBM missile silo in Kansas (Image: OutdoorHub).

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Fuck’s sake – I have four clock radios.

As I hope that makes clear, I’m not one of life’s survivors. Should shit ever hit the fan, my priority would be going on Amazon to buy a new fan, and ideally one with multiple oscillation rates for maximal comfort. By contrast, preppers are hardy folk. They don’t even need to buy fans, because they can probably make them out of everyday things such as burlap, felled oak and ponds. I concede that, like many, I may be labouring under certain cultural preconceptions about preppers, which is why it’s so welcome that a central pillar of Koivu and Kugler’s project is a desire to assess the movement dispassionately,2 and to try to understand the sociopolitical impulses that might prompt a person to prepare for societal collapse. “Why do preppers exist?” Koivu asks as she leads me into the exhibition. “It’s a reaction to what’s happening in society and the paranoia, which I think we all feel, that things are going badly.” As we move down the opening corridor – which has been fly-posted with colourful A& posters, each documenting a di)erent historic catastrophe, prophecy of the apocalypse, or event that holds significance for the prepper movement – Koivu sets out a central tenet of the show. “This paranoia has always existed,” she tells me as we pass a poster documenting purported Assyrian stone tablets from 28$$ BCE. “Our earth has degenerated in these late days,” reads their translation, “there are signs that the world is about to end; bribery and corruption are rife: children no longer obey their parents; everyone wants to write a book, and the end of the world is obviously near.” Nevertheless, Koivu argues, the phenomenon has been accelerated by the rise of mass media, distrust of government, and the 2$th-century’s development of atomic weaponry and other advanced armaments capable of armageddon. “Do you know the term ‘snafu’?” she asks me. “Its like a hitch or something that messes up a plan,” I suggest. “Actually,” Koivu replies, “it’s a military acronym that means ‘Situation normal: all fucked up’,” an acknowledgment that in war, chaos becomes the new normal. This, she tells me, was the only brief given to XPO, the Swiss design collective who developed the show’s exhibition design, and Frederik Mahler-Andersen, its graphic designer.

I don’t know how this happened. At the end of 2$2& I learned that my landlords are selling the flat I live in, so ever since I’ve been making an inventory of my possessions in order to prune down what I need to take with me when I move. It’s only by rootling through cupboards that I’ve discovered my surfeit of FM/DAB. As far as I can tell, all these devices have identical functionality, so there was no need to buy at least three of them. The only real di)erences are stylistic, along with the presence of four proprietary charging ports. I cannot find any of the proprietary cables.

Fuck’s sake.

Clock radios are on my mind because I was recently invited to We Will Survive, an exhibition at Lausanne’s Mudac museum, and I’m worried that I, personally, won’t. Curated by Anniina Koivu and Jolanthe Kugler, the exhibition o)ers a design analysis of the prepper phenomenon, delving into the movement’s disparate communities of survivalists, bush crafters, o)-grid activists and retreaters: people who have variously committed to self-su(ciency; living o) the land; the renunciation of society, public services and technology; the formation of remote communes; or else the steady accruement of survival equipment and supplies. These groups are distinct (“There are a lot of niches,” Koivu concedes, “so in order not to be too stigmatising, ‘prepper’ is the overall term we use”), but all circle around the idea of preparing for the collapse of society – whatever external event may precipitate said collapse, and whatever form said preparation may take. There are currently some 23 million self-declared preppers in the US alone, with no reliable data available for other regions,1 and We Will Survive’s ambition is to track the various ideas, making cultures and social contexts that swirl around them. “One premise is common to all survivalism,” writes sociologist Richard G. Mitchell in his 2$$2 book Dancing at Armageddon, a key text for the exhibition. “[Trouble] is coming, but manageable trouble.” I, by contrast, cannot currently access BBC Radio 5 Live. Despite having spent the best part of £3$$ on radios.

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Prepping, the curators argue, began in North America and has since spread from there, but still largely exists only in the Global North. “It’s connected to Western luxury society,” Kugler suggests.

“We have something to lose, so you’re afraid of that, and you prepare for it.” Prepping in less privileged regions, she argues, is simply daily life, whereas in Western countries, “it becomes a lifestyle.”

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As such, they have stripped the field of some of its more overtly contentious issues. There are no firearms included as exhibits, for instance, because “that would just take the discussion to a completely di)erent level,” Koivu explains. “We have a di)erent message – and we also believe that maybe we wouldn’t be so close to the end of the world if we didn’t have those weapons.”

The Prepper Supermarket (Photograph: Etienne Malapert).

A section of the exhibition devoted to US atomic bunkers and the Cold War (Photograph: Etienne Malapert).

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Photographs: Danielle Caputo.

On cue, the space’s lights begin flickering as part of a programmed sequence intended to engender paranoia and discomfort in visitors. It’s definitely working (how did the ancient Assyrians know I want to write a book?) and sets the stage for a recurring theme of the exhibition.

“Preppers react to a situation,” Koivu tells me, “whatever that situation may be, by not trusting in the system.”

For the record, I don’t think the world is coming to an end – at least not in any way that fits comfortably on an A& poster. Although the recent global rise of temperatures, tensions and tin-pot dictators has made the future precarious, my money is still on civilisation’s slow death by entropy, rather than one-o) catastrophe.

In this respect, I don’t believe in disasters, but rather the gradual enshitification of society: death by the slow erosion of public services; the hollowing out of civil liberties; the withering of our environment; the persecution of the vulnerable for the benefit of the powerful; the metastases of inequity, capital and exploitation. This idea, to be clear, is not alien to the preppers themselves – they’re not exclusively worried about extinction-level events. In Dancing at Armageddon, for instance, Mitchell notes that despite appearances, many cases of survivalism may be “neither intentional protest nor practical readiness for coming uncertainties.” Instead, he argues, the movement’s activities and beliefs can be interpreted as a kind of “encompassing game of make-believe”, whose participants are pursuing “a rhetorical means of transforming depersonalized consumer society, rife with mass commodities and mass marketing”.

Prepping, the suggestion runs, may be as much about asserting autonomy, and critiquing the existing social system, as it is about, well, actual prepping.

“Preppers’ fear of the apocalypse can be read as a diagnosis of the present, o)ering a profound and meaningful critique of contemporary society,” write Koivu and Kugler in We Will Survive – The prepper movement, a book that accompanies their exhibition.

“Their actions make visible society’s fears and fault lines.” With this in mind, Koivu and I pass by a Huggable Atomic Mushroom, a plushie polyester atomic blast created by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, in collaboration with Michael Anastassiades, as part of their influential 2$$&/$5 project Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times. It’s a squidgy, squodgy, plastic, catastrophic, atomic collectible, which feels like Dunne and Raby managed to find the ideal metaphor for what’s wrong with our society. Who needs an actual

atomic blast, I think, when consumerism and cheap mass manufacture will probably tip us over the edge anyway? In this respect, “snafu” seems apt: we don’t necessarily require an armageddon event to ensure our own eradication – we’re heading there anyway. “That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1,3, ‘Central Park’ series of reflections.

“It is not that which is approaching, but that which is.”

To illustrate this idea, Koivu and Kugler’s remit for their exhibition has been laudably broad. There are sections, for instance, that document design projects exploring society’s fears of destruction and collapse, with contributions including Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym’s nickel “souvenir” models of real-world buildings connected to various tragedies and atrocities, positioned next to Reed Kram’s unnerving 2&-hour recordings of online security camera feeds. Elsewhere, the show expands its gaze to state-sponsored survivalist schemes,3 such as Japan’s Disaster Preparedness Tokyo protocol for steering citizens to safety should its capital be hit by earthquakes; Switzerland’s network of emergency shelters that can o)er sanctuary to , million people; and Helsinki’s vast “second city” of subterranean spaces and infrastructure carved into its bedrock during the Cold War, which have been newly documented for the exhibition by filmmaker Tapio Snellman. The core of the show, however, is its Prepper Supermarket – a central space in which decommissioned shelves from Switzerland’s Migros supermarket chain have been stocked with products designed for, or endorsed by, the prepper community.

“What I like about all these objects,” Kugler explains as she joins me and Koivu in the space, “is that it’s surely the first and only [design] exhibition you can make where every object is really, really well made and really, really useful.”

Given that I am in the process of clearing out a flat and am, therefore, très au fait with my own accumulation of pointless shit,& the Prepper Supermarket makes for chastening viewing – everything is confrontationally practical. Koivu and Kugler have researched their topic immaculately, trawling YouTube, books and dedicated survivalist blogs such as The Prepared, SurvivalBlog and SHTF Preparedness to bring together some 3$$ 3

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An interesting wrinkle is considering whether these state-sponsored projects can be thought of as national extensions of the prepper impulse, given that preppers typically distrust the state and its assorted systems.

At last count, I own 1! table lamps and one table.

objects that are “super recommended” by preppers, and which might ably serve their users in the advent of societal collapse. There are multipurpose tools ranging from water purifiers to nylon ropes and shovels, as well as a litany of canned goods, medical supplies and thermal blankets. Alongside these everyday objects, the curators have tracked down more troubling specialist products too. The waterBOB, for instance, is a heavyduty plastic bag that converts a bathtub into a water reserve of some 1$$ gallons, while the Safe Living fire evacuation hood is another plastic bag, this time worn over the head to prevent smoke inhalation in the event of fires – a cheap practical way to avoid asphyxiation, which coincidentally looks like it will definitely asphyxiate you. While Kugler and Koivu have smuggled in a few examples of relevant “high design” – Luisa Kahlfeldt’s Sumo reusable diapers and Martí Guixé’s Seed Safe for Alessi, for instance – the majority of objects are practical products of no determined authorship. These objects may be numerous, but they are also designs capable of customisation, reuse, adaptation, or hacking by their users, and which are purposefully limited in their reliance on technology, external power and data infrastructure. I do, however, spot a clock radio, which was designed by Kazushige Miyake and Kota Kato for Muji in 2$1-. It is equipped with a hand-cranked electrical generator to allow it to be used if access to the grid is compromised, and is capable of broadcasting AM and FM frequencies. It does not, I observe, o)er DAB. Miyake and Kato’s radio is amongst the more technological of the show’s exhibits, but still evidences many of the design principles common across the Prepper Supermarket. Writing on his website, Miyake notes that although the radio “certainly comes in handy in times of disaster,” it has been designed “with a view to it being used on a daily basis”. The radio sits upright to facilitate its crank, for instance, but this orientation also allows it to take up a minimal footprint. It has few frills compared to those within my own personal archive of clock radios, but this just means that there are fewer things to go wrong. Its cable, I notice, is not proprietary. These are small design gestures, but impactful ones that play out more grandly elsewhere.

Close to Miyake and Kato’s work, for instance, Koivu and Kugler are exhibiting The Repair Manifesto, a 2$$, project by Dutch group Platform21 that argues for a number of design principles that the curators believe many preppers would subscribe to. “Things should be designed so that they can be repaired,” reads the

manifesto’s second point. “Repairing is a creative challenge” follows, as does “Repairing is about independence”. This sense of creative autonomy, Kugler notes in an essay published in the exhibition’s catalogue, is closely aligned with the ideology of many preppers, who see themselves as escaping the shackles of mainstream consumer culture. “Regardless of which approach they follow,” she notes, “most preppers, according to sociologist Bertrand Vidal, share the belief that ‘the man of today, the western consumer, city dweller, urbanite, [is] a man with a defect, a kind of war cripple or civilisation cripple who has lost his [natural, primitive, wild, etc.] ‘abilities’ because he has distanced himself too far from [his] nature’.”

Although Vidal’s summary of the prepper sentiment is rich in prelapsarian fantasy – as well as being soaked in some nauseatingly ableist language – it does capture something of the infantilising impact of consumerism upon society. With the abundance of products now available in the Global North, commerce has become a panacea for problems that might previously have been resolved through social measures (“Now, when you’re afraid, you go shopping,” shrugs Kugler), as well as generating its own problems to solve through the inculcation of desire in consumers. The result, as historian William Leach notes in his 1,,3 book Land of Desire, is a society whose cardinal features are “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratisation of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” It’s a trap few of us escape. As I have cleared my flat, for instance, I have found a set of cast iron dumbbells, purchased as part of 2$18’s Operation Hot Bod, but which now appear to have been stationary long enough to have doubled their weight in spider’s webs; various air purifiers, mood lights, and other small electrical goods bought to improve the flat’s ambience and general vibe, but which I have since declared to be irretrievably fucked despite their only requiring replacement batteries; and two separate tool boxes, neither of which contain any tools, but which instead house playing cards, a plastic model of a styracosaurus, and a Zippo lighter that I attempted to use to burn away nasal hair. I fully agree with Vidal that I am a man with a defect.

Preppers, of course, are subject to consumerism too. In Dancing at Armageddon, Mitchell notes that “Goods and services abound” in prepper circles, 8!

Constantine and Laurene Leon Boym’s Buildings of

Disaster souvenirs (Photograph: Calypso Mahieu).

Swiss survival equipment (Photograph: Etienne Malapert).

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catering to “every taste, in every color, for every budget, bar coded, board certified, shrink-wrapped, use dated, sized, weighed, credentialed, and guaranteed to perform, function, and please, if used as directed.”

Indeed, preppers in the US spend around $11bn every year on preparing for potential societal breakdown, which shows that the world of survival is hardly divorced from the allure of designed goods. It is a curious entanglement with mainstream consumer society for a group whose position seems to be defined by their opposition to such systems, “but survivalists [also] want something else,” Mitchell suggests. “They want a part in creating the marketplace, in fashioning economic culture, in crafting rituals of appraisal and exchange, a place in the fundamental mediation of value.” To support this idea, Mitchell visits a survivalist meet-up in Colorado, during which he observes that “everywhere among the participants’ accoutrements were innovations, [...] incremental modifications, improvements”, with participants sharing knowledge, ideas and techniques for adapting, optimising and repairing their products. Consumption is present, but not passively. Instead, it is wrapped up in dialogue, critique, and autonomous action amongst a community.

“Contemporary life encourages obscurity, makes messengers of many,” Mitchell writes. “[…] We redirect information, goods, and services. We do not create them. We ladle out the textbook content, bolt on the replacement parts, assemble the units manufactured elsewhere, dispense someone else’s pills, enforce rules not of our own making on peoples not of our choosing. And repeat others’ words. We do not construct culture. At best we maintain it. But it has not always been so.” Preppers, he suggests, seek a more balanced engagement with objects and culture: one in which they also have a creative voice. Throughout the Prepper Supermarket, this voice starts to become clear. “Many of these people believe in collaborating, doing things together, and creating communities where you can do things di)erently,” Kugler notes as we look over the objects on display – practical, robust designs that largely eschew trend, fashion and status in favour of utility and adaptability. “Perhaps,” she adds, “that could help us avoid the end of the world.”

Like I said, I don’t think the world is about to end, and I don’t think I need to start stockpiling survival objects – that will just create more things to shift when I move later this month. In fact, I wish preppers would spend less time considering various forms of robust

plastic bags through which they can circumvent the apocalypse, and instead wholeheartedly apply their ingenuity to the dreadful world as it stands, rather than the dreadful world they fear it may become.

Having said that, the movement’s success in crafting a culture of its own, and the manner in which its material culture already resists the way that things “just go on” is admirable. “I can still see the crazy part in it,” admits Kugler when I ask if working on the project has changed her perception of preppers. “But we do need to think about what we can learn from them. We do need to be reminded that we consume too much; we throw away too much; and we have totally forgotten where things come from. The preppers remind us that for survival, until about 5$ years ago, it was essential to know these things. It’s only our generation, the supermarket generation, that has forgotten everything.” Although We Will Survive is a space full of commercial objects, it is also one that captures its subjects’ interest in how objects are made and maintained, their provenance and purpose, and how they might be adapted to meet di)erent needs. “Is there one, ultimate universal tool that you shouldn’t do without?” ask Kugler and Koivu in the show’s catalogue. “Yes: the knife. Cutting, digging, chopping, piercing, prying, splitting, crafting, carving, whittling, skinning, opening things: whatever unexpected situation arises, a knife can help.” The text is laid out next to a photograph of an 011 Opinel N°$! Stainless Steel pocket knife, which seems as good a standard bearer for the show’s vision of design and culture as any other: a)ordable, practical, with an emphasis on varied usage and the opportunity for adapta— fuck’s sake, I’ve found a fifth clock radio.+END We Will Survive was on display at Mudac between September 202& and February 2025. It will next be on show at the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 202!.

Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno.

Etienne Malapert is a multidisciplinary freelance photographer based in Lausanne. He also works for art museums.

Danielle Caputo is a photographer for Lausanne’s l’Atelier de numérisation.

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Competition and Compassion Words Tiiu Meiner

Changing into uniforms for Multiform, a sport designed by Gabriel Fontana (Photograph: Iris Rijskamp).

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The entrance to Fontana’s Tournament of the Unknown, which ran in Amsterdam parallel to the 2022 Qatar FIFA World Cup (Photograph: Zazie Stevens).

Gabriel Fontana, the designer of Multiform (Photograph: Laurine Gentilhomme).

Multiform in action (Photograph: Iris Rijskamp).

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Twenty-four players stand at the edges of a large hexagon taped onto the floor, divided into three teams of eight. In the centre of the court, a yellow sponge ball rests on the floor. We are waiting for the referee’s whistle.

I scan the other teams. To my left, the light blue team has a few tall, strong players. To my right, the dark blue team looks quicker, more agile. My own team – the white team – seemed well-balanced, a mix of size and speed.

The game is a kind of variation of handball and basketball, but with three goals instead of two. The rules are simple: score in the opposing goals while protecting your own. No running with the ball – only passing.

The whistle blows. Gabriel Fontana, the designer of the game and the referee, signified by his striped uniform, signals the start from the sidelines.

We launch into action. Quick passes, sharp plays, and before long, my team scores the first goal. We exchange high-fives, celebrating the early lead. But then, Fontana’s whistle and voice cut through the game. “Open your shirts over your head,” he commands.

Obediently, I reach for the flap of fabric on my back, peeling it forward. My white shirt has transformed – it is now light blue. “Now go to the goal that matches your new shirt colour,” he says.

In an instant, the teams have shifted. The game we thought we were playing has changed entirely.

Confusion ripples across the field. I am no longer part of the winning white team and what’s more, my new light-blue squad has shrunk to just five players, while the dark-blue team now has ten and the white team seven.

The sudden reshu-ing disrupts everything – team sizes are suddenly unbalanced, new alliances are formed, and the familiar sense of teamwork is upended.

But the real shift isn’t just physical – it is psychological. We are forced to adapt, to rethink our strategies, and to navigate the unsettling experience of being both in the majority and the minority.

Winning no longer seems like the goal. Instead, the game has transformed into something else entirely: a test of adaptation, collaboration, and the ability to understand shifting social dynamics in real time.

That was the first time I played Multiform. It wasn’t just a game; it was a kind of undoing. Fontana had invited me to experience it for myself while he was still developing it back in 2$18 for his graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven. The rules weren’t like anything I had encountered before – fluid, shifting, designed to dismantle the very idea of fixed teams and clear winners. The game went on for four rounds, and with each round, flaps unfolded, team sizes changed and player roles reshu.ed. By the final round, the scores didn’t belong to any one team, but to all of us. Winning wasn’t about dominance – it was about what we had built together.

I remember feeling a strange unease at first. I had spent years internalising the rules of traditional sports: pick a side, fight for it, win or lose. But here, everything kept changing. I found myself on a team with people I had just been playing against minutes earlier. The shifting alliances meant that no one could cling to a singular identity as “opponent” or “ally”. It forced a kind of radical openness – a trust in the process.

Since then, Fontana has refined Multiform into something even more expansive, establishing himself as a designer at the intersection of sport, design, and social intervention. When he talks about it, it’s clear that this game isn’t just about movement – it’s about the systems that shape us.

“For many of us, PE class was a hostile and unsafe environment,” he tells me. “Dominant ideas about gender, ethnicity, physical ability, and sexuality are reproduced in sports and physical education. Research shows that marginalised groups are often excluded.

These moments of exclusion don’t just stay in the sports hall; they shape a child’s well-being and social development far beyond the game.”

His words make me think of my own fraught relationship with sports. I always loved movement, but for years, I approached it in a way that drained me – physically and mentally. Gym class never felt like a place of joy; it was a series of measurements against others. I wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t the strongest, and so I learned to see sports as something that defined my shortcomings rather than my strengths.

Years later, at the gym, I would push myself to the brink, always measuring my worth against those who lifted heavier, ran faster. It took me years to unlearn that mindset, to realise that progress isn’t about punishment but about care, patience, and steady growth.

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But where do these ideas about competition and winning come from? Are they as natural as we assume?

unchanged – raising the question of whether it’s time for them to finally catch up. That said, there are signs of change: as part of a special invitation from Pride House, an initiative advocating for more inclusive sports, Multiform was facilitated every day in front of Paris City Hall during the 2$2& Olympic Games, suggesting that new approaches to sport are beginning to find space within this rigid framework.

While the Olympics are celebrated for showcasing incredible sportsmanship and were originally conceived to promote world peace and unity, they have also been leveraged as tools for shaping national identities. Over time, this has led to the promotion of values that, at times, distance the competition from its original intent.

The Games became a platform for countries to distort competition in ways that would promote strength and dominance as ideals, often aligning these qualities with national pride and political power. During the Second World War and the Cold War, nations such as the United States and the Soviet Union used Olympic victories to reinforce political ideologies – presenting their athletic dominance as proof of moral and physical superiority. Yet these values, shaped by the political agendas of the early-to-mid 2$th century, have distorted the essence of competition, turning it into a means of reinforcing hierarchies rather than genuine human connection. In today’s interconnected world, these ideals are increasingly irrelevant to how we understand collaboration, shared growth, and collective well-being.

This disconnect extends to sports psychology too, which, like the Games, is rooted in outdated military values: discipline, hierarchy, and mental toughness.

Athletes have been trained to endure, follow orders, and fight. Even today, we still “defend”, “attack”, and “conquer”. In this system, victory becomes an obsession, teamwork is about sacrifice, and losing is failure, not a chance to learn.

But I get it – the rush of winning feels incredible.

So, how did this drive become so distorted? Fontana o)ers a more balanced perspective. “It’s not that competition is inherently bad,” he tells me. “It can be a great source of motivation. But when it becomes the only focus, it is a destructive force.”

That’s exactly why games such as Multiform feel so urgent: they help to disrupt the imbalanced focus on competition. Multiform’s structure forces players to move through multiple vantage points, constantly reassessing their position within the group. Power isn’t static – it’s fluid, collaborative, and shifting. Imagine if

I’ll tell you a little story. One day, after a workout, I sat in a sauna with two men I didn’t know. The conversation turned to a hypothetical question: If you had only five hours left to live, who would you want to have dinner with? One by one, they listed their choices. Both of them landed on Joe Rogan. They admired his mixed martial arts (MMA) commentary, his worldview, and his hyper-masculine approach to life. They spoke about him with reverence, as if his values – dominance, control, self-reliance – were the pinnacle of strength. When my turn came, I said Tilda Swinton.

Silence.

One of them snorted and dismissed her as “weird”, then quickly pivoted to Wes Anderson – still within his comfort zone.

I realised then that this wasn’t just about celebrity dinner choices. It was about the worldview they had absorbed – through sports, through culture, through everything around them. MMA had shaped how they saw strength and success. Anything that deviated in any way from their rigid definition of masculinity was dismissed outright. A casual conversation in a sauna, yet it reflected something much larger: the way sports culture reinforces narrow ideas of power, leaving little room for anything outside those norms. I couldn’t help but be disappointed by their short sightedness.

How did we end up this way? I know what Joe Rogan would say – “survival of the fittest”. But this concept has long been disputed by thinkers and studies that highlight how collaboration, not competition, has often been key to human survival and flourishing. In fact, research in fields ranging from sociology to evolutionary biology has demonstrated how cooperative behaviours, such as mutual aid and collective action, are often more essential for survival than individual dominance.

It’s social conditioning. Take, for example, the Olympics – one of our main references for what sports should be. What kind of social values can we derive from these games? “If we look at history, we can see that sports have not really moved on since the first modern Olympic Games, in 18,!,” notes Fontana, “and therefore, team sport games are still reproducing conservative values of an age gone by.” While society has evolved, the Games have remained largely ,2

The visual identity for Fontana’s 2024 En Jeu tournament (Graphics: Tal and Sheona Turnbull).

En Jeu (Photograph: Émile Ouroumov).

Fontana delivering a Queer Sports Workshop in Mexico (Photograph: Jordan Beckett).

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,&

Photographs: Courtesy of Gabriel Fontana.

society were structured this way: not as a hierarchy, but as an ecosystem of shared adaptation. Wouldn’t we be more resilient? Happier?

This is a question that extends beyond Multiform.

Romy Rockx, a trans man and founder of The Queer Gym, the first queer gym in the Netherlands, is asking the same thing. Rockx’s gym isn’t about domination, exhaustion, or pushing to the limit – instead it’s about sustainability and self-awareness. “Before my transition, I’d go to these gyms, and there would be a lot of men taking up space,” he told me. “Most classes were just about pushing yourself to the edge. But why? Life is hard enough. Why am I punishing myself just to get fit?”

That philosophy also resonates with Nike Running’s global head coach, Chris Bennett, whose audio-guided runs reshaped my approach to running. Using the Nike Run app, I listened to him coach me through various runs, with his pre-recorded guidance playing like a podcast while the app tracked my progress. He taught me to pace myself, accept that some runs are hard, and that the message is simple: be kind to yourself.

Many runners see kindness as a weakness, but as Bennett insists, “kindness is hardcore”. To him, true strength doesn’t come from pushing through pain with harsh self-criticism. It comes from embracing vulnerability and showing yourself compassion. As he says, “My job as a coach is for you to leave me a little bit better.”

This perspective helped me learn to give myself grace. Instead of feeling worse after a run, I started to feel better – and it made me want to run more. I began to realise that strength doesn’t lie in relentless competition, but in the ability to care for yourself through challenges. When I embraced that idea, everything shifted. Running stopped being about destroying myself to prove something – it became about working through something, towards something. And it paid o). I’ll never be a professional athlete (not that that was ever the goal), but my performance skyrocketed.

For so long, sports have been built around exclusion.

According to a study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, by the age of 1&, girls in the US drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys. For LGBTQIA+ youth, the situation is even more alarming: The Trevor Project, a non-profit that provides crisis counselling for LGBTQ+ young people, reports that &$ per cent feel unsafe in traditional sports environments. Additionally, the GLSEN Research

Institute highlights how patriarchal structures in sports have created a hostile climate for transgender and non-binary students, who are more likely to avoid sports-related spaces at school than their cisgender LGBTQ peers. Though these statistics come from US-based studies, the exclusion of marginalised groups in sports is a global issue, as many cultures still uphold patriarchal norms that serve to create barriers worldwide.

But movement is essential. It reduces stress, builds connection, and encourages resilience. Strength isn’t just about muscle – it’s about the ability to move through the world in a way that feels whole.

Fontana and Rockx know this, yet the struggle remains. These values don’t align neatly with capitalism, which, alongside patriarchy, shapes the social structures we navigate daily. Capitalism thrives on competition.

It teaches us that success means outperforming, outworking, and outmanoeuvring others. Sports, in their conventional form, become a rehearsal for this ideology. From childhood, we absorb the lesson that self-worth is tied to measurable outcomes – scores, rankings, trophies. The gym, the playing field, the o(ce: they are all arenas where bodies are optimised, disciplined, and pushed to extract maximum value.

Even our leisure becomes work.

In a system where success is often measured by profit and scale, queer sports spaces challenge the dominant narrative. They aren’t sidelined because they lack value, but because their value isn’t easily commodified. Rockx’s gym, though fully functioning, operates outside the traditional capitalist model of rapid expansion and high-margin profitability. What it o)ers is something more essential: a sanctuary where those historically excluded from sports can reclaim movement on their own terms. In many heteronormative gyms, queer bodies often do not feel like they “belong”, and the advice given tends to push individuals toward fitting into a narrow, standardised ideal. This creates a disconnect, where instead of embracing the unique needs and desires of each individual, the focus is on conformity. Rockx’s gym, however, pays attention to the needs of each client, both in group and individual settings. He asks what they want to work on, o)ering tailored advice to their unique bodies. Rockx helps people recognise the beauty in their personal journey, creating a supportive environment where they can find joy and strength in their own bodies, on their own terms. For many, it’s not just about fitness – it’s about

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survival, belonging, and working through the struggles of daily life.

Fontana tells me about kids who play Multiform for the first time. They instinctively try to find ways to win within the conventional framework, only to realise that the game resists such logic. He watches as they adapt – sometimes struggling more or less, depending on their age. “I notice that the smaller kids, who haven’t been indoctrinated by our societal rules yet, have a much easier time with my game and find great joy in it,” he tells me. “However, the older kids, like the teenagers, sometimes come back to me and say, ‘Yeah, it was nice, but it’s not sports.’ I find that interesting – where did they learn such rigid rules for what defines sports?”

Alternatively, Fontana has also received insights from those who often feel left out of sports – people of colour, gender non-conforming people, and female players.

“These groups tend to feel much freer in my games and find much more enjoyment,” he says. “Sometimes they come to me after the game and say they prefer playing this way than the typical sports they play.”

The finissage of the Tournament of the Unknown (Photograph: Elodie Vreeberg).

Looking back, I too had been challenged by what I thought “sports” were. That initial discomfort – the moment my team dissolved, the way the familiar structure of team sports fell apart – wasn’t just a challenge. It was a lesson in adaptation, in embracing uncertainty. Disorientation, as Fontana’s work suggests, isn’t something to fear. It’s an opening and a space of potential.

Sports have long been about direction – who moves forward, who gets left behind. But in a game like Multiform, direction is fluid. The goal isn’t to charge ahead but to navigate, to find a rhythm within constant change. This isn’t just about making sports “more inclusive” – it’s about rewriting the very nature of movement, of belonging.

In the end, what Multiform o)ers isn’t a game with better rules. It’s a game that asks us to rethink what rules are for. It reminds us that every stumble, every moment of confusion, is an opportunity – to see di)erently, to play di)erently, to be together in ways we haven’t yet imagined. What happens when we rewrite the game? When we stop thinking about competition as the only measure of success? Maybe the answer isn’t in winning, but in how we play.+END Tiiu Meiner is a writer, curator and educator living in Rotterdam. ,!

All Eyes Words Helen Gonzalez Brown,Photographs Richard Davies

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Studiomama’s face castings are di.cult to describe, apart from the fact that they are staring at me. Each one is formed of fewer than 10 lines, and while some bring to mind a definite form such as a squid, a frog, or someone with a big nose, others are so abstract as to not resemble anything at all. Yet their eyes – two pinholes – possess a kind of alert curiosity. Even Jack Mama, who created the castings along with his partner Nina Tolstrup, still finds himself locking eyes with them as if they were a real person in the room. “They’ve got a fixed gaze,” he says. “I think that’s what propelled us to do quite a few, because it does have an impact when you’ve got a crowd or a family of them.” He’s right: I can’t help but feel like the line of castings I’m looking at have just been corralled together for a school photo.

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Though it may sound as if Mama and I have lost our minds, this tendency to perceive specific images in random or ambiguous patterns, otherwise known as pareidolia, is actually common. Faces are the most frequently sighted, with a 2$21 study from the University of Sydney finding that humans react to phantom faces in the same way they do to real ones. “You are somehow unable to totally turn o) that face response and emotion response and see it as an object,” the study’s lead researcher David Alais told The Guardian. “It remains simultaneously an object and a face.” Some researchers hypothesise that pareidolia derives from a survival technique. “Human survival depends so heavily on others – whether we need their help, or fear their violence – that we need to react quickly and understand their motives,” journalist David Robson wrote for the BBC in 2$1&. “If we occasionally make a mistake and see a face in tree bark, that’s less serious than failing to spot someone hiding in the bushes.”

Studiomama, however, has repeatedly taken advantage of this evolutionary phenomenon in order to create charming, delightful objects. The face castings are part of a family tree of projects which began with The Off-cuts, a series of creatures made from leftover wood that began in 2$1$. “One day in the workshop we emptied the bin and started playing, and you could see a nose or an eye,” Mama explains. “It just happened spontaneously.” Many of the pieces resemble animals, with a curved piece of wood repurposed as elephant ears or a long plank made into a gira)e’s neck. Others are more cartoonish, with goggly eyes or a goofy tongue.

“When you have kids, you kind of relive your childhood,” Mama says. “[When Nina and my children were growing up,] we would do a lot of creative things with them, and I mean, maybe I enjoyed it a bit too much.” On a video call, Mama holds up two robot-like figures that his and Tolstrup’s daughter made out of o)cuts. (“Mum and dad,” he explains.) But even their children teased Mama and Tolstrup when they were making The Off-cuts. “They would laugh at us, and be like, ‘What are you doing? That’s not work,’” he says.

Yet the project has influenced Studiomama’s more formal design work – Norppa (2$22), a rocking toy for Finnish furniture brand Vaarnii, is an abstract seal made of pine wood that has been designed so the wood grain acts as whiskers, while Face Stool (2$2$) uses wood o)cuts to create a winking face on the seat. “‘Research’ is a big word, but these are research for us,” Mama says.

The face castings were originally derived from drawings

that Mama absentmindedly scrawled during meetings.

“With [Off-cuts] it was really physical, literally thinking with your hands,” Mama says. “And I think that same serendipity happens when doodling.” After creating 3D-printed models of his doodles, Mama brought them to James & Hoyle, a family-run iron foundry in east London which uses sand-casting methods passed down the generations since the Victorian era. “There’s these amazing remnants of the industrial period that still reside in London,” Mama says. “Walking into [the foundry] feels like going back hundreds of years.” The technique gives the castings a graphic heft: they look like sculptural gym equipment, or artistic punctuation marks. While the castings could serve a specific purpose, such as a book end or a hook, they equally stand alone as artworks.

The first castings Mama made more closely resemble masks, but the pieces have became progressively more abstract. “I was thinking, would it be good to take as much as you can away, and see what can you do with the very minimum, while still getting the essence to come through?” Mama says. This interest in pushing the boundaries of pareidolia was developed through Stone Animals (2$2&), a photo book of pebbles which Mama and Tolstrup picked up on walks along the Kent coast that resemble rust-coloured ducklings or sea-worn seals. “There was a lot of joking, because with some of the stones, people would be like, Really? Nobody could see anything there, but I could,” Mama says.

All of Studiomama’s projects that toy with pareidolia make me feel nostalgic. They remind me of being a child, a time when I was more likely to be present enough to spot faces in building facades, and close enough to the ground that I would be unable to ignore the animals beneath my feet. “I lived in a Tudor cottage as a child,” artist Cornelia Parker writes in the epigraph for Stone Animals. “Every night to help me go to sleep, I would count the faces in the cracks, familiar features that felt like old friends.” By playing on the brain’s tendency to ascribe human-like qualities to the world around us, the face castings are a reminder of a time when many of us believed in magic. “What I love is that people make their own narrative about them,” Mama says.

“With this level of abstraction, you just give a part of something, and then people make up the rest.” Each casting, then, is an invitation to play make-believe.+END Helen Gonzalez Brown is Disegno’s assistant editor.

Richard Davies is a photographer working in design.

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Hard Work, Soft Spaces Words Marianna Janowicz,Photographs Stiliyana Minkovska and Felix Speller

Ultima Thule, an alternative childbirth environment designed by Stiliyana Minkovska.

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I have a soft eye mask on, blocking out most of the light. I am wearing my coat, unbuttoned, and my scarf draped high around my neck – chin and jaw buried. A smooth voice with an Australian accent speaks calming phrases through my noise-cancelling earphones. Despite these defences, I can still make out the voice of the cabbie, talking about that time someone gave birth in the back of his parked taxi.

My partner and my doula are trying to politely shut him down. Contrary to popular belief, birth is not just what happens at the hospital. Mine started hours earlier, at home, and is continuing now, the cabbie’s grating monologue forever part of my daughter’s birth story, his taxi part of my labour environment.

In labour, survival and comfort are strange bedfellows.

A 2$2$ article from HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal, which summarises research done to date on birthing rooms’ impact on emotional and physical outcomes for mothers and babies, confirms that “a birthing woman needs [a …] familiar, calm, safe, and secure environment so her hormonal system can function optimally and facilitate a physiological and healthy labour and birth.” More comfort equals better survival. Sometimes, however, comfort and survival pull in opposite directions and can make opposing demands. Design for survival, when applied automatically, can introduce fear and unfamiliarity, and impede the physiological process of birth.

Birth is an experience that touches all of us at least once, as pointed out by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, the authors of Designing Motherhood, a 2$21 book about the objects that have defined human reproduction. Yet the environments and material culture of birth remain relatively unexplored within the fields of design and architecture, a gap which the book and its accompanying exhibition and design curriculum address. Millar Fisher and Winick faced a great number of rejections before their first show at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum in 2$21. “It begs the question, who decides what matters?” Millar Fisher said in a 2$21 interview with The Guardian. “I have yet to meet a museum director who has ever used a menstrual cup or tampon or breast pump. Those are not the experiences of most people who are in positions of power.”

But it seems like motherhood is finally beginning to enjoy its cultural moment. The Designing Motherhood exhibition is now touring the US and Europe, while Acts

of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, an exhibition curated by critic Hettie Judah, fills a similar niche in art. Rachel Cusk’s frank memoir A Life’s Work, which details the author’s early experiences of motherhood, including the boredom, despair and drudgery, caused an uproar when it was published in 2$$1. Today, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell’s 2$23 translation of Olga Ravn’s novel Mit arbejde (My Work), which largely centres on a young mother’s mental health struggles, has won awards and received critical acclaim.

Despite realistic depictions of motherhood becoming more commonplace in art and culture, many of the material challenges of childbirth have remained or intensified. According to a 2$2& MBRRACE-UK report, the rates of maternal death during pregnancy or shortly after birth in the UK have risen by 53 per cent for the period 2$2$-22 compared to the previous three-year reporting period, reaching the highest rate in almost 2$ years. With the report also finding that the risk of maternal death is statistically three times as likely for Black mothers and twice as likely for Asian mothers in the UK, the design of our birth spaces, systems and experiences is as ripe for review as ever. While the data includes a combination of complex factors, the knowledge that more comfort in birth spaces equals better survival should be a prompt for designers and healthcare providers to reconsider the importance of design for labour and the postpartum period.

In surveying some of the spaces, furniture, fluids and textiles surrounding birth, I have found various contemporary and historical examples of helpful, strange and hostile design. While researching this article I spoke to a number of people who have recently given birth about their experiences, and their voices are included in the following paragraphs. No singular narrative emerges in these stories. Despite the modern drive to make birth safer and more regulated (most often in the hospital), notions of comfort, safety and familiarity remain personal and slippery.

The room The spaces of childbirth, just like the experience of childbirth, are largely inaccessible before you are actually in labour. Throughout pregnancy, I was seeing di)erent midwives in di)erent rooms and attending scans in another facility altogether. Since the Covid-1, pandemic, the hospital where I was due to give birth stopped o)ering in-person tours of its birthing spaces for expecting parents. Instead, we were directed to a

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YouTube video. The clip mentioned that the hospital’s midwife-led unit is suitable for those with uncomplicated pregnancies and those wishing to have a “home away from home” experience – if your home features ceiling tiles, photo wallpaper with seaside sunsets and colourful projecting lights, that is.

With this in mind, I have been asking mothers I know about what they remember from the spaces in which they have birthed. Most of the time, the memories are partial and highly sensual: the bright lights, the sound of medical instruments, the music, the feeling of being outnumbered by medical sta). There is a reason most mammals will go to a quiet dark corner to labour: oxytocin, the hormone that causes contractions, requires darkness and the feeling of safety to be released. The bright lights of a hospital room, where the vast majority of births take place in the UK, tend to trigger the production of adrenaline, which can paradoxically slow down labour by inducing the fight or flight response.

Sometimes it is less obvious spaces that are the most comfortable. “I spent a lot of time in the bathroom during the birth (which totalled 1$ hours and was my first). One thing afterwards that surprised me was how odd this seemed to my partner,” one friend told me.

“He was totally unprepared for the fact that a lot of time birthing a child is actually spent in the bathroom.

He thought it was exceptional and it is not.” Looking back, she wished that the bathroom had the LED mood light instead of the birthing room.

The simple relationship between furniture and space can dictate how a room is perceived and used, and how the birth itself will unfold. The bed, for example, asks you to lie down. If the bed takes up most of the space in a room, the scenario is already laid out. For my friend Nour, the huge room with a king-size bed in the midwife-led unit, where she could sleep next to her partner after a shot of pethidine, stood in stark contrast to the hospital room to which she was later transferred. “The birthing suite was set up for comfort, the hospital room was set up for procedure,” she said.

“The space was tiny and the bed took up most of it.”

scenarios. Today, many birthing people want more autonomy and freedom during their labour, a demand that is increasingly being met by birthing environments through the introduction of pools, birth balls, stools and other forms of furniture. The need for familiarity during birth is acknowledged by healthcare providers, and customisation of the environment is allowed and sometimes encouraged. The bags people bring with them to the hospital grow bigger and carry various home comforts: clothing, night lights, earplugs, pictures.

“It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours,” says Jordi, the protagonist’s best friend in Miranda July’s 2$2& novel All Fours. Everyone assumes doggy style is the most vulnerable, she explains, but it is actually the most stable position. Using a skeletal model of a pelvis, the midwife in my prenatal classes explained how an upright position is more conducive for vaginal birth than the supine one favoured by hospitals not so long ago. This way, gravity is on your side, she said, plus the upright position enables a forward tilt of the pelvis which gives the baby’s head more clearance by guiding it away from the mother’s spine and tailbone.

Prior to giving birth, I did not understand the urgent need to move that I read about in other women’s birth stories. I now know what it feels like to experience your body calling so intensely – surges like underground, involuntary eruptions – and to not be able to respond.

The “soft animal of your body”, as Mary Oliver described in her poem ‘Wild Geese’, wants to turn, twist, move, to comfort itself and ease the pain. In that sense, physiological birth can be a lot like sex: messy, carnal and intuitive.

I spent long stretches of time on all fours and similar positions during my labour. I remember my knees and elbows becoming painful from pressure as I transitioned from leaning against the bed’s adjustable backrest to kneeling on the floor with my arms on the bed. The freedom to move ended when the doctors entered the room and instructed me to lie on the bed with my legs in stirrups. For my friend Helen, the bed in the prenatal ward became a spatial condition that clearly set up the hierarchy between her and medical sta). “I was lying in a bed, waiting for the hormonal induction to start the birth. It wasn’t working and I wanted a c-section,” she told me. “A group of male doctors entered and, while towering over me, spoke condescendingly, trying to dissuade me. They were referring to my ‘future children’ a lot.”

The furniture The hospital bed is the fulcrum, and often the bone of contention, of birthing spaces. It is a prescriptive piece of furniture, the design clearly communicating what it demands from the patient - to lie down. Giving birth, with its intensity, unpredictability and immense inwardfocus, rarely complies with such straightforward 1$8

Minkovska’s collection was donated to St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where it is currently used for training and educational purposes.

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The collection is made up of three furniture pieces, which each allow for different positions and uses for both the birthing person and a partner.

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Designer and architect Stiliyana Minkovska, who specialises in maternal healthcare, is motivated by providing greater comfort and wellbeing to the birthing mother. Her set of birthing furniture, Ultima Thule, encourages a range of positions, providing a greater freedom to seek relief during labour. Minkovska’s pieces remind me a little bit of spongy play equipment – soft, unthreatening, bemusing – and perhaps through those qualities, rather than any clear use or function, they communicate comfort and safety. Minkovska’s furniture is composed of layers of soft material and provides di)erent ledges and levels on which to rest or lean; one of them accommodates a birthing partner in a supportive location behind the birthing person. Devised to aid various active and restorative positions, the furniture, importantly, does not present itself as being medical equipment. For Minkovska, this is part of the wish for birthing spaces to be “a place where birth is guided rather than controlled,” as she explains in an interview with London’s Design Museum, where she developed Ultima Thule while a designer in residence in 2$1,.

Water “We were set up for a water birth at home. My partner went to pick up the birthing pool from another house.

The couple said they never got to use it and they also passed him some towels and rags, ‘in case it floods,’ they said. We never got to use the pool either. So eventually another husband came to pick up the pool and the rags.”

As Millar Fisher and Winick write in Designing Motherhood, water has been used during labour for centuries – whether it was as a hot compress, or birthing by sacred rivers and other bodies of water. A birthing pool as a place of delivery and a method of pain management, however, is a relatively modern invention.

The pool was first introduced in the 1,-$s and initially envisioned for people to spend time in during labour and not as a place to actually push. Since then, however, researchers have found that birthing in water is safe, e)ective and can also help manage the pain, with some studies indicating a real impact on the length and progression of birth. “The visual image of an uninterrupted flow of liquid can have a powerfully positive psychological e)ect, and the sense of weightlessness that comes with immersing oneself in water can be used to encourage intuitive movement and postures,” Millar Fisher and Winick write.

In the stories of the mothers I know, water usually features in one form or another – a compress applied to the forehead, a bottle with a straw for drinking without needing to tilt one’s head, a shower head sprinkling warm water on the lower back, and finally the birthing pool. One of those women told me about her birthing secret – a waterproof clitoris massager, to be used in the shower to stimulate the release of oxytocin, the hormone that causes contractions.

Textiles “Shortly after the birth of our daughter, our life revolved around the bed. I would be stuck in the sheets, nursing in the morning while my partner brought in breakfast on a tray. We quickly learned to put down an additional sheet or towel on the bed before laying our newborn on it. The laundry was mounting faster than we could get to it.”

In My Work, Ravn’s main character Anna speaks about living in a world of textiles, as she meticulously sorts, washes and dries her new baby’s garments. In pre-modern England, the gossip, which was a group of women supporting the birthing mother, began collecting linen for a delivery long before the baby was due. Architectural historian Emma Cheatle writes about the process in her 2$23 book Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity. In the 18th century, she notes, nothing could be wasted and it was nearly impossible to get extra fabric during the process, so an extensive quantity was procured in advance. The cloths were used for bedding, to absorb bodily fluids, to bind and aid childbirth during a breach labour, and to swaddle both the mother and the baby after birth.

Today, the soft world of textiles in the postpartum period is overshadowed by contemporary research on SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which identifies them as potentially lethal. The traditional baby blanket – a sentimental mainstay of many hospital bags – has been replaced by a tiny, tight sleeping bag, which cannot accidentally envelop and su)ocate the infant.

The Lullaby Trust, a charity educating on safer sleep, recommends newborn babies are put to bed on their backs, in an empty cot. Any additional objects, or even the soft flesh of their parents, are deemed to be potentially deadly to the child. Soft padding, so called “crib bumpers”, placed in the cot by parents wanting to provide extra comfort for their babies are also forbidden, as the need for comfort is superseded by the will for survival.

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We claw back what we can I never made it to the pool in the midwife-led unit and I did not get the chance to enjoy the sunset wallpaper featured in the YouTube video tour. I gave birth on the labour ward, negotiating the hospital bed, the IV stand and the continuous foetal heart rate monitor, which, despite being wireless, kept disconnecting, prompting the midwife to fiddle with the attachment on my belly every now and again. Still, I was lucky to deliver a healthy baby, and to be discharged after only one night in the postnatal ward, where a paper curtain separated me, my partner and our newborn daughter from five other analogous families.

Increasingly, we claw back more comfort from hospital spaces – birth playlists, strings of fairy lights, soft bath robes, pieces of furniture and, last but not least, birthing partners being dragged back and forth, in a bid to make the birthing environment more comfortable and conducive. The feminine, airless and dark room of the 18th century, as described by Cheatle, is now a much brighter hospital space where male birthing partners are needed and welcome.

The spatial separation of home comforts and the medical care available in the hospital seems di(cult to resolve. But if the experiences of birthing people point to anything, it is that birth does not abide by everyday design norms, such as having a separate bathroom.

What could it look like for entire birth spaces to not comply to any specific category of rooms we are used to? If they were designed like Minkovska’s idiosyncratic pieces of furniture, maybe they could become cavelike, with pools and water-jets, soft textiles and a range of environments and temperatures. They could be safe, comfortable and fun, without compromises, and provide a worthy and helpful backdrop to one of the hardest, and sweetest, acts of labour.+END Marianna Janowicz is an architect and researcher who lives in London.

Stiliyana Minkovska is an architect, design researcher, and healthcare innovator focused on inclusive, equitable and human-centred design.

Felix Speller is an international photographer with a focus on design.

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Threading History Words Bisila Noha,Photographs Djibril Drame

The textile work of Senegalese-French artist and designer, Aissa Dione.

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When I first came to Dakar in November #0#3, I reached out to textile designer Aissa Dione through a friend. As a ceramicist who loves crafts, art and the sea, I felt I needed to visit the city and learn about the craftspeople working there. In response, Dione welcomed me into her home. We talked about ceramics, art and history, all while having lunch in her garden: a little oasis planted with trees and vegetables in the middle of Senegal’s hectic, dusty capital city. Dione is tall and energetic; her gaze projecting a blend of joviality and experience. She carries herself like someone who has seen a lot.

of ourselves, we search to feel like we fully belong; for home, whether it be a new one or an extended version of what we have lived so far.

Today, Dione seems to have found that home in textile design, but her path there has not been entirely straightforward. While establishing herself in Dakar, her resistance towards European art traditions saw her instead making works using batik, a traditional method of decorating fabric using hot wax and dye. She sold these works as paintings for about 1$ years, visiting local companies to get new clients. During one of these visits, a company told her that it didn’t want art, but was looking to re-design all its o(ces. “I said OK… I can do it,” she tells me, while bursting out in laughter.

Searching for local materials to use for the project, Dione turned to her grandmother, who managed weavers in Dakar for a living. These weavers made traditional Senegalese textiles, including Manjak cloth, which had originally arrived in the country with the Manjak people from Guinea-Bissau, who brought along an intricate weaving process that dates back to the 15th century. Manjak cloth features patterns woven with short lines of thread, which are repeated throughout the piece. These patterns can range from simple straight lines travelling across the fabric, through to mesmerising geometrical compositions that look like hidden messages in an ancient script.

The traditional hand looms used by the weavers of Dione’s grandmother, however, were only between 15 and 2$cm wide. In order to make the lampshades, sofa upholstery and wall coverings required for the project, Dione needed to widen them – something she had promised in her design proposal before knowing whether it was technically possible. The first weavers she approached refused to change the size of their looms, and only her grandmother’s colleague François Nango would accept the challenge, widening his looms to ,$cm. Nango soon recruited his brother and cousin to work on the project with him, and so Dione’s company was born – with weavers who are still working with her today.

That business is now based in an atelier in the HLM area of Dakar. Once my eyes adjusted to the view in the space – a room full of looms with very defined paths to move around – and my ears got used to the deafening, yet fantastic, sound of the looms in action, the first thing I noticed were weavers working in pairs. Even though Dione’s looms are larger than conventional Senegalese looms, they are still operated in the traditional way,

This may be true. Dione is a designer who has dedicated decades to trying to preserve the heritage of Senegal’s traditional textiles, as well as working to reignite the country’s wider textile industry and repair the damage wreaked by the import of cheap fabrics and garments.

Her products, which range from furniture to fashion, are aesthetically simple and thus, to me, highly elegant – a beautiful mix of tradition and contemporary design.

“In Senegal we have many craftspeople so it is easy,” she tells me. “If you want to develop something, it is not as di(cult as if you were in another country.”

So when I returned to Dakar in November 2$2&, as part of a five-month journey to participate in art residencies across Senegal and Nigeria, and gain a deeper understanding of these countries’ craft traditions, I resolved to visit one of her ateliers. During that visit, I bought a boubou robe from her collection. I remember how it felt as I first tried it on. The cotton was light and felt amazing on my skin. The quality of the textiles and the making was palpable. The design features blue, black, and green shades of fabric, all touched by a subtle pattern of horizontal lines which make the garment special while also remaining simple. I have not stopped wearing it since.

When looking for a story about survival, Dione’s is one.

She was born in France in the 1,5$s, but came to Senegal in the early 1,-$s in search of her father. Having trained in fine art, Dione initially worked in her new country as a painter, albeit one with a vision that would define her later career in textiles: a focus on local materials.

“I was very angry at Europe for di)erent reasons and even though I was a painter, I didn’t want to use painting [techniques] coming from Europe,” she tells me. As someone who has also grown up between heritages, I can understand her quest. As we try to make sense 11&

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Looms in Dione’s HLM atelier (above), while Dione herself stands outside her second space in Pikine (right).

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with two people working together to hand-weave the threads. What’s more, all of the workers are men, whereas the o(ce is run by women. This is a central element of the craft’s survival at the hands of Dione: she has established her business in harmony with traditional West African structures of weaving. Men make and women manage them – just like how her grandmother managed weavers in her workshops.1 Thanks in part to the fact that Dione is following local customs in her production, the sons of the weavers she has been working with for decades are now learning and joining the business. Similarly, two of Dione’s daughters have become involved in the management side of her business. So when I ask her about the future of weaving in Dakar, there is no fear or doubt in her mind. It will continue. “It is also a question of salaries,” she tells me. “If people have a good salary, the work is not too complicated and the atmosphere is OK, people will want to stay.” Dione employs all her weavers full-time, o)ering a level of job security that is rare for craftspeople who typically work to commission. It is part of her strategy to keep the industry going – after all, who would want to work on something that is not stable? As the craftsmen make the textiles, she makes sure the works are sold and the orders keep coming in, and so everyone remains in business.

Dione seems to have found a balance between tradition and modernity, which applies not only to her business mindset, but also her designs. Originally, she says that she was mainly inspired by Japanese textile aesthetics, which brought a more sombre and quiet energy to her works; the textiles that Dione created for luxury French fashion brand Hermès in 1,,-, for example, feature dark blue, grey and camel colours overlaid with white threads to create geometric patterns.

This source of inspiration eventually led to Dione’s ongoing collaboration with Okujun, a fabric supplier based in Japan. Since 2$1,, Dione has created three 1

As I keep discovering during my travels in West Africa, many of the craft environments that are thriving today seem to be those which have maintained the traditional gender roles ascribed to them, from all-female pottery communities in Nigeria, to all-male weaving teams in Senegal. These divisions perhaps derive from the fact that pottery is easier to make at home alongside child-rearing and housework, while weaving requires more space. Witnessing these di)erent communities has challenged my own views – coming from a Western upbringing, it is di(cult to see women discouraged from participating in weaving and not interpret it as misogyny.

However, I have loved visiting all-female pottery communities and witnessed first-hand how spaces reserved for particular communities can bring many benefits.

collections of silk fabrics created using hand-woven techniques in both Japan and Senegal, combining the expertise and aesthetic traditions of both countries.

Over time, however, Dione’s palate and aesthetic have broadened and become bolder – her 2$2$ collection, for example, includes opulent dark red and gold fabrics, in additon to earth-toned ones. “I have thousands of references that we haven’t exploited yet, and every day we are forced to use new ones,” Dione says, explaining that some of her designs have been inspired by external commissions. This is a consistent thread in Dione’s story: rooted in traditional techniques, but still looking for new ways to make textiles for today.

In working within Senegalese textiles, Dione has faced numerous challenges, not least the fact that their history goes hand in hand with the history of cotton. When Dione first started her business in 1,,2, there was a spinning industry in Senegal which provided easy access to cotton thread. “We used to get up, go next door and buy thread from Senegal, because we had the industries,” she tells me. “Same for all countries in West Africa.”

Senegal’s spinning industry had been built by the French while the country was under colonial rule, with textile manufacturers such as La Cotonnière du Cap-Vert (CCV) established in 1,51. “Then the French decided to move on from spinning and sold it to the Lebanese,” Dione summarises. This situation was compounded by an influx of Chinese goods in the early 1,,$s. Manufacturers struggled to compete with the new flurry of imports, and soon stopped spinning their own thread in favour of importing it from China instead. “The threads began breaking very badly in the looms,” Dione tells me, “which is how we discovered [our supplier] had changed to Chinese threads.”

After Senegal’s spinning industry entered its decline, many of its factories closed and their machines were broken down and sold for parts, Dione tells me. The more I learn about the perils of the textile industry, the more I realise that it represents the perfect channel for understanding how the world works: geopolitics, global markets and capital, and the ongoing impact of all of these on the African continent. The drama of Senegal’s cotton industry is the drama of a globalised world. “You can’t imagine the cotton situation,” she tells me. “This was awful because my business had started to go and I had nearly 12$ people. It was between 2$$$ and 2$1$. It was annus horribilis,”

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she adds, able to laugh about it now. As Senegal’s textile industry collapsed, Dione went in search of thread that would match the quality her work requires, looking at suppliers from Turkey to Egypt. In 2$1$, she found a small enterprise in Egypt, El Shehab Merdye, which now supplies threads to Dione and even dyes them in bespoke colours.

This collapse had another corollary, however: from the early 2$$$s, Dione started to purchase mechanical looms from the -$s and 8$s, sourced chiefly from within Senegal, where the textile industry was dwindling, and from Lyon, France, where factories were switching to modern digital looms. “We are using knowledge generated from craft together with the same thread, the same colours, the same aesthetic, but with a slow industry,” she tells me. It is something I come to understand as I wear my boubou – it feels handmade and looks hand-woven, yet was produced on one of these mechanical looms, with the speed at which these operate (compared to the more languorous pace of hand-weaving) allowing for the price to drop.

It is, Dione hopes, a game-changer, as “we could open a new production and make our aesthetic a)ordable to more people.” In this respect, the mechanical looms Dione has salvaged are enabling a homecoming for locally-produced textiles. Despite the fact that Senegal is a cotton producer, creating some 2&,$$$ bales between 2$23 and 2$2&, the country still imports most of its textiles. “Everyone wears polyester,” Dione tells me. “In hospitals, they have nylon sheets, when Senegal is producing cotton[…] and sheets are the easiest product one can do. Can you imagine?”

In order to bring cotton into everyday garments, Dione recently launched a new fashion line made using the old mechanical looms – the collection from which my boubou is drawn. “Thirty years ago, people here didn’t trust the making of Senegal,” she tells me. It is a trend that can be seen elsewhere too – as foreign goods arrive into a country, we embrace the new and disregard what has been traditionally and locally made.

For a long time, Dione tells me, foreign clients were the only ones who were interested in her work and who could a)ord to buy it – given that Dione employs her workers full-time, her production costs have always been relatively high, something which has been compounded by factors such as governmental taxes for internal commerce. “In order to develop, I had to look for markets outside [the country],” she says, a quest which has led to collaborations with European

An upholstered chair in Dione’s studio.

fashion brands such as Christian Lacroix and Fendi.

“Now [Senegalese culture] is really changing,” she says. “People are looking for makers who can o)er good quality, aesthetic products that are interesting for their homes.” With her market and brand established, and the potential of the mechanical looms to help lower costs, Dione can now “go back and o)er [to] the local market.”

When I thought I had seen everything during my visits to her atelier in HLM, Dione suggests a trip to Pikine, a city to the east of Dakar. Here, Dione has taken over a section of what was once the largest textile factory in Senegal, which has now housed her mechanical looms and carpentry and upholstery workshops since the beginning of 2$2&. As I come in, my heart stops.

The smell of wood – Senegalese, of course – the tools, 118

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the mix of materials and crafts and the deafening sound of the looms working – all touched by the beautiful light coming in through the ceiling windows. Dione’s spaces are part industry, part museum, which makes them all the more special. One of the new looms in Pikine is from a factory in Lyon, dating from the 1,5$s.

The loom is currently non-functional, but Dione is now working with local engineers and mechanics to restore it to use. She tells me that levels of manufacturing skill are high in Senegal and, in order to avoid having to import spare parts for these ancient looms, local makers can make replicas instead. In so doing, more local mouths are fed, and more local workers remain in business.

Dione’s craft is not only impacted by global markets, however, but also by the remnants of Senegal’s colonial ties with France. The new Senegalese government, which was elected in spring 2$2& under President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko of the Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF) party, seems to be working to change this post-colonial relationship, however, and in December 2$2&, the Minister of Industry and Trade announced that the country plans to ban both the import of secondhand clothing – which amounts to 18,5$$ tonnes each year in Senegal – and the export of raw textile materials in order to protect and revitalise its domestic textile industry. “They are re-joining our philosophy,” Dione says.

The Pikine space is a huge factory, yet seemingly not big enough for Dione’s ambitions. She already needs additional space and has now embarked on another quest that she hopes can further contribute to reigniting the country’s textiles history. She is currently looking into partnering with the partly government-owned Senegalese company Domitexka. Founded in 2$1$, Domitexka specialises in textile production for export and, in 2$18, took over a disused factory in Kahone, a town southeast of Dakar, where hundreds of looms were left behind as part of its closure. The proposed deal will be an exchange, a collaboration between industry and design: Domitexka wants Dione’s aesthetic; she wants its looms. And so the future is created and everyone can survive.

Dione’s decades of experience have given her a solid understanding of what it means to preserve a craft.

“The most important thing is to not lose the technique,” she explains to me, “so the only way for any craft to be preserved is to modernise the aesthetic.” When I see

how her sofas, cushions, throws, boubous and shoes marry contemporary design with traditional textiles, her vision becomes tangible. True to the essence of traditional Manjak cloth, the patterns in her collections range from simple lines to complex designs, such as a pattern which resembles a hair comb that Dione uses as her company’s logo. Yet by widening the traditional looms and experimenting with di)erent colour palettes, she has managed to open a new world of possibilities for traditional Senegalese textiles. “In order to keep people employed, new markets need to be found and that comes through design,” Dione says. “Whether for craft or for industry, in Africa, in our context, to design is the only way.”

Before we end our time in Pikine, I ask Dione to summarise her experience. “The overall concept is political,” she replies. “Making on the spot, in Senegal, in Africa, developing know-how and being independent.

That’s it. When you make your own goods that you consume, that you use everyday yourself and you don’t have to import, that is a political move.” I leave the factory elated. As a maker, it is inspiring and reassuring to see that it can be done: that we can work against the often overwhelming global currents. Dione’s story has all the ingredients for success: passion, vision, an in-depth understanding of her craft’s history and local traditions, and a relentless drive to continue threading new stories of survival.+END Bisila Noha is an artist and writer whose work centres on craft, women’s stories and social justice.

Djibril Drame is a photographer, visual artist, curator, and independent researcher on graffiti based in Dakar.

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In Search of the Long-Armed Chair Words Sarita Sundar and Rachel Lee,Photographs Hugo Revollet

The Nieuwe Planter’s Chair, designed by Mileno Guillorel-Obregón and Yassine Ben Abdallah.

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Field Notes: January #0#( Location: Kolkata Condition: Average Age: 1$$+ years Material: Teak wood Distinguishing features: None Place of use: NA Construction: Continuous seat and back Armrests: Swivel out Legs: Straight square sections Seat: Rewoven in plastic Down the road from the Alipore Jail Museum in Kolkata, a row of cubicle-like stores displays an eclectic mix of furniture. Tables, chairs, cabinets, sideboards, mirrors and other items jostle with one another as they spill out onto the pavement. Some have been restored with new hardware fittings and shiny polish, others are awaiting restoration – dusty, broken, with missing parts. We enter one of the stores and notice a row of worn chairs hanging on the wall. “They look like they are awaiting an execution of sorts,” I muse, recalling vivid images of the jail museum.

Sidhartha, the shop manager, gestures towards the long-armed chair he recently acquired. He tells us that the chair is over a century old. He knows this because it is made of Burma teak, brought into India before the Partition. Using a sharp glass sheet, he scrapes off the dirt and discolouration from the armrest with a flourish, revealing the warm teak finish. Rachel notices the cleverly hidden swivel mechanism under the armrest; considering the chair must have been unused for quite some time, it pivoted out surprisingly smoothly. There are no decorative details on the head rail or armrest, the chair’s woven seat is missing, and its square legs make it glaringly basic and featureless.

In its heyday, was it a sturdy and comfortable chair that was used on the verandah after a long day of work?

It surely was not a “conversation piece” that could complement the decor of a high-end drawing room.

Nevertheless, Sidhartha is confident that once he restores it, there will be takers for the chair in India and abroad.

The extended armrest of the Nieuwe Planter’s Chair.

numerous oral histories from people who own, make, or sell the chair, and photographed it in situ in India, Europe, and Sri Lanka. We found the chair in various locations – from plantation verandahs and social clubs to railway station waiting rooms and libraries. It turned up in colonial and contemporary popular culture – in satirical prints, humorous postcards, Bollywood (and other regional language) films, book covers, poetry, and paintings. Even while it was more character actor than leading star, it appears to have lent itself to a wide range of storytelling. As a conversation piece and symbol of power and privilege, the planter’s chair demands attention: beloved by patriarchs, its extendable armrests make it a champion of manspreading.

Early in our research, we set out to detail the chair’s tangible features. We found that a “classic” version is distinguished by long arms that reach out

Over the last two years we have travelled across the Indian subcontinent, chasing down an object with probable colonial origins, widely known as the “planter’s chair”. Alongside digging through the archives of various institutions across the world, we have collected 122

to provide leg rests, and a continuous sloping cane seat.

As our research progressed, however, we expanded our definition to include the variations we discovered, such as chairs with fixed elongated armrests that do not retract, seats made of canvas, padded fabric, or leather upholstery, backs and seats made of separate frames, and chairs with staggered armrests and leg rests.

Despite its large, ungainly frame and spatial demands, how has this design classic survived nearly two centuries of transnational journeys? The chair was rarely embellished with rare or expensive materials, so what has led it to traverse vast geographies, and settle comfortably into the imaginations of diverse communities across the world? The answer seemed to lie beyond its concrete properties. As such, during our field work we also sought out the non-physical qualities or traits that a chair must possess in order to be considered an example of the planter’s chair.

Originally from Scotland, Rachel first encountered the chair in central Mumbai at the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room, constructed in 18-$.

Field notes: August #0#1 Location: Mumbai Condition: Very good Age: 1$$+ years Material: Teak wood Distinguishing features: Varied Place of use: Verandah of a library Construction: Varied Armrests: Swivel out with no ornamental pin, fixed Legs: Straight square, spindle and tapered Seat: Cane cross and diamond weave On the hushed first-floor verandah of Mumbai’s David Sassoon Library and Reading Room, surrounded by neo-Gothic arches, a man is reading a newspaper.

The chair in which he is sitting holds him at a relaxed recline and raises his stockinged feet off the ground.

Rather than resting on a separate footstool, his feet are supported by armrests that extend significantly beyond the limits of the chair’s seat. As well as raising his feet, the long armrests also serve to separate them in a manner not dissimilar to a gynaecological examination chair. His posture is simultaneously relaxed and exposed. When I look down the verandah, I realise that all the chairs are variations on a theme.

Some have permanently extended armrests, while

others feature a pivot that allows the foot support to be tucked away when not in use. Before arriving in Mumbai, a friend from Kolkata had joked with me about such chairs: “Oh, you’re going to Bombay?

You should look out for Bombay fornicators!” Confused rather than amused, I quickly googled “Bombay fornicator”, which turned out to be a popular local name for this peculiar chair. And now here I was, on day one of my Mumbai field trip, confronted with a battery of them.

For Sarita, her connection to the chair goes back to childhood. From Kerala, South India, she has lived most of her life elsewhere. As a child, visiting her ancestral village from Delhi in the north, she first encountered the chair through her grandfather’s interactions with it.

Field Notes: July #019 Location: Aliparamba, Kerala Condition: Average Age: 1$$+ years Material: Teak wood Distinguishing features: None Place of use: Verandah of an ancestral house Construction: Folding Armrests: Fixed Legs: Straight, rectangular Seat: Canvas and cotton It was the dignity and loftiness with which my maternal grandfather assumed his seat that drew me – and most of the village – to his side repeatedly. The charukasera, or leaning chair, upon which he sat, upon which he spent most of his day, was a standard-issue teak and canvas model. Every morning, a fresh white muslin towel was laid out. Every morning, he would pick it up, shake it out, use it to swat the chair assiduously, stretch it as if to ensure symmetry, and lay it down with utmost precision before assuming his position on the verandah. It was a station of vantage and power, angled to afford prospect of any approaches to the house or of any emerging from within. His percipience and reputation for astute advice saw villagers seeking his darshan, or counsel, often. They were afforded positions, determined by their social standing, across from him on seats much like his: benches with backs; benches without backs; stools; or none at all; where the more confident found spots on the inner or outer steps, and the less stood diffidently in the compound.

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A historic postcard from the collection of Clare Arni.

A historic postcard from the collection of Clare Arni.

A planter’s chair in Colombo, Sri Lanka (photograph: Sarita Sundar).

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I would watch this scene with curiosity when I visited my grandparents in Kerala – curiosity tinged with awe and discomfort. Awe at how my gentle grandfather and chair played a role in this very feudal tableau; discomfort at how my gentle grandfather and chair played a role in this very feudal tableau.1 Despite our best e)orts, we have not been able to determine, precisely, the origins of the chair. Depictions of planter’s chairs in colonial literature and images from the era confirm its association with the British colonial military, leading us to conclude that the chair most likely originated in India during the British East India Company’s dominion in the 1,th century.

However, the chair’s popular name clearly links it to other spaces, such as the verandahs of bungalows in British-established plantations. Subsequently, the chair crossed colonial borders and planted itself in a variety of settings, such as the Dutch East Indies, where it was known as kursi/krossie gobang in Bahasa or luiaardsstoelen in Dutch.

Field Notes: November #0#3 Location: Bangalore Condition: Good Age: 1$$+ years Material: Teak wood Distinguishing features: Spindle top rail Place of use: Verandah of an apartment Construction: Separate seat and back Armrests: Slide out Legs: Straight, rectangular Seat: Cane Clare Arni’s apartment in central Bangalore is a veritable treasure trove. In a text message, Clare had told me that her sister remembered having planter’s chairs in their childhood home in Madurai – and being bitten by mosquitoes through their cane bottoms. A British photographer living and working in India for over three decades, Clare’s work spans multiple genres. She also collects many forms of memorabilia. Leading us to her verandah, she points to a chair surrounded by tall palms and ferns. She tells us that this is her son’s chair, where he would sit through the day, reading and drinking copious amounts of tea.

1

Adapted from Sarita Sundar’s From the Frugal to the Ornate: Stories of the Seat in India (2$22).

The Āy#ma / Extend deck chair by S#r Studio (Photograph: Sameer Belvalkar and S#r Studio).

The real treasure, however, is the box of postcards her father had collected. These pictorial portrayals of the colonial era were often self-deprecating and satirical in tone and showed the chair as a locus of white male power and privilege. Appearing in quite a few postcards, these chairs were clearly symbols of colonial repose, with the act of lounging in them a powerful statement. They exuded authority and leisure in equal measure, signifying a life where one was served by attendants. As it raised and separated the sitter’s legs, the deeply gendered chair was inappropriate for women to use.

As the examples at the David Sassoon Library and Sarita’s reminiscences show, the planter’s chair was not the exclusive domain of colonisers. The chair was embraced by local elites, as well as many others in the industrial and political classes. A surprise revelation was one used as a reading chair by Babasaheb B. R. Ambedkar, an anti-colonial Dalit activist, who drafted the Indian constitution post-Independence. Many communities adopted the chair, attaching community or vernacular names to it: the Charukassera in Kerala, the Parsi Chair in Mumbai, the Hansi Putuwa in Sri Lanka. The rich repository of audio, visual and textual material collected during our research has revealed that it goes by at least 2$ di)erent names in diverse parts of the world, attesting to its survival beyond just a colonial legacy.

Field Notes: November #0#( Location: Colombo Condition: Very good Age: 1$$+ years

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Material: Nedun wood Distinguishing features: Makara and floral motifs, circular slot as a drinks rest Place of use: Verandah Construction: Continuous seat and back Armrests: Wavy, swivel out Legs: Spindle tapered Seat: Cane After seeing a few hundred chairs, we thought we’d seen them all. We thought we wouldn’t come across any that would cause us to gasp. And yet, this one manages to do just that. Made of a local wood called nedun, it features crisply carved motifs of a makara – a mythical sea monster often depicted with a crocodile head and the body of a fish or a deer – spewing out a braid of acanthus leaves from its jaws. Its long wavy arms and top rail match in ornamentation. A round detail swivels out and can be used as a drinks rest.

This is the most magnificent chair we have come across.

Belonging to an architect-writer, it is well sat upon – with all the family members taking turns on it during the course of the day.

With the British colonisation of Sri Lanka in the 19th century, acres of jungle tracts were converted to coffee, and later cinnamon and tea plantations.

And, along with other colonial practices, many cultural artefacts moved from the Indian subcontinent to Sri Lanka. And yet here, the Hansi Putuwa or “lying back chair” appears to have defied, and challenged, any role it might have played in difficult and dark histories.

In the open verandah, cosily furnished with natural fibre floor coverings, low seats, and a view to a lush garden frequented by tropical birds, it seems to take on an altogether unique character, partaking in the warm conviviality of its surroundings.

The Āy#ma / Extend deck chair is made from reclaimed wood (Photograph: Sameer Belvalkar and S#r Studio).

Age: !$+ years Material: Wood Distinguishing Features: A circular raised dowel Place of use: Study Construction: Continuous seat with a break Armrests: Swivel out Legs: Spindle tapered Seat: Cane Naomi, an academic who grew up in a multiracial family in the UK, speaks fondly of winter holidays spent in tea garden bungalows with her extended family in Sylhet, Bangladesh. She remembers coming across the planter’s chair there. “We thought they were great. The kids would climb all over them,” she says. “Yeah, we thought it was fabulous. We’d never seen anything like it. What the hell is this weird thing with the bits out, what is it for? To put your cup of tea on or something? We couldn’t figure it out.”

She recalls being told that the chair was for colonial officials. “They would put their dirty boots up and their helpers would pull them off for them,” she says. “That’s what it was for.” Aware of the chair’s direct connection with the exploitative practices of plantations, she wonders at the lack of criticality in naming it “planter’s chair”. “Why would you call it that?” she asks. “People don’t know what happened on the plantations?” Yet, when she came across the chair in a shop in Brighton, she couldn’t resist buying it. “I was like, Oh, we used to have these when I was a kid! So, I had to have it.”

She finds herself conflicted, struggling to part with it because “It’s been around the world a bit with us,” travelling with her family from Brighton to Indonesia and now to London. Eventually she concludes that,

A planter’s chair’s long armrests and relatively large size means it is often too cumbersome and ungainly for domestic interiors in most parts of the world. We did, however, come across a few owners who had carted the chair across continents. While many interviewees acknowledged the role that the chair played in colonial history, it was rare for someone to vociferously express the kind of discomfort that Naomi did.

Field notes: July #0#( Location: London (via Zoom) Condition: Very good 12!

if she were to change the chair’s name, she would feel better about keeping it in her London flat.

Today, while examples are sourced from antique shops across India and sought by auction houses, the chair continues to be crafted by artisans and reinterpreted by contemporary designers. Some contemporary designs reuse, alter, and retain traces from earlier expressions, appropriating and montaging elements from the past to add to the present.

Field notes: July #0#1 and July #0#( Location: Pune (via Zoom) and Mumbai in discussion Condition: New Age: Five years Material: Wood and leather Distinguishing Features: Hand polished teak Place of use: Varied Construction: Knock down and folds flat Armrests: Fixed Legs: Round sections Seat: Leather The leather dips down leisurely before rising to meet the smoothly finished teak spindle-shaped top rail.

There is a sense of unhurriedness in the form – calling out for a pause, to move slow. I sink into the seat and instantly feel enveloped in its warmth. Āy,ma / Extend deck chair was created by German designer Pascal Hien and Indian designer Nikita Bhate of S,r Studio, who bring their differing cultural backgrounds together to create products that take inspiration from India’s craft traditions. The chair is part of their Reclaimed Stories series, and its frame is made from repurposed wood crafted using a combination of mass production and modern handmade techniques. The unique joinery detail is from the Sankheda, a traditional furniture style from West India. However, instead of the typical bright lacquer finish on the wooden sections, the teak is hand polished to create an almost golden glow.

Nikita speaks of the design details: the chair packs flat for ease of transport, and the shortened armrests make it easier to fit into smaller homes. The chair seems to have many stories to tell, of nostalgia for leisure times, of a sensitivity to material usage, of craft legacies, and the beauty of well finished materials.

Artists are also drawn to the planter’s chair, and it often appears in works critiquing colonialism, such

The leg detail of the the Nieuwe Planter’s Chair.

as the Nieuwe Planter’s Chair by Yassine Ben Abdallah and Mileno Guillorel-Obregón for Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, two practitioners whose rendition of the chair seems to subvert colonial legacies, deconstructing (and decolonising?) a traditional planter’s chair.

Field notes: July #0#( Location: London (via Zoom) Condition: New Age: One year Material: Aluminium and wood Distinguishing Features: Aluminium profiles Place of use: Not available Construction: Continuous seat Armrests: Swivel out Legs: Spindle tapered Seat: Cane

Survival

Abdallah and Guillorel-Obregón describe how they sourced a chair from Leboncoin, stripped it down, and recreated it using aluminium profiles. Their redesigned chair looks like an exploded view diagram, highlighting details such as its floating wooden components, the copper coin resting on a red dowel, and the armrests made of aluminium sections and wood. At first glance, the spindle-shaped wooden legs hidden behind the metal frames seemed out of place. We question if they had a structural purpose.

Are they intended to be provocative or subversive?

While we are aware that the legacy of teak wood is intrinsically linked to colonial expansion, racism and misappropriation, we didn’t know enough about the ethics of the extraction and supply of aluminium, a favoured material in this day and age. Through the forced juxtaposition of industrial aluminium, a material whose provenance and extraction is mired in social and environmental concerns, with traditional woven cane and carved wood, their piece attempts to “unseat” the ubiquitous legacies of colonialism in modern design practices, as well as the institutions that display them.

The long-armed chair elicits conflicting feelings in many.

Nevertheless, it has had an uncanny ability to adapt and survive. Through its post-colonial excursions, it has transformed, adopted new names, and absorbed layers of meaning, remaining an intriguing hybrid across contexts. This boundary-crossing object has not only persisted – but has seamlessly integrated local nuances, embedding itself comfortably in both domestic and commercial spaces.

We may never know whether its survival is due to its ability to: command respect and power through its monumentality; relate to things grandfatherly; recall “better” times when space and time were more generous; or evoke nostalgia for times spent in the warmth and conviviality of family. We have been discomfited by the chair’s colonial legacy, and its continued role in perpetuating colonial, and postcolonial, legacies. And yet, we have come to accept and appreciate its enduring presence as both a functional object and a cultural imaginary. Moving forward, we must ensure that it continues to encourage, inspire, and push us to investigate, confront, and transform its legacies.+END

The chair was designed by Yassine Ben Abdallah and Mileno Guillorel-Obregón.

Rachel Lee is an architect and architectural historian based in Delft.

Sarita Sundar is a designer and design historian based in Bangalore.

Hugo Revollet is a photographer and furniture designer based in Paris.

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The drawings featured on this cover were created as part of a research project by artists Leonhard Rothmoser and Björn-Achim Schmidt. The pair developed hundreds of ideas that deal with survival, ranging from the concrete to the surreal, all of which have been roughly based on psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which explores the motivations for human behaviour.

Even though the pair’s artistic collaboration has now ended, the possibility of a new spark reigniting their shared practice still exists. So far, however, the ideas expressed in their sketches are what survive.

This issue includes: Gabriel Fontana’s non-hierarchical sports; a journey to reclaim a forgotten designer; dusting off ArkDes’s permanent collections; windows made into nebulae

by Studio Brynjar & Veronika; cryonically preserved bodies with Murray Ballard; indigenous cows, sheltered by Studio Saar; a plan to revive the forest economy

by Samy Rio; preppers and consumer culture at Mudac; design for childbirth; a reimagination of abandoned buildings from Limbo Accra; field notes examining a colonial chair; a chance to lock eyes with Studiomama’s iron face castings; a history of Senegal’s textile industry from Aissa Dione; and market trading with El Alto Aesthetics.