A large part of my time in Amsterdam (anywhere really) is going to museums to see the art and objects a culture values. In this post I will begin to share many of the museums and art spaces I have visited this summer.
Some of the museums touch on social design in obvious way, some related to various ideas I have been thinking about during my Dutch time.
Tropen Museum
This was my first visit to the Tropen Museum (https://www.tropenmuseum.nl). Tropen Museum translates to "museum of the tropics" and is a museum that focuses on the cultures that the Netherlands had colonized, and its changing relationships and reckoning with those relationships. This is the museum that Burobraak worked with in addressing issues around Zwart Piet, addressed in my second entry.
The show was called Fashion Cities Africa, focusing on individual fashion designers from specific cities throughout the continent.
Many of the designers spoke to getting out from under colonial aesthetics (not just aesthetics of the colonial era, but of the colonial culture in general) and to look to their own cultures as makers to create fashion that is truly African.
This concept of creating in a non-colonialized way reminded me of a Social Design Insights podcast I listened to (#75 New Forms of Design Education for New Forms of Cities) where Christian Benimana of the African Design Center (https://www.africandesigncentre.org) spoke to the same need in African architecture: to get out from not just colonial aesthetics, but also in their educational systems, to find an architectural education model that spoke to contemporary African needs.
Some of the designers had a touch of Afro-Futurism (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-broadnax-afrofuturism-black-panther_us_5a85f1b9e4b004fc31903b95) in their designs, especially Deola Sagoe’s white dress. Along with the fashion exhibition, the museum also had an Afro Futurist photo exhibition in the next gallery.
Deola Sagoe's pink fly dress is my new fantasy dress. The fabric design is simply beautiful.
The fly patterned fabric refers to Vlisco wax-prints, which have an interesting cross-cultural history of their own. Some examples of Vlisco fabrics (see below) were also in the exhibition, as well as available in local markets. https://www.vlisco.com
I see stories in these patterns.
In another part of the museum, were t-shirts donated to charities, which then made their way to African street fashion.
The donations are often turned into bundles sold to African traders, who in turn sell them for subversively cheap costs (think H&M of Africa, possibly worse). This glut of cheap clothing has been devastating to independent African industries and therefor economies. The documentary T Shirt Travels was a revelatory to me about the unintended consequences of not thinking beyond the first step (more on this later)
This exhibition shows how peoples make these shirts their own, how they redesign, cut, manipulate and add to the shirts to personalize them. To me, this parallels the need to redefine an aesthetic which is handed to you by colonisers, to make it your own.
Defining the self. Images matter.
There was also an exhibition called Things that Matter https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/things-matter, that speaks to the objects that define us as we move between cultures. As different cultures move, morph, and combine, so often do our objects.
My favorite example is the Vlisco kimono.
Netherlands + Africa + Indonesia + Japan
The CSW art department has been having conversations about imagery and appropriation. By no means do we have anything figured out, but I find this an interesting object that shows simplistic rules are don't tell the whole story.
Defining the self matters.
Images matter.
Websites of the designers (not all but some):
http://www.houseofdeola.com
http://aminaagueznay.blogspot.com
https://mariamccloy.wordpress.com/about/
https://www.notjustalabel.com/designer/said-mahrouf
http://www.designindaba.com/people/sunny-dolat
https://www.strangerlagos.com/author/yegwa/
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