L'Appartement 22 | Rabat, Morocco

Abdellah Karroum is an independent curator and art researcher, born in Morocco in 1970.



Source: http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2005/l_appartement_22
(Published: November 2005, print version)


L'appartement 22
Interview with Abdellah Karroum
By Haupt & Binder

L'appartement 22 (Apartment 22) is an experimental space for encounters, exhibitions, and artists’ residencies in Rabat, Morocco, founded in 2002 by Abdellah Karroum. Its co-operative, project-specific work methods are based on the participation of artists as well as its private and institutional partners. The curatorial work of this undertaking supports artists in the international network of contemporary art.
Abdellah Karroum, the founder of L'appartement, was born in 1970 in Morocco and works as an independent curator and art expert. Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt of Universes in Universe conducted the following E-mail interview with him:



Universes in Universe: In which cultural context and in which art scene in Rabat and elsewhere in Morocco does L'appartement 22 operate? What made you decide to initiate such a project?

Abdellah Karroum: Morocco has experienced significant cultural change over the last few years. The rapid development of new information technologies, especially the Internet, allows for an extensive access to culture in other countries around the world. Just the same, as a result of various structural factors, Morocco is still more of a consumer than a producer of culture. There is also a great lack of exhibiting and distribution possibilities for young artists. The few non-profit galleries are state-run and their programs are not defined through serious art politics. In fact, the people in charge of the programs for these spaces are not art professionals, but rather members of the Ministry of Culture.

L'appartement 22 is the result of this situation and, ultimately, of a coincidence. Originally, the apartment was only meant as my own private home. After I finished studying in Europe, I planned to work at universities and art schools in Morocco. I had a clear idea of how cultural activities in the context of this country could be developed. I came to Rabat to assist in setting up an art department at a Moroccan university, to work with artists, and to spend the rest of my time writing books. In the end, I decided to use my own apartment as an alternative to the lack of interest shown by institutional spaces in the kinds of artistic forms that really interested me. With that, L'appartement 22 became a space of freedom for both the artists and myself.

The top priority goal is to create a presence for art works and give artists the chance to meet the public. This has a lot to do with my wanting to think through with the artists different ways of communicating and exhibiting, but also with my intention to share artistic experiences with the public in Morocco and in other parts of the world. You never need a full range of technical equipment and devices to bring about meaningful works and exhibitions. You only have to listen to the artists and pay attention to the audience. L'appartement 22 shows already well-known artists (Ahmed Essyad, Fouad Bellamine, Fabrice Hyber, Jean-Paul Thibeau, and others) as well as young artists such as Younès Rahmoun, Safaa Erruas, and students of the Drama and Cultural Entertainment School (ISADAC). But, above all, the apartment is a meeting place for artists who deal with the world’s current events. Basically, this is about giving meaning to cultural activities and providing a definition of art developed from the time and space in which one lives. It would please me to bring even more artists into the international network of contemporary art, especially from the younger generation, the artists working with the kind of material found everywhere in our daily life.

UiU: Could you describe the spaces and facilities of L’Appartment 22, and the character of the surrounding neighborhood?

A.K.: L'appartement 22 is located in the heart of Rabat – Morocco’s administrative capital also the seat of all the ministries – in a building from the 1920s, which faces the Moroccan Parliament.

The atmosphere of the neighborhood gives the impression of life in the country, like it does on Avenue Mohamed V, where young people meet and take strolls in the evening. But this is also a district where, almost every day, the enraged students and the unemployed who try to reach the parliamentary building are kept back by the police. This can sometimes be unbearable, especially when the police chase after demonstrators with rubber clubs...

L'appartement 22 plays with the paradox of being a very small and very big space at the same time. To gain access into L'appartement 22, you have to first find the entrance of an old building without a house number, and then mount the steps to the third floor. The actual surface space is only thirty square meters; but compared to all that goes on here, the physical dimensions are far greater than that. The artistic works and proposals shown here always draw reactions from outside of L'appartement 22, whether through educational initiatives, performances staged in the city, or publications offering a sensitive and intellectual continuation of the works.

UiU: Could you name a few of the exhibition projects that you presented at L’appartment 22, and explain their curatorial concept? How exactly did cooperating with the artists work?

A.K.: The first exhibition at L’appartment 22 was "JF_JH individualités" (Young Women_Young Men, Individualities). The works for this show were developed in the apartment’s spaces in the framework of the artists’ two-week-long residency. The "Brisa" installation, for example, created by Safaa Erruas for the exhibition, was later shown in Naples at the 2005 Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean. The main principle behind this collaborating of artists under the defining title of "JF_JH," namely to address the complexity of the relationship between men and women in Morocco, was continued in other exhibitions: JF_JH Cohabitation, JF_JH Agreements, and JF_JH Complicity. Over the next few months, I hope to continue this collaborative principle with a project entitled "JF_JH Freedoms," in which an unlimited number of artists participate.

There were also exhibitions with rather well-known artists such as Fouad Bellamine and Mustapha Boujeamoui. Bellamine was invited for "Une leçon de peinture" (A Painting Lesson): the artist carried out his work in front of an audience for longer than a month. This action-piece made a strong impression and incited public debates. Boujeamoui initiated the "SuperTea" exhibition, which consisted of three parts, three works, and three formal approaches. This allowed him to test his intentions and share their sense and sensibility with the audience. His manifestations extend beyond the exhibition space by incorporating cultural and political themes that address the context of artistic creativity both in Morocco and abroad.

UiU: How have audiences responded so far to these projects?

A.K.: There was a deep interest on the part of the students and artists, as well as from a public eager to encounter culture. Although L'appartement 22 is not visible from the street, a good many visitors make the effort to find the entrance in order to attend the apartment’s different manifestations. The meetings with the artists are so successful because the Moroccan public truly enjoys talking to them. That might be linked to Morocco’s culture being as much an oral as visual one. Besides that, from the very beginning, the Moroccan press frequently reported on this space and the events held here. At the end of an event, you always have people who stay a little longer to meet with friends or other artists. Then the discussions become a lot more relaxed, if still as serious as before. Several projects originated from these informal meetings.

UiU: What is the greatest challenge when managing such a space?

A.K.: One sign of success is that other people were impressed enough by L'appartement to begin showing art in their own apartments. Good examples of this are L’appart du 2e and Le 17e in Casablanca, and I hope this continues in the future. The current challenge concerns making the space finance itself. What I hope for is that, with the artists, it will be possible to further develop the cooperative aspect and nurture a greater interest among the collectors and institutions working in the area of contemporary art.

UiU: How do you organize the Residency Program?

A.K.: The basic work principle of L'appartement 22 is twofold: ambitious meetings and ambitious collaborations. Each residency consists of an investigation conducted on several levels, in the context of the apartment, the city, the country, and the world. This includes a carefully worked through experiment with different forms and media, by no means limited to this space alone. The residency space is a kind of "headquarters" or "editing room" for developing an art project that surpasses the physical space of an exhibition. The artist is not obliged to set up the exhibition, but we always organize an open public discussion with the artist.

The program of L'appartement 22 always begins with me meeting an artist or discovering the artist’s work. Then we work together on a way to express an intention through exhibitions, lectures, performances, or through other means. It makes no difference to me whether a project is realized in L'appartement, in a museum, in the lecture hall of a university, or in the public space. When we face the public, I play the role of the host, curator, moderator.

UiU: Logistically speaking, how do you organize the artists’ residency periods? How do you decide, for example, on the length of a residency? Do you only invite those artists whose works you already know? Do you also consider applications and proposals? While the artists are in Rabat, do they live in L'appartement? How is the financial aspect resolved?

A.K.: The L'appartement 22 artist residencies are always linked to specific projects. A residency can last up to five weeks. Since L'appartement 22 is a privately-run space, each project is prepared by both the artist and the host. The artists are chosen on the basis of a project presentation, following a call for submissions posted in the Internet. The residencies and events are cooperatively financed. Both the artist and the host are involved in this process, whether through the support for the production (rentals, sales) or any public or private grants. But I often have to advance the production fees, which constitute very limited investments compared to those made by galleries. The only institution currently offering friendly support to our projects is the French Embassy to Morocco. Whenever I’m in Rabat, I live in L'appartement 22 myself, and therefore, in the event of a residency, I have to find other housing for the artist, something which only happens about two or four times a year. The foreigner artists often live with local colleagues or with friends.

UiU: L'appartement 22 is organizing the project "Coprésences" (Coexistence) in Morocco, together with the Asociación para la Mediación Cultural, Vejer de la Frontera (Spain), and Synesthesie in France. Could you briefly describe what this is about and which activities are scheduled to take place in Morocco?

A.K.: "Coprésences" is a project that was developed after the meeting of three curators (Anne-Marie Morice from Synesthésie, Cécile Bourne from the AMC in Spain, and myself, representing L'appartement 22 in Morocco). The Moroccan section of the project began when Fabrice Hyber initiated his "Museum of Plastic" at the outset of a trip taken along the "oil route" from Morocco to the Middle East via Indonesia. With this project, up until the opening of the "Museum of Plastic" in the year 2011, Fabrice Hyber investigates Europe’s various relationships to Islam.

In connection with working on the concept of "Absent Capital," a project to be developed over the next few months, Mohamed El-Baz and Christophe Boulanger both stayed at L'appartement 22 in July and September.

All the projects of "Coprésences" are based on embedding the artists’ works in the specific context and on audience participation. The project’s impact can be local, regarding the concrete plan of action and immediate experiences, but also universal and function on an artistic and human level.




Haupt & Binder
Gerhard Haupt and Pat Binder, co-publishers and editors-in-chief of Nafas Art Magazine. Since 1997 they publish Universes in Universe - Worlds of Art. Based in Berlin, Germany.

(Translation from the French: Charlotte Le Sourd. Edited by Karl Johnson)



Founder, Director:
Abdellah Karroum

L'appartement 22
279 avenue Mohamed V
Rabat
Morocco
Website: http://www.appartement22.com
Email: akarroum@free.fr

Mounir Troudi | Sufi Singer, Tunisia

I have recently been struggling with the issue of Zimbabwe but I want to take a break and introduce you to some interesting music from Tunisia. When I was staying with Najet Belkhodja in Tunis recently I met up with Mounir Troudi. Here is some wonderful footage of Tunisia and life lived in North Africa. Mounir Troudi the amazing Sufi singer from Tunisia teams up with Antonio Maiello the Neopolian Folk singer with the Mediterranean Orchestra. This is a video for those that just love music.



*N.B. If these links don't work please cut and paste and watch on the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TraA0GngK4g

Here is a slightly different version with images of the Mediterranean Orchestra



*N.B. If these links don't work please cut and paste and watch on the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUv90iZZFZY


Hope you enjoy them as much as I do......

Death of a Husband in Nigeria

Onwu Di | Death Of A Husband


It is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall a woman at any point in her life - to loose her husband. No matter the length of time she spent with him in matrimony, the grief and sorrow she experiences cannot be quantified. It is an eternal loss; and so, no matter how much we try to console or encourage the truth is, she has lost her soul-mate. All we can do is give her time. For it is only time, as they say, that heals all. It is vital that she finds the right support - morally and otherwise from relatives, friends and loved ones so that she can see her way through this mournful period. Unfortunately, more often than not the reverse is usually the case.

In different parts of the world, irrespective of religion, tradition and culture, widows are victims of violence and oppression at the hands of close family members and so-called friends, especially their in-laws. The story below clearly illustrates my thoughts on this matter. The characters and locations are real.

Personally, I believe that my father allowed himself to be the sacrificial lamb for my sake. It was as if he was communicating from his grave and saying, "Here my eldest daughter… Chinwe, take it… this is your breakthrough in your course to support the widows of Nigeria... For my sake your voice and desire will be heard and accepted finally by our people," and if I tire in this campaign through my poetry and writings, then I have disgraced my father's memory. This is the only way I can appease my father's soul.

So I ask this question - Do widows deserve to have their human rights stripped from them and violated when their husbands die?






Article written by Chinwe Azubuike.
August, 2006.





Photo: Wisdom and Mary Azubuike with Chinwe and her younger brother Chukwuma


Factual Story….

My father, Mr. Wisdom Azubuike died on the 8th of August 2006, aged 60yrs and was to be buried on the 24th of August 2006. He died seated while on duty at work. He was thought to be asleep on duty, but instead, he was dead…(he was a security guard at the Apapa Branch of Intercontinental Bank PLC in Lagos, Nigeria). Autopsy result stated he had suffered a sudden attack of 'Hypertension', because he did not know that his blood pressure had been rising for quite some time.

My mother, my siblings and my father's elder brother, Mr.Christian Azubuike, along with other family friends accompanied the corpse to our village on the 23rd August 2006 following the wake-keep that was held on the night of the 22nd August in Festac Town, Lagos. Before leaving for the village, my father's brothers, had collected eighty thousand naira, (the whole money) which was given to the family by the Bank, as support for any expenses incurred on the burial arrangements. His brothers said it was the fee that was to be paid to perform some burial rites for the corpse and also prepare things such as refreshments, etc for the reception of guests after the burial. My recently widowed mother was left penniless. Regardless, they heartlessly demanded for more but for the fact that she and my younger brother scolded them and argued the fact that there was no more money left to give.

On the night of the 23rd when my family arrived at the village, at our compound my Uncle, Christian suddenly and surprisingly ran into occupy the family house, (just a 2 bedroom bungalow-like house, which was owned by my late Grandparents) with his other brother, Leonard and their children, and my Aunt Mrs Rozaline - stating that my father had no house of his own therefore they would take over the bungalow. In this way my mother and her family were not even given any welcome or a place to lay their heads for the night. They actually rested in the coastal bus (donated to them by the Bank as means of transportation) and slept without food or bathing. Betrayal is an ugly word, especially in the context of family.

The next morning, the day of the burial, my father's brothers and sister, Mr.Christian Azubuike, Mr.Leo Azubuike, and Mrs Rozaline, arranged with other members of the Azubuikes of Duruigbo clan (where I come from) of Oka Village in Isiala Mbanno Local Government of Imo State to stop the burial of my father, Wisdom. My Uncle, Christian accused my mother and siblings of killing their brother,(meaning my Dad)… that they should bring out all the money my father had, because his daughter (meaning, I ) lives abroad, and seemingly has received a small fortune from me.... the accusation was that we had all, including I, planned and executed our own father's death and that it was only us, the immediate family, that would benefit from whatever came from me. Me, the pauper female poet living in London.

My Uncle Leo had hired mobs and touts who carried sticks and weapons to batter my mother and family. My Uncle Christian, and his sister, (our Aunty) Mrs Rozaline, gathered all the women of the Duruigbo clan who carried firewood and cains to beat my mother with, according to Tradition. Then, in full view of the public, including people of other tribes and some staff of the Intercontinental Bank as well, who came from Lagos to our village to witness the burial, my Uncle Mr.Christian Azubuike stripped my father's body of his funeral clothes, which had been carefully chosen and dressed by my younger brother, Chukwuma. Christian took out a large sharpened knife and to the horror of all, desecrated the body. Splitting my father's stomach open, like a gutted fish, and then started to probe inside, justifying his action by stating he was searching for some vital organs or bodyparts in the absurd thought that we, Wisdom's immediate family, would have used them for money making rituals. Eventually yet still in the eyes of the amazed public, everything was carelessly put back to the way the mortuary workers had left it but the damage had been done and witnesses had overseen this cruel barbaric act by their fellow Nigerians. Once one has witnessed such an act nothing will quite seem the same again.

My younger brother, Chukwuma Azubuike, being the first son of my Dad, insisted that he wanted to bury my father on that same day, but my Uncle refused. Three men from my village intervened and tried to make peace, demanding that the burial take place that very day yet my Uncle Christian refused. My brother again eagerly enquired when they actually intended burying his father but my Uncle told him to leave, that he had no idea about any burial anymore. They brutally chased my family away, who ran for safety, back into the coastal bus. Even while they were inside the bus, the people kept shouting and banging at the windows and doors asking them to come out of the bus. My Uncles seized my Dad's corpse along with the others, put it back in the coffin and asked the ambulance driver who had brought the coffin from Lagos to take it back to a mortuary situated near our village. Members of my mother's family, who came for the burial as well, were the ones who took my family back with them in the coastal bus to their house at Owerri where the whole family took refuge. Consequently they had won and denied us the proper Christian Mass we had wanted for our father, moreso, denied me of the speech I had written to be read at Mass for my dead Dad and (obviously) squandered the Eighty Thousand Naira they had collected from my family's benefit back in Festac. There are witnesses who can testify to the money that was given to my father's brothers.

While talking refuge at Owerri in Imo State, my family tried to see if there was a way they could get information about the burial and attend, because it is unheard of that a man be buried in the absence of his wife and children. My mother and younger brother made official reports of the case to different Police commission zones in Imo State.

On Friday 1st September 2006, my family in the company of my mother's relatives and many other people who were also armed went to what they thought was my father's funeral. They had received word that my Dad was to be buried on Friday (although none of them had actually been properly informed). On the Friday 1st September, that was thought to be the burial, my father's brothers had once again shifted the burial to the next day, Saturday in the hope that they could perform it in the absence of my family... However, this did not deter anyone because my family and all the rest of the people that accompanied them from Owerri all stayed over until the Saturday morning, which was the D-day. There was a lot of friction, initiated mainly by my father's people, but then they saw that my family too were really out for them that day. Everyone attended the funeral Mass, which to the amazement of many, had become a biased occasion, for the priest who celebrated the Mass gave a very angering and chiding speech for the benefit of my family- on hearsay from the words of my father's brothers, indirectly accused my family of being instruments of my father's death.

After Mass everyone went back to our compound for the final 'lay to rest' act. Then my father's brothers and their entourage tried to create some barriers again, by physically and morally trying to cause outright War between them and my family with her own entourage. The resistance on my mother's part was very clear to them. She vehemently refused to partake in some incongruous fetish rituals that were presented to her. It had become a matter of War if push came to shove. Lives were willing to be lost if it would eventually allow my father to have his rightful burial. Eventually my father was laid to rest, but sadly ungracefully.

Poetry by Chinwe Azubuike

Chinwe Azubuike from Nigeria.

Here is a contemporary African Poet. She is regarded as a strong female contemporary voice from Africa, born in Lagos-Nigeria. Her origins are from Imo State and she is the first born of a family of five children. Her late father, Wisdom Azubuike served in the Biafran War and married his wife Mary in the mid 1970's. Her humble beginnings were a far cry from the literary educated class of poets- born into a relatively poor family. Over the past decade she has gradually crafted her own powerful voice and found a unique style of no-nonsense writing that comes directly from the heart.

Her literary development began whilst attending secondary school. She constantly viewed herself as a spokeswoman for Nigeria's deprived underclass and recognised within herself a strong sense of social justice. This is reflected in her poetry, as her work highlights the complicated issues and beauty of the people of Africa, especially the plight of women and children. The bulk of her work focus' on female issues; of love, life and torture with specific references to ethnic family traditions within West Africa.


Presently, Chinwe is running an ongoing campaign worldwide for women, against the victimization and deprivation of human rights of "the Widow" in Nigeria. This issue is extremely personal to her as it is borne out of her own bitter experience when her father, Wisdom, sadly passed away. She has written extensively on the subject with essays and poetry and intends to create a documentary in Nigeria about "Death of a Husband".



Writers Return by Chinwe Azubuike

The town criers are resounding the new liberated message:
The writers have returned to build the true Independent Nation.
Spelling out Independence clearly to all those listening.

Finally the day has come. The glorious day is amongst us.
When gifted Nigerians with the pen,
return and shape this new Independent Nation.
This day Nigeria faces a triumphant revamp.
A revitalisation of her reprehensible fallen past pride.

Today you will see them all; they are now beginning to flock.
The hot sun burning down on their backs,
softly caressing their blackened skin.
Man and beast roar with anger and passion
welcoming this long awaiting charge of honour.

They have resumed, in a frenzied gusto,
their rightful positions in every tribe of our Nation.
Scribbling, writing and punching away,
Protests and statements- their missiles aimed high
at our jailers of our new Independent Nation.

The town criers are resounding the new liberated message:
The writers have returned to build the true Independent Nation.
Of the revolution that is secretly emerging
of the second liberation of our Fatherland
fought with the only weapons that are left to us …
our pen and our wild imaginations.



Poetry by Chinwe Azubuike | Nigeria

----

Onwu Di | Death of a Husband

She dies and, ….
"Oh! Take heart! "
"May God comfort you"
"It's one of those things"

He dies and it's ….
"Aahh! ! ! "
"She has done her worst! "
"Ajoo Nwanyi! "
"Amuusu! "

On sick bed,
On wheels,
Beneath the sea,
In the air,
"She was the cause! ! ! "
They always say.

The other people lament...
"What rubbish! "
"Such injustice!! "
but to deaf ears they fall.

They come in troops
Lazy bones in disguise
To reap where they sowed not
In the name of kinship.

Day by day they saunter in to cast your lot.
And at times,
battle over the remnants
like vultures to the carcass.

Di!, Stand up!!
Get up from your eternal slumber
and show us your slayer
for your home is falling apart.
Your kinsmen have ravaged your house.

Your wife has become a barbarian.
Made to drink the juice of your corpse.
Stripped of her beauty by her skinned head.
Ruffled and tossed like a culprit.

They have sentenced her to a dozen months imprisonment
in the confines of your ancestral home.
They gave her white this time, to cover her nakedness.
A change from the black that used to be the uniform.
And until she completes her days,
the light of the sun she dares not see again
nor witness the joys of the world.
And when that happens,
a second wife we fear she may become.

The other people lament again,
"What rubbish! "
"Such injustice!! "
Yet to deaf ears they still fall.

Your children, we know not their fate.
Chased away from your cocoon.
Scattered like sheep.
Destitute we fear they shall become.

Di!,
If only you will arise
and prove the innocence of your wife.
Then your home we fear,
is doomed forever.



Poetry by Chinwe Azubuike | Nigeria.

Female Circumcision in West Africa

Suzanne Ouedraogo | Artist from Burkina Faso.


Here is one of my favourite artists, Suzanne Ouedraogo. Her work is quite graphically expressing the plight of young girls in West Africa. Her message is clear and shocking and warrants our attention.

Her series on Female Circumcision Commissioned in 2003

Excision I 2003
























Excision II - 2003






















In 2003, I commissioned two West African female artists, Suzanne Ouedraogo and Chinwe Azubuike to create a series of works on the subject of female circumcision.

Here is a poem written by the female Nigerian poet, Chinwe Azubuike, which compliments these extraordinary paintings by Suzanne Ouedraogo.

Our Dilemma by Chinwe Azubuike

You, our gods of immortals and living
Of seas and lands
Of all visible and not
We beseech, hear our cry this day
And come to our rescue.

Our sacred weapons of pleasure
Are being destroyed by the day
Rendered useless
By our overseeing Lords and Ladies
Of ancestral descent.

They perform a barbaric operation on our ‘flesh of honour’
And call it ‘Female Circumcision’
In the white man’s language.
They mutilate our pride and say it is ‘tradition’
“The initiation to womanhood”

They cut us!
Oh yes, they cut us with the blade.

In the gaze of our fellows, they cut us!
At times in the secrecy of our mother’s haven.
They do not concede to the tools,
Nor words of the physician’s for our safety
To them it has been for ages
And tradition dare not be defiled.
They just cut us.

Against our will as they are wont to
For we foresee the agony and anguish
To these we try to parry but helpless we are

Our eyes have cried,
Tears of unending pain and torment
They have run dry of water.
Our hearts, laden with loathsomeness
We fear may burst.

They cut us, with or without our consent
Left to bleed by their ignorance
Sometimes fatal to our existence.
Other times, we become plagued with illness of strange names
“Infection” the physician would call it

Again they say it delivers us from the hands of promiscuity
As we ascend the ladder of womanhood.
Such blasphemy! We think
As if we are not bound for the act of consummation
In our ‘married’ days

As we watch our counterparts this day
Buried deep in this sin,
Sisters whom we term fortunate cut at childbirth
Fortunate to have escaped the pain we feel now,
We can’t but wonder
“Who is fooling who?”

You, our ancestral Lords and Ladies
Suffer us no more we beg
What profit do you aspire
When our lives are wont to expire
In this course of tradition?

Oh! What a shame,
That you who drum to our ears
To revere the dignity between our legs,
Become the ones that destroy it.



Poem by Chinwe Azubuike | Nigeria


------

N.B. In 2005, the painting of the Excision I by Suzanne Ouedraogo was lost at Belgium airport by the artists when transferring to Paris. If anybody knows of the whereabouts of this painting please contact Joe Pollitt at africanartists@hotmail.co.uk. Many thanks.

David Adjaye | Ghana/Tanzania/England

Behind the facade


David Adjaye is an architect who makes buildings as if they were conceptual artworks. His client list reads like a Who's Who and he admits he's a bit of an operator. Now, as he enters the major league, can the 36-year-old live up to the hype?

Tom Dyckhoff
Saturday February 8, 2003
The Guardian
Source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,889980,00.html


'You've gotta be a showman." David Adjaye fixes me with his giant grin. "You can't just do your work. You've got to put it out there. Nobody's going to give you ten million pounds if you can't demonstrate your ability." If anyone could part a person from £10m it's Adjaye. It's the marriage of velvet and steel in his eyes, the way he undercuts his handsome confidence with a generous smile and teenager giggles. I've seen him work a room, brisk, efficient, but not cold, laughing at your jokes, flamboyantly, boyishly foppish, flashing that smile here, a touch on your elbow there. I doubt you'd even notice your wallet lightening.



Series of Monoforms | David Adjaye


Showmanship and a determined charm are rare qualities in an architect. Rare, but crucial. If you don't know how to talk the talk, you won't be getting the commissions, certainly not that £10m dream of yours. Most architects learn the hard way. Adjaye has been blessed from the start.

It's already set him apart. By rights, at 36, Adjaye should have 10 more years detailing drainpipes in some corporate colossus. Instead, he became a player years ago - freakish in a profession in which 40-year-olds are deemed bright young things - with a string of photogenic villas for Britain's modern Medicis, designed with ex-business partner William Russell. The client list? Ewan McGregor, Jake Chapman, Alexander McQueen, Chris Ofili, Juergen Teller, a handful of anonymous multimillionaires, plus the odd cool bar (London's Social) and slinky boutique (Browns Focus in Mayfair). His computers are now stocked with designs for Oslo's Nobel Peace Centre, Boston's performing arts centre, New York's Museum of Contemporary Art. To win these commissions proves he has been recognised internationally. And next week his new TV series helps launch BBC3: with Charlie Luxton and Justine Frischmann, former lead singer with Elastica, he will present Dreamspaces - Wallpaper* magazine TV, set to drum 'n' bass and club graphics.
His rivals are getting snippy: "Prince Charming" they call him, not entirely joking. "They all want to kill me," he giggles. It's mostly envy. But there's honest curiosity there, too, about whether Adjaye has real architectural substance beneath the hype, the schmooze and the PR machine. And this year, as he moves from style mag photoshoots to serious international projects, is the time we will find out. Adjaye puts his success down to timing, luck. That's partly it. But he's worked at it, not just the design, but wooing clients, running with the glampack. I can't imagine he slumps in front of Heartbeat on a Sunday night with a packet of Doritos. "I don't think I'd last long. I just don't like switching off. It was actually a problem as a child. I was on the verge of being dangerous. I get really pissed off really quickly. If something doesn't arrest me, I start to flip and flit."



Dirty House | David Adjaye

Adjaye was born to Ghanaian parents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His father was a diplomat, so he had half the world under his belt by the time his family settled in north London, when he was nine. "As much as I was enjoying all the places I was moving to, I was incredibly traumatised by it, and loathed my parents for this inability to have roots. But then I decided to embrace it. I realised that it was a strength, rather than a problem." A strength, in part, because continually adjusting to new cultures tested his charm and confidence to the limits. It also toughened his resolve. Aside from a brief ambition to be a pilot, he was always attracted by the creative world. After a year's art foundation, though, he quit for architecture. "I couldn't break through to become an artist. I need [to work in] specific contexts. I need limits, or I never stop going." Architecture, he thought, would stop him flitting. So he entered at the bottom, jobbing around British firms for four years, picking up skills, before completing a degree in the subject in one year, with a first.



Iniva | David Adjaye


Still he never felt entirely at ease. For a start, he was a young black man - albeit from a professional family - in "the most closed, middle-class, middle-aged, trust-fund profession you could ever be in", where even women remain a rarity. It was also the British attitude to architecture that disturbed him, "that design is just functionally driven, that you just solve problems, scientifically". It's true. In Britain we find it hard to think of architecture as a rich piece of culture, like a novel or music, embodying an argument or an idea. For centuries, our traditional pragmatism has driven us to judge architecture solely on its technical prowess or failings, or its picturesqueness within a romanticised landscape (I'm thinking carbuncles here), capped with a silly name ("the gherkin", etc), rather than judging it on its physical, three-dimensional presence. "And that's just wrong," Adjaye chips in. "Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they're just things they manoeuvre through. But the make-up of a person is influenced by the nature of spaces."






He found more like-minded people outside Britain after university, travelling around Europe, doing placements with his hero architects, or in Japan, where he studied 16th-century tea pavilions. And at the Royal College of Art, where he completed a master's degree and revelled in the college's singular interdisciplinary community of car designers, graphic artists, textile designers and those emerging Young British Artists who would provide him with his first precocious commissions. These were places that treated architecture as art. He admires, in particular, the freedom of thought of his artist friends, so different from the "neuroses" and pragmatism of most young British architects. He has worked with them ever since, most notably Turner Prize-winner Ofili: their latest collaboration is at Folkestone Library. "Chris is so articulate about the visual world, I stand in awe. I like being able to have access to his world. So we can rap, as we say. And see what kind of lines come out of it."

Adjaye is not a frustrated YBA; he does, though, call himself a "conceptual architect". "People usually say, 'Oh, that means bullshit'. I say it means the ability for me to use anything to express my ideas. The idea is the most important concept within the whole construction. Everything else is a means to an end."

He's talking the talk again, but he does deliver. In each project, from no-budget to glampack, he displays the thrillingly lateral, entrepreneurial approach to materials of a young conceptual artist. Like a kid given the run of a toy shop, Adjaye hunts for bright new things to try out, plucking textures from one context to another. You'll more commonly find the honeycomb aluminium panelling at the Social bar on an aeroplane; at Browns Focus, fat slabs of cheap, coarse chipboard are lacquered as deluxe decoration (squint and it's leopardskin); for a house he's building himself in Ghana, he's using traditional mud walls, "only made 21st century". Cheap becomes a million dollars, luxurious trash.

In his startling, Arctic-white office, great heaps of materials stack up on the floor - rough aggregate, slabs of slate, terracotta, every possible permutation of perforated metal sheet - ready to be tested in the hand. This is Adjaye's library, where he roots out the right look, texture, tone or smell. It becomes sensual. In one exhibition he designed, he spliced brilliant ice-cold steel with fat, cosy pads of charcoal felt. The massive corner slab of Dirty House, just completed for artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster in Shoreditch, east London, is coated in thick, rough, anti-graffiti paint the colour and texture of chocolate fudge, with its cantilevered roof seeming to float on a bleached white glow, like icing. You could gobble it up.




This is the concept. He calls it "emotive" architecture, space that prods you to respond or, as he said earlier, helps form your everyday psyche, like a two-way conversation between you and him: "Spaces should seduce. I want to demystify this shroud that architecture has, that it's mystical, some kind of mysterious old art that nobody understands." But his is not easy architecture. It might not reveal itself immediately. It demands you work, too. And it's not about showing off macho technical prowess in wild daredevil forms or phallic skyscrapers (though, rest assured, his buildings aren't all talk, no plumbing). Nor is it about what the building looks like. Adjaye's buildings aren't traditionally pretty, to be gazed at. They don't have a signature style. In fact, they can be ugly. He might design simply to unsettle the way you look at things. The perversely blank facade of the Elektra House, Whitechapel, east London, for instance, is a dark pool of calm in the visually busy street, entirely without the symbols one expects of a house - pitched roof, chimney, even windows (they're on the back). It's dark, alien, almost sinister. It broods. When people walk past, I've watched them touch the facade almost instinctively, or wrinkle their noses in disgust. They respond.



That pleases Adjaye. He wants, he says, to "make space present", make it more intense. And, like the work of his conceptual installation artist friends, his buildings work best when you're in them. They evoke a certain mood. One commentator described the airless ground-floor room at the Social bar as "a coffin ... the inside of a box". It was a compliment. He says he curates the spaces, almost from the inside out, like a game of cat and mouse, goading and tempting you, carrot and stick, through a series of twists and turns, tricks of perception, trompe l'oeils. Enter the Upper Room, the exhibition he designed for Ofili in London last year, and you're tempted with lights down a twisting dark street-like corridor of walnut wood veneer, its grain almost shaking like a mesmerising optical illusion, before you come upon a dark chapel, lit by Ofili's dazzling paintings, like stained glass.

His architecture is photogenic in a classic "minimalist" way. But he's no minimalist. If anything, he pumps things up to the max, makes them strong-tasting; he's not interested in what he calls the "boring, passive, nice stuff" he sees built in Britain today. True, there aren't many here with his curatorial approach: maybe Will Alsop, architect of Peckham's technicolour library, or Caruso St John, whose Walsall Art Gallery certainly "makes space present". Like Adjaye, these architects have reacted against British pragmatism with architecture of a more international flamboyance.

The question is whether Adjaye can maintain the intense mood-making of his early projects, many of them just small-scale interior works, at the larger scale of his new big-league, public projects. Not content with this huge task, Adjaye has thrown an even more ambitious aim into the pot, transforming what he has rather grandly called "the architecture of the post-city", that is, the public realm.

What's left of it sits outside his office in north Hoxton, where New Labour Islington crashes into old Labour Hackney with an almighty bang: threadbare 1950s estates, cracked pavements eddying with shoppers, empty Bacardi Breezers or Dixie Chicken wrappers piled in the stagnant pools of rubbish at the edge. It's just your average fractured, half-privatised, half-sinking urban landscape, the kind that just seems to happen, gradually, when nobody's looking.

In fact, it's been a while since anyone's looked at it - properly, I mean. Every few years or so, politicians and planners have a little worry, lament the loss of the civic realm, the state of the inner city, and launch big initiatives, from Thatcher's enterprise zones to Prescott's ineffectual urban summits. But, says Adjaye, the mess of our civic landscape is not solved by the grand dictatorial planning of old. "The city's not there to be solved," he says. It's that scientific bent of the British again. "It's not about grand boulevards and trees any more, sparkling and clean. The big idea. Pure utopia! I don't wish a perfect equilibrium on the city. That's frightening."



Adjaye, instead, celebrates the vibrancy of the mess. You have to work with it, be more radical. "To me, politics is about a small idea, down there, which affects individuals." It means, architecturally, something akin to his "emotive" spaces, literally curating public space and buildings as deft pieces of place-making conceptual art to which you, the public, respond.

But it's one thing to design a cool home that communicates to one or two people. It's quite another to curate space for all society, especially when nobody's entirely sure what society looks like any more. Model citizens don't exist like they used to. People don't go to town halls, or libraries. They go to Tesco. Our civic society, like its landscape, is cracked and fragmented, multirooted, something to escape from to shopping malls, cars, gated estates. So, architecturally, it can't look as it used to, monumental porticoed town halls, fat Victorian philanthropist outside. Instead, it has to make a virtue out of its diversity, be flexible, contradictory, but uplifting. "My architectural politics are the politics of inclusivity," Adjaye says. And that's the vast aim he has set himself: what is this inclusive "architecture of the post-city" like?

He's not alone in his search. Architects have been hunting for it for 50 years, ever since they started coming up with critiques of modernism's authoritarian social reform. Postmodernism, with its cheap heritage symbolism, was one attempt at making architecture friendly to you and me. So was hi-tech, such as the Pompidou Centre, which primitively tried to make flexible space that users could manipulate. So, believe it or not, was 1960s concrete brutalism: the architects of housing estates were searching for a malleable, socially just design system for an increasingly complicated society; they ended up making prisons. After such prototypes, architects were rapped on the knuckles, told to build lofts and never to play with politics again.

Adjaye is the next generation, one he thinks is ready to disobey. And one brought up with a different way of seeing - trained, through films, computer games, CGI, the media, to expect different kinds of spaces, a sci-fi world of responsive environments. "I'm telling you, films like Minority Report, you know, with those interactive environments, where billboards know your name and you can play on those glass screens. They're coming. It's just been done in a building in Tokyo." Here's that kid in the toy shop again. "A segment of glass actually has scripts running through it. You don't know where it's coming from, but it's being pumped through the circuitry." It's a future in which private and public spaces, from bars to town halls, become fluid things, controllable by you as much as imposed upon you by architects and developers, a little like interactive TV.

It's happening. Very slowly. For now Adjaye pins his faith on his materials, felt and chocolate fudge paint, and his ability to treat emotive architecture like conceptual art, embodying in stone the different interpretations and identities required for new civic design. "I don't mean that literally. It doesn't happen in this utopian, heroic sense of the architect willing the right form, shoving up icons of culture. It's like being a conductor. There are different instruments that one has to bring together."

It's quite a task to pull off and, verbally at least, Adjaye's solution sounds woolly. I can hear his critics rubbing their hands. But, with his background, his own "inability to have roots", if anyone knows how to make sense of such complexity, it's Adjaye. This, he says, was the real strength that his convoluted childhood gave him.

His first crack at it debuts later this year, a series of libraries in east London. Except they're not libraries. They're Idea Stores, "which absolutely irritated countless people," he booms, laughing. "But there is a world out there that feels disconnected from this particular brand, the library. So you have to set up a new model. Branding is the world that we live in, as much as people hate it and want to slag it off." The Idea Store will, he says, be like a "marketplace". The first, for Whitechapel, is outside Sainsbury's. The offputting, monumental "symbolic grand narrative" of civic buildings will be replaced by something more fluid and vague, for the new fluid and vague consumer-citizen. "There are several ways of getting in. There is no front and there is no back. It's like a billboard. It projects. It has electronic messaging. It has videowalls. It has an egalitarian facade. If they decide to go and read a book, then I'm really thrilled. But if they decide to go and play on a computer game, I'm thrilled, too." He doesn't mind dancing with the devil of capitalism. But he's cynical enough to acknowledge that his ideal future of manipulable Minority Report environments might be less of a two-way conversation between architect and user, and more about you, the consumer-citizen, being manipulated by something bigger, to get you to buy.

Part of Adjaye is indeed a showman, but he's also a romantic, an old-school humanist, as every architect should be - even something of a social reformer. "Style becomes style only when it has a political and social relevance," he insists. "It's like, fashion magazine style. I'm not saying it's bad. But for me it's not enough. It doesn't have substance."

Peppering his glamour work now are projects such as the Bernie Grant centre in Tottenham, or a project for retired dockers in Shadwell, east London. "We aim to be the Robin Hood practice," he recently said. "For rich people we make things grittier, for poor people we make them glossier." He laughs. "Yeah. I said that. I have a belief that humanity is above everything." It's as much a personal mission as an intellectual one. Visiting his mentally and physically disabled brother in a series of dour care homes made him acutely aware of how mean environments can be in the public realm. For once he has an earnest expression. "The pinnacle of architecture is when all society wills to create something that emblemises what they are. Architects have to be optimists." The smile comes back. "Otherwise they'd kill themselves." And the giggle

Pierre Goudiaby Atepa | Senegalese Architect

Changing Africa

We are all observing it : Africa today has begun its own renaissance. The Atepa Group has for more than 30 years striven to participate all over the continent at the rebuilding of what was once known as one of the leading civilizations of the world.

Think of Timbuktu, the Pyramids of Egypt!

Changing Africa, by participating in the making of its future, by identifying here and there partners in business, partners in progress, to use the potentials of this rich continent and work hand in hand to make them blossom.

That is the reason why we have decided to go global. Global in the choice of our partners, global in the activities we have identified as being useful for the welfare of Africans and their partners, be it financial engineering, architecture, real estate, mining, transport, agriculture, energy.

At Atepa, we want to create conditions for win-win ventures with our partners.
So come and join us in this tremendous task of building Africa together.
Well ! we have being doing it for more than 32 years and counting.


Pierre GOUDIABY

ATEPA
Architect
President Founder


Pierre Goudiaby ATEPA, Bâtisseur du futur - Master-builder of the future
Interview de Mathieu Ropitault
Interview by Mathieu Ropitault

The seat of the BCEAO, the Central Bank of West African States, and the Millenary Door in Dakar, the Banjul airport, the bank of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Lomé, etc. The list of architect Pierre Goudiaby Atepa’s accomplishements is a long one. As long as his projects in progress.
Since his first achievement in 1975, the man has gone far, imposing, successfuly, his African and contemporary stamp. And if his first works still evoke admiration, he continues to bustle about numerous sites, each one more ambitious than the other.
A workaholic, Pierre Goudiaby Atepa exerts himself to do his part in the construction of a great Africa. Encounter in Dakar.



After 34 years in architecture, how do you look at your career ?
Actually, it’s gone very quickly. But that’s normal, when you do things with a passion, like I do, you don’t dwell upon the time.
Time, we live it, we don’t ask any questions and we move on. And when I realize that it’s been 28 years since I started my compagny, in fact, it’s like it was yesterday...




For several years, Senegal has been a construction site, that must be very satisfying for the architect that you are ?
It is more than a satisfaction. As for me, I am happy. I regret, however, that other architects did not follow suit. It is a criticism that I have of them because President Abdoulaye Wade invited them to participate several times, but they became enmeshed in quarrels that really made no sense.
Unfortunately, we are only three or four architects that are benefiting from this inspiration, this state of cultural and architectural effervescene. They are not all benefiting from it, and I think that’s a shame.





Is it a challenge to give Senegal a new image ?
You know, let’s not pull the wool over our eyes. Africa is the cradle of art. If African architects succeed one day in making the symbiosis between African art and modern architecture, the result will be magnificent.
I am almost 60 and I have to think about taking a rest in ten years. But I am sure that the new generation will revolutionize modern African architecture, which will have nothing to reproach itself of in terms of modernity and wich will maintain, as Senghor advocated, the true values of African civilisation.


A spanish journalist wrote that we do architecture without a complex. Not only do we want to create architecture without a complex, but we want to go beyond that. Not that we want to give others a complex, just simply to represent new modern architecture.


In 1973, you presented a thesis on the ideal African city, this city is it on the agenda today ?
It could be the same one. The ideal city had three essential properties. The first, that it be profoundly African. The second, that it is turned towards an assured modernity. The third, that it is a solar city. I had, for example, designed a solar-powered bus that was invented 15 years later. So I had thought about it without having the means to create it.




This solar city, convivial and ecological, hasn’t aged a bit. At the time it was nearly visionary, no one took it up because petroleum was 5 dollars a barrel. Today, the price has gone beyond 100 dollars !


Right now I am working on solar light bulbs, because the current solar panels that you have to position to capture the sun are not nice looking. In Africa, we are not lacking in sunshine, so let’s do something so it is aesthetic, so that people can consume solar energy and that it is a pleasant commodity.


You are putting a great deal into the African continent.
I received everything from Africa, so I must give something back to reciprocate. I don’t have anything against football players and singers but I am tired of seeing on television only Africans who sing, who dance and who play football. I am not saying to the youngers that there are better things to do, but that there isn’t only that to do. They have to go into business, change the economy.

To do that Africans have to be enterprising and not have any complexes. The wealth of tomorrow is in Africa. We have to develop it ourselves in partnership with others, in a frank collaboration that is beneficial to all, African youth must be aware of its potential, to accept that it is possible.


You have also just launched the IDEE-A initiative.
Once again it is to bring together, through new technologies, intelligence and allow Africans to participate wherever they are. If before I told Africans to come back to Africa, today I tell them to stay where they are and to use modern means of communication to develop Africa. And to develop is first of all to have ideas.
We are trying to put into synergy every competence that we can have throughout the world and locally in order to create projects for the society. That is what is important to me, to participate in an intelligent way in the development of Africa.

Among your future projects, which is the one that is the most important to do ?

I would say Diamond City in Liberia because we are starting from nothing. We are going to create, completely, a city to bring wealth to a poor country that is potentially among the richest in the world. The idea is to develop the diamond industry by creating a free trade zone to boost the Liberian economy. I will say it again, wealth must be created and everyone must benefit from it. That is how Africa will get ahead.


www.atepa.com
www.idee-a.org May - june 2008