FORM, MATERIALITY AND POESIS

Tomi Laja: Where are you currently — Britain or Ghana?

Giles Tettey Nartey: At the moment, I’m in Ghana on a trip with my diploma students from the [Architectural Association]. My teaching partner and I brought our students here for a couple of days.

I know the landscape there is quite varied, from the plains to mountains to rainforests. What kind of terrain are you in right now?

Ghana is a combination of a multitude of different climatic zones, communities, and ways of living. Earlier, we went to Tamale [in the Northern Region], which climatically, is closer to the savanna. We drove through the rainforest [to get there]. Currently, we’re in Accra, which is a really peculiar place. It’s an urban landscape that’s bordered by the coast [down south] and the Aburi Mountains [above]. Due to urbanization, Accra has expanded so much in the last 15 years or so. My perception of its size when I lived here as a child was so much larger than when I returned as a teenager. What I once viewed as the outskirts of the city now feels closer to the center.

You’ve consistently moved between different geographies and cultures. Time and distance have a way of rupturing memory, which is a theme that surfaces repeatedly in your work and in conversations around your practice.

Memory is the core of my work — or one of the tenets, anyway. My research is completely tied with this idea of how memory allows for new ways of existing. In practice, I am interested in how design can tell stories through the objects that we create. Some of the work also speaks about the act of recalling, and the distortion that also takes place [in that process]. We never remember what something fully is. We remember how something felt.

What codes do you use to signal contemporality?

Most of my work at the moment is art-led, but research-based. And what that allows is a deep study into histories, theories, and ways of practicing as a means of expanding on the design language I’ve been creating. I position my work within the space of the mnemonic, which is the thing — an object, a word, a taste, or a sense — that brings back or recalls a memory. When we start to talk about a kind of contemporary West African design — which my practice is concerned with — this idea of the mnemonic and memory speaks to that, because historically, within West Africa, Africa as a whole, and the “Global South”, objects weren’t just objects. They weren’t inanimate things that simply occupied space from a distance, or things to look at as pieces of art placed on our shelves or hung on our walls. These objects carried a certain weight. They held rituals, practices, lineages, or histories about a community or a people. In the same way, the artifacts that I make aren’t just objects. Some of them speak about a ritualistic aspect of use — and not in a grandiose or hyper-conceptual way, but as the simple act of doing something continuously, and that action having some form of effect or relation with oneself. I recall these quotidian rituals in West Africa: pounding fufu, preparing a meal, or washing your hands before a meal. They almost seem insignificant, but they hold great weight and importance. It’s easy to think about the disconnect between that way of living and the contemporary society we live in now, right? Whereas actually, I think there’s something interesting about the compounding of those two.

So, SERWAA (2024) [the cast-aluminum seat which references the West African Lobi chair,] is the purest form of highlighting a traditional design intelligence through a contemporary material lens. It takes the same form and design logic [of the traditionally wooden Lobi chair] and shifts the materiality as a means of speaking about what is considered contemporary. And by contemporary, I mean made now and reflecting the times we’re in, in terms of the materials we have access to and the ways of production available to us, rather than being made as a pastiche.

Your practice seems to be forming contemporary artifacts that implicate performance and the positioning of the body. SERWAA feels to be choreographing an invitation for the body to rest, aware of the sitter’s form and gaze.

Exactly. Because the form of the traditional Lobi chair is low to the ground with an inclined back, it allows the body to recline. It positions it upwards and lifts the head in a particular direction. It is a kind of a reclining chair, so to speak, repositioning the body to the sky. There is something beautiful about the cosmological connection it creates. I find it fascinating that the architecture, design, and objects that we make and use can have such effects on us. There is something profound in that: how the chair actually invites rest in this simple motion of lying down and looking towards the stars, shaping and guiding us.

You have some site specific works that explore materiality through their local contexts, such as Kuruwa [a series of sculptural forms referencing both West African and Korean aesthetic practices], which was exhibited in Seoul in 2024. How critical are ideas of hybridity in your practice?

There’s something really wonderful in the space between two things, and in what happens when those things interact. There’s a kind of negotiation that takes place when two ideas have to speak to one another. It’s not a matter of one overpowering the other. Rather, something new emerges from that condition. There’s a hybridity in the materiality, culture, and logics coming together within the work, and that is important. I’m also not interested in replicating the past. What I’m more interested in is how to reimagine those practices and ways of being within a contemporary context, creating a hybridity between old and new. And when you piece those elements together, it produces something entirely new.

What materials were you working with on Kuruwa?

It’s hanji, a kind of traditional Korean paper used for writing, as a building material, or for making screens. The project involved borrowing that materiality to continue to expand my own visual language. I’m not particularly interested in a specific medium, per se. I’m far more interested in how to transfer an idea across different mediums: how to create a design language that can be articulated similarly as a bench,  stool, room, film, or an object. The name of the exhibition, Kuruwa, means “small cup” in Ghana’s Twi dialect, and speaks to the idea that the body is a vessel. An object is a vessel. Grain silos are vessels. A table can be a vessel. Why? Because it holds something. It brings things together and it has a kind of capacity.

Recently, you worked with the Italian brand Demon Footwear to make your GTN mules, which were released at Dover Street Market Paris. How has that collaboration expanded your material and formal practice?

I designed the object and Demon Footwear engineered it. It was an opportunity to distill and extend a language from some of the broader material and formal investigations I’ve been pursuing in my practice, and present them within a sculptural, wearable object in the form of a shoe. The practice acts as a kind of incubator for ideas that can exist within an exhibition or institutional setting, but also within an everyday context: an object to be lived with.

You’re always starting with research, whether it’s tethered to culture, material, or form.

Completely. Research is the foundation of what I do, in terms of interrogating and forming new connections. I always think of the process of making and creating as a series of states. There is a state of sitting, a state of standing, and a state of speaking. When I think about research, I think about this state of sitting and listening, allowing a truth to reveal and present itself.