British-Ghanaian designer Giles Tettey Nartey has used welded aluminium to craft his Serwaa chair, which reinterprets the normal picket Lobi stool native to West Africa as an “industrial product”.
Referencing well-known industrial-style chairs such because the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe, the piece by Tettey Nartey goals to platform the widespread but “missed” Lobi chair by reframing it in a contemporary context.
“I take my follow as, in some methods, reframing one thing which is so widespread and revealing the qualities that I discover actually essential,” Tettey Nartey advised Dezeen. “How do you are taking this conventional Lobi stool, and truly body it as if it is – which I feel it’s – as important as these Mies van der Rohe chairs [for example]?”
“I feel the shift in materiality tries to research this – what does a standard Lobi stool appear to be as an industrial product?”
The Serwaa chair is outlined by its low, sweeping steel construction and includes a cut up seat that’s composed of two similar parts that slope backwards, angling the person skyward.
Constructed solely from welded aluminium sheets, the piece includes a refined composition outlined by curved and angular varieties.
In a West African context, the Lobi stool is usually believed to carry spirits of the deceased and is due to this fact animistic, moderately than merely being an inanimate object.
Eager to reinforce the article’s animistic qualities, Tettey Nartey designed the Serwaa chair with six angular legs – versus the 2 or three typical of a standard Lobi chair.
“From a West African or African context, seeing an object with six legs is not unusual,” he mentioned. “However a six-legged object inside a Western context feels unusual, simply due to a design sensibility.”
“In order that strangeness was one thing I needed to work with,” he added.
Serwaa varieties a part of an ongoing PhD analysis undertaking by the designer that explores home rituals in a West African context via a collection of objects animated via efficiency.
“You see loads of West African objects being dislocated from the context [and] being positioned in a museum context, which removes this concept of use and efficiency,” Tettey Nartey mentioned.
“A big proportion of [these objects] got here from the mystic sphere, however how they’re introduced inside a Western context removes this concept of animation from it,” he added.
“So my analysis talks about this concept of efficiency being one thing that animates this stuff.”
Different items created as a part of this collection embrace a communal desk for pounding and serving fufu and a standard West African bench reimagined as an enormous sport of Oware.
Different aluminium furnishings lately featured on Dezeen contains a collection of furnishings and homeware constituted of scrap aluminium and steel and metal furnishings exhibited at this yr’s Milan design week.
The images is courtesy of Giles Tettey Nartey.
