Back to the Future

In 2006 Li Edelkoort published North meets south, a catalogue of sorts for a touring exhibition of objects from Scandinavia and Africa. The publication offers photographic juxtapositions in which objects – including ethnic art from Africa and Scandinavia, as well as contemporary Scandinavian design – prove the truth of various assertions such as: Africa mirrors Scandinavia; Europe is ethnic; Africa is modernist; pattern is primitive; blankets are global; folklore is universal, etc. A senoufo stool from the Ivory Coast sits next to a BDI chair by Bjorn Dahlstrom from Sweden, a dust pan by Normann Copenhagen sits next to a recycled utensil from Benin. And so it goes, objects from north and south brought together and linked by some surprising and surprisingly convincing visual similarities.

In her introduction to the catalogue, Edelkoort, who is a Dutch ‘trend researcher’, writes:

A finnish blonde wooden spoon echoes a nigerian dark wooden spoon, a danish stool of organic design resembles a similar piece of craft from the ivory coast, a pancake-flat marimekko print feels ethnic combined with an optical indigo banana leaf pattern, a sample of swedish folk fabric mirrors a piece of kente cloth, while a graphic plaid from lapland sits snugly next to a morroccan blanket . . .

With the east-meets-west dialogue stranded in isolationist behaviour and patriotic politics, the world is moving towards the next big thing . . .

So far apart and yet so close in visual and aesthetic terms, the mirror of northern purist design and southern primitive craft leaves one perplexed and enchanted; how can opposites be so attracted, how can cultures so far away be so similar?

Recent discoveries have clearly indicated that the african continent is the cradle of mankind, and therefore its culture. With our roots firmly sealed in red earth, we have migrated to other horizons, higher mountains, colder climates, vaster seas . . . losing colour along the way.

Yet an aesthetic norm seems to be genetically embedded in our collective memory, enabling us to tap into unspoiled territory, using a common design DNA, reaching out to formulate an organic visual language of archaic clear simplicity, a graphic design direction.

To discover these formal links brings a sudden awareness of proximity and fraternity; of equality also.

This young century will see the north and south embrace, unleashing inspiration for the decades to come towards a contemporary yet archaic modernism.

I have to say this gives me the creeps, and not just because of Edelkoort’s feel-good generalising, her advertising patter that is tailormade for maximum corporate appeal. The problem is the total lack of historical awareness in this point of view, and its dangerous naturalising of cultural politics – the unequal relations of cultural appropriation, for example.

According to Edelkoort, we share a common design DNA, which explains the visual similarities between north and south. The Scandinavian ancestors carried this aesthetic with them all the way to the north, the snow and ice of winter and the dramatically different landscape explaining the variations of colour palette. To make the most of these similarities, to refer to objects from Africa in contemporary craft and design, is not appropriation (a term that in its harshness inevitably raises questions of power) but a re-establishing of family connections, making the most of a cultural inheritance that belongs to all of us. Equality emerges from shared aesthetics, the fact that we all eat from similar looking bowls, with similar looking spoons, while sitting on similar looking chairs. (Let’s overlook the fact that some of these objects cost thousands of dollars, are the product of a sophisticated industrial production and depend on avant-garde notions of originality, while others are recycled, made by hand, and stage specific relationships to the past and its relevance in the future.)

Indeed, Edelkoort’s ideas are less a vision of the future than a badly digested summary of our past. What she seems to be describing as the way forward is essentially the workings of 20th century modernism, which to a large extent depended on exactly such objects and non-western cultural traditions to formulate its ‘archaic clear simplicity’. Modernism in part looks the way it does – in craft, design and fine art – because of primitivism, the interest that European artists had in the art of Africa, the Pacific, Asia, etc.

It seems that Edelkoort has got her past and future mixed up, unless we are doomed to repeat the past again. I bet the south can’t wait to experience proximity and fraternity with the north again in the 21th century, seeing as it was such an equal exchange last time round.

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