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Portrait of architect and designer Patti Anahory
Design Indaba
Cape Town, South Africa
Cape Verdean architect and designer Patti Anahory was selected by Design Indaba to take part in our collaborative initiative with Google Arts & Culture, titled Colours of Africa. Africa is known for its bold, unapologetic use of colour. Stories are told in pigments, tones and hues; a kaleidoscope as diverse as the cultures and peoples of the continent. For the initiative, we asked 60 African creatives to capture the unique spirit of their country in a colour which represents home to them. The projects they have created are personal and distinct stories of Africa, put into images, videos, texts and illustrations. Each artist has also attempted to articulate what being African means to their identity and view of the world.
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- Title: Portrait of architect and designer Patti Anahory
- Original Source: Design Indaba
- Subject: Patti Anahory
- Rationale: Águ The colour(s) of water Asked to think of a colour that reflects my experience and critical understanding of Cabo Verde, I immediately decided on the colour(s) of water. As a transparent liquid, this choice appears to be antithetical to the brief, a search for colour (through the lens) of water must critically engage the complexity of conditions, experiences and meanings that this precious liquid has in Cabo Verde, an archipelago surrounded by water, yet plagued by droughts. The contrast between the immensity of the surrounding oceans and the scarcity of potable water features strongly in our daily lives and collective imagination. beyond blue... Yet, the predominant (visual) narrative of Cabo Verde is defined by the trope of idyllic islands surrounded by clear blue seas. Blue is the predominant colour of any image search of Cabo Verde on Google’s search engine. This colour has fed the external (foreign) imagination and the political-economic reliance on tourism. Yet, the daily struggles for potable water, the dependence on desalination, as well as the cycles of droughts provide a counter narrative to the predominantly blue inviting seascapes of the searched images. This colour discoverying experiment proposes an alternate understanding to this narrow visual (colour) narrative of Cabo Verde by complexifying its relationship to water(s), beyond blue. process as product… My colour discovery as well as my proposed conceptual/art piece are collapsed into one. I propose a sequential process that relies on Google engine searches and a programmed algorithm to yield unpredictable (colour) results depending on the search parameters. In this sense the process is itself the product – a colour is produced. This discovery becomes the proposed product. A Google search for “Cabo Verde” in many of the most spoken languages around the world (Arabic, simplified Chinese, English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, etc.) yields a quilt of photographs with a predominance of turquoise blue. A view of Cabo Verde that is turned towards the sea and away from the arid landscape that marks the daily lives of Cabo-Verdeans who battle daily for access to potable water. This approach uses (and relies on) Google’s (image) search engine as an integral part of the process. In many ways, it is an ode to the Google universe, which will host this project and house our work, recognising the crucial role it has played in our daily lives. The development of the algorithm and the introduction of my own stock of images aims to imbue the process with personal agency in order to critically resignify the meanings of colour, in this case, the colour of water. algorithm re-signifying the colour (and meaning) of water An algorithm was programmed to identify and extract the predominant colour of the images obtained from Google searches. The algorithm extracts the average RGB colour of all the pixels of each image from the array of images downloaded from each thematic Google search. Prior to discovering/producing “my COLOUR of WATER”, I extracted two colours: the colour of Cabo Verde and the colour of Cabo Verde + Water through the compilation of hundreds of images from Google searches of Cabo Verde in a variety of languages (Portuguese, English, French, Hindi, Chinese (simplified), German, etc). This search returns a screen of alluring photographs with blue as the predominant colour. The developed algorithm organizes the images in an array and extracts the predominant colour of each pixel of each image. colour 1 = Google image search (Cabo Verde in various languages) + algorithm colour 2 = Google image search (Cabo Verde + Water) + algorithm My colour is the colour of water in Cabo Verde. The colour of water is not the blue that covers the google image searches but a mixture of tonalities resultant of search words that include various relationships to water: drought, rain, water production and storage, mixed with images of my own work around issues of (uneven) water distribution. my colour of water / hacking the search = Google image search (Cabo Verde + Water + Drought + Rain + Water storage + …) + inserted images from my work on (uneven) water distribution + algorithm future possibilities... This experiment could be further developed as an app that creates a colour for particular experiences or places (or a combination of both). Using a compilation of images/photographs gathered during particular events, or time span, in or of a place or any combination of selected or Google images, a colour can be produced, one that will ‘define’ that experience and or place. The result is always unpredictable and variable, depending both on the particular viewpoint, the Google (word) search and the time of the search. App: discover your colour of __________ (place X) (event Y) (concept Z) (X + Y + ...)
- Project: Colors of Africa
- Location: Cape Verde
- Lead Quote: The contrast between the immensity of the surrounding oceans and the scarcity of potable water features strongly in our daily lives and collective imagination.
- Hex Code: 83847B
- Colour Choice: Águ
- Biography: Patti Anahory is an architect and designer. She holds a Masters in Architecture degree from Princeton University and a professional architecture degree from the Boston Architectural College, both in the USA. In 2000, she was awarded the prestigious Rotch Traveling Scholarship (USA) through a two-stage design competition, becoming the second woman ever and the first woman of colour to win in 113 years, and up until then, the first awardee to select sub-Saharan Africa as a site of research. Between 2009 and 2012 she served as Founding Director of CIDLOT – University of Cabo Verde, an emerging multidisciplinary applied research centre promoting a critical understanding of the impacts of development paradigms in the dynamics of settlement and urban growth. In 2011, she co-founded XU: an interdisciplinary collective, now a professional practice, exploring art and inter-media studies as a critical language to address urban, architecture and environmental injustice. She was a member of the Master Jury in the first edition of the Africa Architecture Awards in 2017 and in 2018 she served as jury for the curatorial framework of the 2019 XII International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, Brasil. In 2019 she was invited, but did not participate, to be Regional Curator for Africa for the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism and in the same year she curated the independent initiative errant_praxis an experimental digital gathering of architecture practices to interrogate the complex modes of practicing in/from and for the African world - the continent, islands, diaspora and imaginaries. Her collaborations with filmmaker and web developer César Schofield Cardoso are Storia [na] Lugar, a multi-disciplinary storytelling platform promoting participatory media and mapping and [p a r e n t h e s i s] a space for creative experimentation and cross disciplinary dialogue. This year, she will curate an architecture event at Arc en Rêve, Bordeaux, France for the Saison Africa 2020 project.
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