Water storage containers in Tarrafal

The below images inform the work submitted by Patti Anahory for Design Indaba’s collaborative project 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 colours of Africa, a collaborative project with Google Arts & Culture, 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.

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 center 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.