Decolonising Materiality: From a Colonial Past to a Decolonial Future
A collaborative work by Bubu O & decosm through the DesignKind programme.
Bubu O and decosm collaborated to find out the origins of the material Jute in history, its connections to colonialism, the routes it has travelled in the world as well as where the material is grown, produced and manufactured today and where it ends up. The artwork produced questions our understanding of what’s natural and what’s human-made, uncovers histories that are long forgotten, and suggests a future that allows for new mixed materials to emerge to provide an answer to our need to recycle and reuse rather than the destruction of biodiversity and exploitation of low income communities to propagate and produce from scratch.
Bubu O
Bubu O is a fibre artist and Creative director of the contemporary women's wear brand, IAMISIGO, living between Lagos Accra Abidjan and Nairobi.
Her work spans around the idea of how the body exists and interacts with space by creating wearable art pieces, film, photography and space installations with unconventional materials and ancient textiles traditions from all over the African continent.
decosm
decosm is a London based collective working to decolonise city-making. They aim to respond to widespread concerns around social, environmental and spatial inequalities in our built world.
They co-develop tools to explore how to decolonise and diversify city-making in education, practice, and the places we live; decosm brings together spatial practitioners and people from all walks of life to nurture this collective process.
decosm is currently led by Neba Sere, Umi Lovecraft BP and Sanaa Shaikh.
This piece focuses on decolonizing the mind thoroughly, by questioning and engaging a variety of thoughts in relation to socio-political questions i.e. capitalism, classism, traditions as well as questioning future issues such as our ecosystem. How do we embrace our histories as having passed and move forward? The idea is to remove the construct of borders and to merge different ideas to create a unism in matter and space.
This is represented through photography and a short performance piece using jute as the main material, which was used in ancient times for fishing and sourced in Lagos Nigeria at a dryfish market, supported by what is now used for fishing, a plastic fishing net, and seen to be one of the most dangerous forms of plastic contamination not only for environment but the animals and people within these environments.
Decolonising Materiality - Performance
With the new gaze on Africa and its inhabitants, the piece was created in response to the climate crisis in relation to the “fishing” currently happening within the continent as well as outside its diasporic community. Is the new age of climate crisis and racial justice a fishing game into fishing out issues of the past to solve the current world hunger for sustainability? Are we the new commodity being transported?
The idea of rawness, anti-”finishing” (and therefore anti-Eurocentrism) and functionality exist as strong conceptual design threads throughout the piece. Thereby questioning how the fibre can not only keep history alive but also pass on information for the future through preservation of techniques and expression through matter, by using the ultimate canvas- “the human body” via clothing as a vehicle of communication.
By conveying lost historical stories and transforming these found “data” and applying them into garments and fibres, as a form of silent protest to post and neo-colonialism, portrayed through wearable art, space installations, visuals and short film.
The end result was using the material, jute, to tell visual suffering of a fibre interwoven to potentially save us and our planet from the climate crisis which we face currently. In essence, understanding and translating the spirit of the material.
Researching the project
Part of the research for this project took the shape of exploring the history of jute and mapping the development of this timeline across the world
History and timeline of Jute
Jute - digital map
Documenting the process
Part of creating this work involved collaborating between disciplines, countries and time zones. A shared Miro board was used to explore initial ideas and research for the project, along with video calls and exploratory sketches.
Bubu O x decosm Miro board research
