At the heart of Design in West Africa: Unity in Multiplicity lies a conviction that design in the region cannot be understood through Western disciplinary boundaries. Rather than object-oriented or style-driven, West African design is fundamentally relational: it emerges from systems of knowledge, materials, rituals, and collective memory that resist singular narratives.
My curatorial approach for this exhibition recognizes design as an expanded field one that spans spiritual protocols, ecological intelligence, artisanal mastery, political agency, and radical forms of self-determination. Across West Africa, the act of making is never isolated. It is embedded in networks: of community, of ancestry, of land. Objects become carriers of meaning, but also instruments of continuity, care, and transformation.
The exhibition is therefore structured not as a survey, but as a constellation of practices that highlight how makers from different countries respond to shared urgencies heritage, identity, material scarcity, environmental change while articulating distinct local vocabularies. This multiplicity is not presented as divergence, but as a coherent ecosystem of interconnected voices.
By commissioning new works and engaging in extensive research with artists, designers, and architects from across the region, the exhibition positions the Palais de Lomé as both a site of encounter and an instrument of cultural recovery. The palais architecture is deliberately activated: its colonial past is neither erased nor aestheticized, but confronted with works that challenge its history and re-inscribe the space with new spatial and symbolic functions.
My curatorial intention is to invite visitors to perceive design in West Africa not as an emerging trend, but as a mature and sovereign discourse, shaped by generations of innovation and grounded in local systems of value. Unity in Multiplicity affirms that plurality is not a conceptual framework, but a lived reality one that defines the region’s creative power and its contribution to global design cultures.