Design and manufacturing of a micro-architecture with a dual soul, a scenic object, within the exhibition space, and at the same time an object containing an immersive experience
The dialogue with Anawana and Zasha began with an image, a dress worn in Zambia for a ceremony/dance "Likumbi Lya Mize" The dress is composed of various elements and is very scenic, one of the key elements of this costume is a very large skirt, almost as if it were a small architecture. This is where our project starts, from the suggestion of the artist who asked us to create a small architecture that takes inspiration from this dress and becomes a visual and sound work, an architecture in which to enter and live an intimate and multi-sensorial experience.
The project was presented as part of an exhibition entitled Spiritual Fabulations curated by Zasha Colah and Chiara Figone, which grew out of a three-year research project entitled (re)memberings and (re)groundings and establishes a field of interaction between ancestral paths that insist on the centrality of spiritualities in other narratives.
The project was realized in five days through a collaborative process between us, the Archive team, Anawana and a group of Naba students
Anawana Haloba (Livingstone, Zambia, 1978) lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. She studied at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts in Lusaka, Zambia and completed her BA at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo in 2006. She was a graduate of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and an alumnus of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC. She is a doctoral fellow at the University of Bergen Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design.
A very important aspect in the development phase of the project was the study of the surface skin, which we wanted to be as similar as possible to a weave, the interweaving of a soft fabric that rests on the structure.
Our attempt was therefore to design a device that was both a large skirt and a small immersive dome: it takes its inspiration from an artifact made using ancestral weaving techniques, but becomes an architecture made with geodesic geometries and therefore triangulations, the same ones used in contemporary architecture, made of wood. A device that has a double soul, the first is linked to its exterior, it is an architecture but it is also an image, a suggestion, a scenic object, while its interior is an immersive experience, a hut and at the same time a ship.
The cladding was made by re-using the wood from a previous Anawana installation in Milan a few years earlier, a project we worked on and which allowed us to get to know Anawana, Zasha and the crazy and fantastic team of Archive books
Haloba’s work has been shown in institution such as Centre Pompidou, France; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway: GAMeC, Italy; SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway; National Museum of African Arts Smithsonian Institute, US; the Rauma Biennale, Finland; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany; Museum Berardo Collection, Portugal; la Biennale di Venezia, 2009; Sydney Biennale 2008; Manifesta 7; the Sharjah Biennial 8th, 11th and 14th editions, as well as the biennales in Sao Paulo, 2016; Shanghai, 2016; Lyon, 2017; and the Bucharest Biennale, 2021.
Alessandro Mason, Pietro Lora
Anawana Haloba
Zasha Colah, Chiara Figone
Archive books Milano
Nicolò De Maiti