Dezeen reports:
This design week, la Rinascente will show festival-goers how Africa's newest makers, thinkers and dreamers are being spurred on by visions of the future. Afrofuture, an experimental programme curated by Beatrice Galilee, will ambitiously initiate an international design discourse around the exciting new conversations bursting out of all corners of Africa. Galilee says: "As the design world expands its reach beyond aesthetics to encompass networks, strategies and unexpected tactics, Africa becomes an urgent critical voice in the global conversation. In the Afrofuture we imagine the African Union as the world's most powerful economic zone, we imagine DIY space travel and biomorphic militarised kwazulu vervet monkeys. We present Chinafrica state tv, futuristic instruments and contemporary African pulp fiction."More here
Jungle Jim science fiction magazine cover
Over four days, la Rinascente invites festival-goers and consumers to journey with them into the Afrofuture. Taking over la Rinascente's flagship Milan store, each day's events will bring a forward-thinking, futuristic, global game-changing version of the world's second-biggest continent. Whether real of imagined, the Africa of today has wrapped its arms around the world of tomorrow. Writer Nana Ocran, who has helped develop the project for la Rinascente, says: "Afrofuture shines a modern, pan-African light on what can, is and could happen in design in and beyond Africa, through wider, deeper narratives and experimental mash-ups with global innovators. It's a dynamic platform to kick off the conversation about African design and to think big about how the rapidly emerging future will see mould-breaking designers coming up from the radical underground to the global mainstream."
