In Domus:
One year after presenting the engagingly performative, at times subversive Hacked design show, Milan’s la Rinascente and curator Beatrice Galilee have partnered again to shake up the conventional conception of a Milan Furniture Fair exhibition. Afrofuture portrays a highly technophilic Africa, the world’s second-largest continent (yet one that tends to be underrepresented in Milan).More hereAfrofuture brings together a diverse cast of characters, events, objects, and organisations into a single programme. From the artists and technologists of MakerFaireAfrica to “The Afronauts”, Christina de Middel’s speculative photographic series on Zambia’s failed 1960s space program, the exhibition challenges traditional craft-centric assumptions about African design. The exhibition documents the spread of design into every facet of everyday life as well as into strange territory, as in the sculptural fantasies of the Kane Kwei workshop’s bespoke coffins.
image courtesy of Afrofuture
According to Galilee, “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 militarized Kwazulu vervet monkeys. We present Chinafrica state TV, futuristic instruments and contemporary African pulp fiction.”
