The normal practice of dealing with stripped bare mealie cores, pineapple tops and banana stem fibres is probably to throw them away. The pragmatic perception of hand-made papers is that they’re artsy and have no function in the real world. Enter Phumani Papers, exhibiting at this year’s Design Indaba Expo, set to toss expectations out the window.
Phumani Papers was officially launched in 2005 as South Africa’s first archival paper mill. This offshoot from the Artists Proof Studio was established by Kim Berman and the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1999 with the joint support of the government Department of Science and Technology and the University of Johannesburg. Berman and Xaba also got the nod from South African National Archives. It has the facilities to make its own acid-free paper, with rudimentary equipment and purely recycled material. This saves the trees, gives the unemployed a chance — it has established over 250 jobs and helped to foster almost 20 new hand papermaking enterprises — and brings beautiful archival paper with a tiny footprint into our world. It gives new life to eaten-up mealies, pineapples and bananas, by-products from sugar cane harvesting in KwaZulu-Natal, invasive Eastern Cape Black Wattle tree material and disused hospital sheeting.
The team makes all sorts of funky artsy stationery, some items more useful than others. Meaning ‘reach out” in isiZulu, Phumani supports fifteen hand-made paper producer groups in seven provinces. And it fits all the Design Indaba expectations of having the wherewithal and thinking to ‘fuel an economic revolution in South Africa.”
But more excitingly, Phumani in its rudimentary ways has established a brand new lifestyle division in its catalogued projects. This involves things you might never associate with paper—ranging from vases to toys, designer boxes in different shapes and sizes to book covers. They use sisal in the make up of some of their paper-derivative projects giving their objects strength and durability; Phumani’s cardboard lends itself to innovative and practical understandings of how origami can infiltrate our lives, not just to be pretty, but to be useful.