This year’s Design Indaba showed how Africans are still merely spectators of the global consumer bandwagon
Anthea Garman
There were some big and unresolved debates at the Fourth International Design Indaba in Cape Town recently. The conference, showcasing an eclectic bevy of the world’s brightest designers from multiple media, found itself embroiled in discussions about war, peace, hunger, capitalism, branding and where on earth Africa fitted into the bigger picture.
Sitting in the darkened Nico Theatre oohing and aahing over many brilliant pieces of startlingly original work from 1960s record covers (Paula Scher) to exquisite webpages of distinctly Japanese sensibility (Yugo Nakamura) was no protection against the intrusion of global realities.
Dr Frene Ginwala, Speaker of Parliament, had started it all off by delivering a challenge in her opening speech: “Is the ideal culture one of an ever voracious consumer society of Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Nike and Castle beer, or is it something more? Does it forge new identities or reinforce existing image hegemonies?”
Heated interchanges took place a number of times between speakers, with chair Lewis Blackwell trying to synthesise some meaning from it all for the hundreds of delegates whose daily bread is dictated by the body corporate.
Against a backdrop of idyllic picture-perfect photographs of a white nuclear family typographer Neville Brody delivered a sustained attack on the branded world that excludes most of humanity. “Only 20% of all people have telephones, only two percent are online,” he told us.
“Can design feed people?” he asked, “A brand is a membership card to the global club. Brands come at the price of diversity and at the cost of the local. They incorporate cultures and regurgitate them. Branding is a “scorched Earth” policy. Media isn’t creative, it’s reproductive: it’s like viral DNA penetrating the farthest cells of culture.”
Oliveiro Toscani, (famously of the controversial Benetton adverts) showed us a video he had done for the Davos World Economic Forum meeting in January. Two screens operate at once: on one are projected the highest technical achievements we have made (rocket science, the genome project, minute medical procedures) on the other the most shocking litany of blown up bodies, refugees, hollow-eyed street children.
Toscani is unrepentant about his in-your-face-and-down-your-throat style. He believes in raw emotion and telling it as you feel. “We are squeezed between production and consumption,” he said, “there is no reality in advertising: no death, no life [referring to his banned new-born baby picture], we are immortal, all the mothers are blonde.”
He also showed us a video done during the Kosovo invasion with similar footage overlain by brand names (particularly those of fashion houses and supermodels).
“During the consumption,” he said, “the war raged.” It seemed a very fitting summary of the schizoid period we now live in.
In some of the workshops local advertising brand managers asserted the industry’s mantra that brands promote consumer “choice”. Without brands, there is no choice, said one! But the international speakers were very careful about qualifying how they work around the brands both personally and politically.
Michael Thibodeau of the New York company Futurebrand worked on the development of the South African Airways logo with local company Herdbuoys. He talked at length about how a logo was developed through detailed research into South African people’s cultures and symbols. The consciousness that developing a logo was a highly political act at a particular point in our history (1996) was evident.
“It’s all about the intentional launch of symbols into culture. If what you do sticks it has a massive effect on your culture,” Thibodeau said.
In contrast to that careful approach is the work of Zimbabwean Chaz Maviyane-Davies who runs a company called Creative Defiance. During the month leading up to the election in his country he mounted a one-man poster campaign in defiance of the ruling party. Designing a poster a day (and sometimes two) he put the finished products on the Internet to be downloaded and distributed all over the world.
He was outspoken about Africa’s place in the design world. “Existing dominant media in Africa patronises the majority. The global village is supposed to enable us to assert our identity, instead we are demoted to spectators.”
In designing posters for the United Nations celebration of the Declaration of Human Rights and in designing magazine covers Maviyane-Davies sees himself as “rekindling the images we lost in the repackaging of Western images”. He uses powerful African bodies of all kinds (male, female and of mixed race), and whatever objects he finds in the -multi-mix urban African environment to state his case.
Also on the hunt for Africa is Orange Juice Designs’s Garth Walker from Durban. Walker has been documenting this country’s crime paranoia by photographing burglar bars and alarm company signs. It’s all about “ways of seeing,” says Walker. If you sit in your office far above the urban pavement where they sell sheep heads, what you see is not shaped by what Africa is now.
For many years Walker has pounded the Durban pavements collecting images: from the street-side barber shops (he has developed a typeface inspired by these haircuts) to the backs of highly decorated buses, he imbibes the Zulu-English-Indian mishmash and tries to translate that into design that is rooted right here and speaks to us in a voice we know.
It was a heady two days of brain rearranging stuff: inspirational images and ideas against a tangle of critical issues we all bear responsibility for. Head in the clouds, feet in the mud. Seems par for the course for being human.
See the design indaba website at www.designindaba.com and follow the links to the new design magazine launched at the conference