NEW AFRICAN DESIGN IDIOMS TO REFLECT NEW SOUTH AFRICAN IDENTITIES

The democratisation of South Africa has brought about as much social and political disorder as it has generated the hope of re-ordering our political and social landscape.  Of particular importance to all cultural groups is the difficulty of agreeing on commonly accepted conceptions for South African identities.  This problem is exacerbated by our history of Apartheid, in that all notions of inclusivity necessary for democratically constructed identities carry with them notions of exclusivity, on all sides.  Our identities lie at the heart of our collective culture, politics, spirituality, ways of living, and ways of thinking, but cannot be pinned down as being exclusively either private (personal) or collective (national).  Their complexity thus informs their conception and can either guide or hinder the process of constructing new identities.

The creation of new design idioms can act as symbols of new identities in that they can incorporate visual clues that reflect the histories of the diverse cultures in South Africa.  Such symbolisation through design is not unique to the South African context, and can be traced in all collective identities, whether of the tribe or of the nation.

In all areas of design in South Africa, the search for new expressions for these identities has provided much impetus for the development of new idioms and new styles.  This paper describes one such search in which I interrogate the politics of identity, the nature of expression allowable via modernity (the machine) versus that of tradition (craft), and the opportunity for new expressions to be found in the interstices of modernity and tradition.  Much of the African ‘landscape’ is characterised by the confluence of modernity and tradition.  ‘African’ style is preferred as a starting point, above ‘South African’ style, to avoid the arrogation of claiming the invention of a symbolic style which can only properly be termed ‘South African’ through a democratic process.

I suggest an ideology that seeks to unsettle the hegemony of western aesthetics by using strategies that transform selected visual and tactile features of traditional African art and contemporary African crafts into new stylistic features.

These strategies are fleshed out in concrete form in a range of cutlery which serves as illustrative examples of the strategies-in-practise.