It’s no secret that the overproduction of fast fashion has created a global waste problem. Testament to this is West Africa’s largest informal secondhand clothing market, called Kantamanto, in Accra, Ghana. The market is not only a dumping site for the global North’s textile waste but, brimming with secondhand clothing vendors, upcyclers, dyers, tailors, menders, and importers, it is a remarkable example of a circular textile economy.
At the heart of circular practices and fashion waste, what better place to learn about sustainability and circular design? Kokrobitey Institute will be hosting a two-week interdisciplinary seminar from 7 – 21 August 2023. As witness to the effect of Western fast-fashion waste streams on Ghana’s people and environment, the institute’s has designed a programme (details below) that includes a series of critical and hands-on workshops about unsustainable global production and waste disposal practices.
Resident uses a handloom
The goal of the course is for participants to be inspired and to envision a different future through their practice, one in which sustainability is a guiding value in the production of goods. It is open to an interdisciplinary community of artists, thinkers, and doers.
Facilitators designer Bubu Ogisi and Kokrobitey Institute’s Renée Neblett
Participants can expect to experiment with combining waste with other resources, including natural fibres. The workshop includes visits to landfills and interactions with people processing the waste from overflowing secondhand clothing markets. Materials for experimentation will be sourced from Kantamanto market.
To delve deeper, participants will engage with non-profit organisation, The Or Foundation, which works closely with the Kantamanto community to create a just circular economy, to discuss their research and source shredded clothing, or “shoddy”, made with their homemade shredder.
Previous residents in the yard at Kokribitey Institute
Once these explorations are complete, the course will wrap up by bringing these experiences and materials back to the Kokrobitey Institute for a series of seminars, studio workshops, films, and free time for personal projects and critique.
Artist-in-resident, Daniel Clarke at Kokribitey Institute
Renée C. Neblett, director of Kokrobitey Institute, will facilitate the multi-disciplinary seminar. The forums will include guests from across the arts, business, and waste management sectors. Participants will have the opportunity to work with highly skilled, professional crafts-people, environmentalists, cultural practitioners, and guest designers, including Professor Kofi Asare, Afua Sutherland, Fulera Seidu, creative director and manufacturer at Winamzua Creative Hive, Bubu Ogisi creative director of the contemporary women’s wear brand IAMISIGO and Damien Ajavon, textile artist. It is designed for artists, designers and educators, and takes place between 7 and 21 August 2023.
All participants will take part in an individual and group presentation to share their material explorations, insights, discoveries, and reflections.
Traditional Ghanaian culture offers, a near blueprint, for building a sustainable future
Participants will be immersed in local traditions, with workshops exploring African weaving, batik, sewing (incorporating waste fabrics), and more. Access is granted to all studio spaces and tools at the Institute for furniture design, textile work, recycled glass, and education material production.
Learners practice weaving
Kokrobitey Institute is a residential learning centre committed to sustainable development by exploring traditional knowledge systems as they pertain to sustainability, education, resourceful design, and social entrepreneurship. They believe that the study of traditional Ghanaian culture offers, a near blueprint, for building a sustainable future.
As Renée said during her keynote address at the fourth annual Twyg Sustainable Fashion Awards in 2022, “We need an African Renaissance – a rebirth of traditional African knowledge systems.” For those concerned with world-building for a more sustainable and care-filled future, this knowledge will pave the way.
Programme 7 and 21 August 2023
Week One:
Orientation
Sustainability seminar
Workshops:
- Exploring waste as material for product development
- Weaving, Sewing, and Crocheting with recycled and natural fibres
- Batiking
- Silk Screen Printing
Field Trip to Accra’s Kantamanto Market, Landfill, and Recycling Centre
Field Trip to the Kakum National Rain Forest
Films, Critical Discourse, and Open Studio Time
Project Planning
Week Two:
Sustainability seminar
Plants/Herbal Uses Seminar
Field Trip to the Volta Region: Agbozume weaving village/Salt Pond
Final Presentation/Exhibition of individual material explorations from students
Films, Critical Discourse, and Open Studio Time (for experimentation and development of independent projects)
Opening/Panel Discussion
Facilitators
Bubu Ogisi: Bubu is a fibre artist and creative director of the contemporary art brand, IAMISIGO. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, and now living between Lagos, Accra, Abidjan and Nairobi, Bubu studied fashion at the prestigious Ecole Superieure des Art et technique de la Mode in Paris, France. Her work primarily focuses on how fashion and textile can not only keep history alive but also pass on information for the future through preservation of techniques and expression through matter. She creates wearable art pieces with unconventional materials and heritage textiles traditions through in-depth research with remote African communities. All of her materials and techniques are original designs sourced and created in different parts of Africa putting into consideration the artisans with whom they work, how they work and where they work. The idea is to remove the construct of borders and to merge different ideas to create a unism in matter and space. Conveying lost historical stories and transforming these found “data” onto garments and fibres, her design work is a form of silent protest against colonialism and neo-colonialism. This aim of decolonizing the mind thoroughly is furthered by questioning and engaging a variety of thoughts in relation to socio-political questions i.e. religion, gender, traditions, symbols and scripts, tribes and magic as well as questioning future issues such as our ecosystem.As an agent of change the ideology is to highlight and promote cultural crossover where no identity is negotiated. Bringing together different cultures to create free-minded pieces. Our work is 100% artisanal and handmade focusing on ancestral techniques, while incorporating waste and other unconventional fibres to create wearable artwork showing the importance of preserving handmade processes and upcycling to fight against our planet’s issues.
Damien Ajavon: Based in Paris, Damien is a queer, non-binary, Afropean textile artist born in Paris of Senegalese and Togolese origin. Their work explores the different methods by which textile fibres can be manipulated by hand. The interaction between visual and tactile experiences has always played an essential role in their process; they use their African and western influences as a vehicle for their textile storytelling and as visual markers of their creative approaches. Their desire to search for their identity, blackness, queerness, and what is their relationship to home, origin, and spirit. Damien has been unearthing and weaving connections with their ancestry through textile languages rather than oral ones. They have accumulated substantial international experience that honed their expertise and technique around Europe, Africa, and North America. They learned to weave hemp, dye cashmere, and work with feathers in Italy, felting hats and making accessories in Quebec, pattern making and knitwear in New York City, digital knitting in Norway, and Manjak traditional weaving in Senegal. They have been exhibited in several group shows and invited to North America, Europe, and Africa for some artist residencies. Their work was recently included in the Oslo commune public collection.
Damien’s practice is grounded in their heritage, influenced by both African and western influences and the queer community, which serve as a tool to create culturally representative textiles. Not only that but by a strong desire to merge generations of African craftsmanship with their diasporic and transoceanic knowledge and experiences through fabrics.
Renée Neblettt: Renée the founding director of the Kokrobitey Institute in Ghana. She is an artist, teacher and environmental activist working at the intersection of sustainability, resourceful design and social entrepreneurship. The work at the institute is informed by the environmental literacy practiced in traditional Ghanaian culture; practices that supported thriving eco-systems before the introduction of foreign models of development. The recently constructed Alero Olympio Design Center is a growing hub of innovation & creative enterprise; where local people work in partnership with an inter-cultural community of creatives, researchers, environmentalists and educators. The Institute’s goal is to add this perspective to the larger discourse on sustainability and development.
- The workshop costs $2000 (excluding travel to Accra). It will take place in-person at the Kokrobitey Institute in Accra, Ghana. For more information and to book a spot, contact info@kokrobiteyinstitute.org
- To learn more about the Kokrobitey Institute, check out their website.
- Images: Photos supplied by the Kokrobitey Institute