“Art gave me freedom,” the artist Olaniyi Akindiya reveals on a Google Meet call as he quickly strings up pieces of cardboard. “There’s communication, dialogue among people that’s helped me open up the minds of a lot of people.” The Nigerian artist has been working in fine art for over two decades but began his adult life as a biochemist. Akindiya sought medicine to fulfil his desire to help others and support his community. Unfortunately, the reality of capitalism quickly set in. “I worked with pharmaceutical companies. You sign a contract, and you follow all these rules. Profit becomes more powerful than the life of people,” he explains. “So I went back to school.”
In 1995, Akindiya completed his studies at the Institute of Textile Technology, Art and Design, Lagos, a journey that began after an unplanned trip to Lagos with a friend. From here on, the artist would reimagine his culture’s vibrant textiles and crafts into complex multimedia designs, weaving together paper, sculpture, and painting to fabricate new conversations around colonialism, globalisation, and African inheritance.
For his Pro Helvetia residency, from April to July 2022, Akindiya took inspiration from the complex legacy of African textiles, reimaging them through paper to create woven sculptures and installations to interrogate the Africanness of these textiles. Some of the prints and fabrics assigned to the traditional African aesthetic, such as shweshwe and Ankara, were colonial products that today have been transformed and added to the lexicon of African cloth. And with the modern-day supply chain, even some indigenous patterns, prints, and weaves are produced outside of the continent, sometimes in European countries like Switzerland or, increasingly, large factories in China, Bangladesh, and India. This global stage has only added to the lexicon of African cloth, and Akindiya’s Pro Helvetia residency sees him go from Nigeria to Switzerland to configure this new language.
“To Nigerians, dressing is a communication of life. The way people dress and the patterns, design, and colours of the cloth they wear communicates what is going on in their life.”
Khensani Mohlatlole: Your work is based on textiles, but you often use paper, cardboard, and other non-fabric materials…
Olaniyi Akindiya: I think I started using paper and then using cardboard. But now my work has evolved beyond that mostly. Now I do a lot of public sculptures, which we make with [more] sustainable materials, which could be there for another hundred years. So I use iron, steel, and fibreglass. My works are really inspired by these two iconic textiles: one of them is ase oke from Nigeria and kente from Ghana.
It’s still the idea of how I see them and how important they are to my culture, to where I come from, and also how they are part of making a statement and communicating. A pattern can tell you if a person is getting married, or a widow, or if there’s a naming ceremony or graduation. All of these tell you who and what we are.
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Akindiya doesn’t want to just translate these textiles into a paper or steel version, however. “I wanted to make my own,” he shares. Something that would both harken back to the source material but could be easily recognisable as his work without a logo or signature.
He traces the root, or origin point, for most textiles as Africa–particularly with the cotton that is farmed and carded in North and Western Africa before being transformed by factories in the Netherlands and Austria. Once there, they become ‘African’, as opposed to a Nigerian or Ghanaian product. He discusses the homogenisation of Africa as a single country or culture while also appreciating the similarity and community that Africans from different regions and countries can find with one another. “If you have ever travelled to another part of Africa, either Central, East, or South Africa, you are going to see fabric.”
“Nowadays, this is now printed in China or Japan,” he adds. “So, for me, it is very important to see where we are coming from.”
During his residencies, Akindiya spent time with Swiss textile manufacturers, having to navigate language barriers to investigate how his material culture was being produced. “How do they decide what techniques, patterns, motifs, figures, and images they want to put on those? How are they selecting colours? What makes them feel that we’ll buy this?”
Khensani Mohlatlole: Was it difficult obtaining this information?
Olaniyi Akindiya: Well, it’s always difficult, but one of the things is that I have my way of getting into people’s minds, of getting into people’s heads. And to do that they need to trust you. They need to believe in what you’ve chosen to do. You need to give them something. And by giving them something, they feel the power and they give you what you’re looking for.
[These companies] are eager for new development, for new innovation, and for that, they need to collaborate with designers.Khensani Mohlatlole: How long did this all take?
Olaniyi Akindiya: What would take me possibly a week [to do] became two weeks because I had to find a translation of what I wanted to do, what they were doing, and then still come to an agreement. And to get into their archives, which they’ve had for a long time, and convince their designer to be able to work with me on what I want to change. It’s going to take a long time because it’s a collaboration that’s going to continue.
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Akindiya’s projects are also considerably more involved than what some of these manufacturers and designers are used to. He reveals that for one project, a carpet he wove with a Swiss organisation, would require the weaving of 12 different colours where the looms had mostly been used for one to two colours on any given project. The process became an opportunity for these Western manufacturers to take cue from an African creator, to produce a product for the African market with a genuine African perspective. It required changing their modes of working.
Akindiya’s collaborative work with these manufacturers adds a new layer to the practice, production, and methodology of African textiles. It’s beyond appropriating the language of an oppressor in the way contemporary Africans may approach Dutch wax prints like shweshwe, but it’s also not bound to historical and traditional approaches to indigenous textiles like adire, ase oke, or kente. This history and culture play an integral role in the formation of this dialogue but this is, instead, developing new words and symbols to communicate the postcolonial existence. If there are no words to describe the collage of rebellion, revolution, suppression, and marginalisation, then it only makes sense to create new ones.
This story is produced in the context of an editorial residency supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Swiss Arts Council.
