In a workshop at London's Somerset House, British-Nigerian architect and designer Richard Adetokunbo Aina is turning West African material heritage into contemporary furniture, using craft to reconnect design with the cultures, communities and meanings behind it.
Footage filmed on August 29 shows Aina cuts, sands and shapes timber by hand and with machinery before carrying one of his finished chairs through the workshop.
Aina founded I-JOKO, a design brand and consultancy bringing African aesthetics and systems of thinking into contemporary global design. Its name comes from Yoruba, with 'ijoko' meaning 'the chair' or 'the seat'.
His connection between design and heritage began early.
A school project sparked an interest in furniture-making, which later grew into an exploration of his Nigerian and West African heritage.
"I wanted to, in my last year of my master's, actually design a kind of architecture that was reflective of my cultural background, my Nigerian or West African heritage.”
That interest developed into his furniture practice and an approach he calls 'Afrorevivalism', which reinterprets and reinvigorates existing African cultural knowledge rather than simply reproducing the past.
"A lot of this material heritage is made as part of ritual; it is made for communion. They're not made as inanimate objects. These objects are living, as is the culture. There was a huge disconnect where a lot of cultures, like the Lobi, re-orientate their sense of self and their cultural identity through their objects. So it's one thing to return objects to certain people; it's then how these objects can be reinvigorated and refacilitated within communities through ritual, through acts of commemoration, through specific placement."
One of his designs, the Palaver Sling Chair, uses intersecting timber forms and a leather sling, drawing on Nigeria's palaver tradition of communal dialogue and gathering.
Aina rejects broad labels such as 'African art' or 'African chair', arguing that identifying the particular people and traditions behind an object is essential to preserving its cultural meaning.