Design Week Lagos: Seven Nigerian Designers on Rue de Turenne

Design Week Lagos shows seven Nigerian designers at the Paris Design Week Factory, 116 rue de Turenne. It is the second leg of a tour that began in April at the Salone del Mobile, and it has a particularity: three of the pieces on show are no longer prototypes, they are produced by an Italian manufacturer.

The seven

Athanasius Johnson, Adaora Enwonwu, Emma Emodi, Oluwakayinsade Ademuson, Joan Eric-Udorie, Myles Igwebuike and Richard Aina. Furniture, lighting, sculpture, collectible design: the selection does not fit into a single category, which suits it well, since that is also the Factory's rule this year.

Four pieces to look at first. The Bantu stool by Joan Eric-Udorie. The Ara chair by Emma Emodi. The ISÉPÒ low table by Richard Aina. And ỌCHE by Myles Igwebuike.

What changes this year: Ombré

Design Week Lagos unveils in Paris its first collaboration between its designers and a manufacturer, the Italian lighting maker Ombré. Three lamps come out of it: Apo, designed by Athanasius Johnson, Anyanwu, by Adaora Enwonwu, and a light installation by James Brendan Udom, the Okkyo lamp.

The nuance matters. An exhibition puts a body of work before your eyes; a manufacturing contract puts it up for sale. Titi Ogufere, founder of the Africa Design Network and of Design Week Lagos, puts it this way: moving African design « from visibility to opportunity, and from creation to commercialisation ». That is the heart of the programme, and it is what sets this Paris stop apart from a simple hang.

Where, and at what time

The Paris Design Week Factory brings together more than one hundred and fifty emerging designers across four galleries, at 116 rue de Turenne and at the Espace Commines. It is co-curated by Jean-Baptiste Durand and Simon Geringer, who describe the edition's principle as a deliberate friction: shedding labels, letting practices of less than five years old cohabit without hierarchy.

Design Week Lagos — 116 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris. Métro Filles du Calvaire, line 8.

Thursday 10 September, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Friday 11, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Saturday 12, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. Sunday 13, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. Monday 14, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Free entry, as everywhere at the Paris Design Week.

Milan, Paris, Lagos

All Roads Lead to Lagos is the international programme of Design Week Lagos. It began in April in Milan, with Richard A. Aina, Olaoluwa AJ Durotoye, Nicole Adaora Enwonwu, Myles Igwebuike, Athanasius Johnson, Odema Acacia Saleh and Joan Eric Udorie. It passes through Paris in September. It closes in Lagos in October, for the festival's tenth edition, on a theme that says the same thing as the Ombré collaboration: Making A New Africa: From Material to Market — from raw material to market.

The stated intention is not to give a tour of a scene, but to set it in front of galleries, manufacturers, brands and collectors. A round trip, then, rather than a showcase.

What we take away at Beyit

We spend the year tracking down pieces from a single photograph. What interests us here are the names: Bantu, Ara, ISÉPÒ, ỌCHE, Apo, Anyanwu. A piece that carries a name and a manufacturer becomes identifiable, and an identifiable piece can be searched for, found, bought. That is exactly the passage Titi Ogufere describes, seen from our end of the chain.