CAPE TOWN, South Africa — In comparison with other collectible design fairs, Guild is a small operation. While Collective debuted in New York last year with around 20 exhibitors, and Design Miami/ will show in Basel this June with more than 50, Africa’s first such event, which opened Thursday at Cape Town’s Granger Bay waterfront, had only four: Milan’s Rossana Orlandi, São Paulo’s Coletivo Amor de Madre, New York’s R & Company, and Johannesburg’s Southern Guild, whose founders, Trevyn and Julian McGowan, also launched this fair. The advantage of such sparsity, however, doesn’t seem to be limited to allowing for more floor space — it also offers greater opportunities to explore ideas of national identity.
Take R & Co., for example. “We kind of looked at this more as an expo,” co-founder Evan Snyderman told ARTINFO, citing two reasons: Cape Town is the World Design Capital 2014, a biannual designation which hosts international conversations on urbanism and social design policies; and Cape Town’s lack of design fair history means no obligations to the design fair orthodoxy of focusing solely on selling. “Trevyn asked us to come and represent what’s happening in contemporary design in America, which makes this more than just another selling fair,” Snyderman said. And so under the heading “The American Studio Artist,” Snyderman and partner Zesty Meyer’s booth celebrated the American resurgence of a certain rarity: artists who actually make the things that they design, from legend Wendell Castle’s voluptuous functional sculptures in wood and fiberglass to David Wiseman’s beautifully ornate, contemporary interpretations of classic decorative arts that employ porcelain, bronze, and glass handblown into snake-like fixtures.
Nearby, Coletivo Amor de Madre, which specializes mostly in Latin American design, focused solely on the work of Brazilian artists, including Guta Requena’s 2013 “Cadeira St. Efigênia,” a reinterpretation of Lina Bo Bardi’s 1987 “Giraffe Chair” that involved scanning the legendary architect’s design, merging the file with sound waves culled from the streets of Brazil, and running it through a 3-D printer. Just a booth over, Orlandi brought the postmodern Italian humor that her gallery is known for with Fornasetti chairs and their bold iconography, and Fubini Mansueto e Verrando’s Tee Stool, a teed golf ball sculpture around the right size and shape to be used as a seat. The globe-spanning galleries were supplemented by exhibitions put on by various organizations. Shows by the V&A in collaboration with the British Design Council and Agents of the 3D Revolution explored the evolution of crafts from bookbinding to 3-D printing.
As counterintuitive as it seems for Africa’s first collectible design fair to feature mostly foreign exhibitors, the inclusivity can serve to show that African design, despite its underrepresentation on the global market, stands up just fine against international veterans. And in any case, African creativity remained the central focus. Southern Guild, which has become known for bringing to light a recurring hybrid aesthetic in South African design — contemporary European sensibilities with strong influences of African craft and tradition — presented new works in a very sizable booth that announced its presence in bold swaths of bright pink and yellow. A new favorite of this reporter’s is Adam Court, who designed for Okha“Shattered Mirror,” a wall-mounted collage of raised, reflective glass backlit by blue LEDs. “Design Origins Africa South,” presented by Johannesburg anthropological museum the Origins Centre, showcased the evolution of African artifacts from 10,000 years ago through the present day, while just across the aisle from Orlandi’s booth, an exhibition of the collective Design Network Africa showcased works by its members that had previously shown at the 2013’s London Design Festival “Graphic Africa” exhibition.
The show-stealer was made in Cape Town: Handspring Puppet Company’s “Joey the War Horse,” the mechanical metal title character of the London West End show “War Horse.” Strolling through the fair midway through the vernissage, its dramatic performance (animated by two operators controlling it from within and a “trainer” leading it forward) was so compelling that fairgoers came to a full stop in its presence. A wide-eyed Orlandi was overheard expressing the desire to bring it to Milan during the Salone del Mobile in April. If she succeeds, so will Guild Design Fair in having made a major inroad for South African design on the global market.
