This second episode of How to be Good Ancestors focuses on Burkina Faso, in a conversation with the multidisciplinary designer Richard Aina. We will travel to Lobi land in the South Western region of Burkina Faso. to look at how the artefacts produced there are held hostage by colonial power structures and modern infrastructures. Through this episode we attempt to generate a framework to shift dominant paradigms and generate a sensible architecture for the repatriation of those artefacts.
How to be Good Ancestors means rereading our past to disentangle future possibilities from systems of oppression. In this podcast series, hosts and AA students Ferial Massoud, Maria Putri and Aude Tollo retrace the common histories of three nominally decolonised states – Burkina Faso, Egypt and Indonesia – through the systems of debt servitude to which they were condemned in the wake of their independence, and which they remain subject to today. We ask: what are the spatial and material consequences of these systems and how can we begin to undo them?
SHOW NOTES:
- Richard Aina’s website: www.richard-aina.com
- Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums, 2020
- Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia, 2019
- Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, 2018
ABOUT A LINE TRACED:
As our society continues to unveil fractures within its social and political systems, A Line Traced aims to examine topics that are immediate, prescient and impact the build environment in ways that require urgent architectural responses.
AirAA podcasts are conceived, recorded, mixed, edited and distributed from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, which is based in Bedford Square in London. Special thanks to Thomas Parkes for his contribution to the production of our episodes.
The opinions expressed in AirAA podcasts are solely those of the participants and do not represent the opinions of the Architectural Association as a whole.