To Speak Amongst Ourselves

A look from *Cloth as a Queer Archive*, featuring jewellery designed in collaboration with Dunja Herzog (image by Isabel Okoro, courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

The room is painted floor to ceiling in a smooth, dense blue which, in the warm, shifting light of midday, works brief but powerful illusions. From the west side of the room, a window’s unobscured view provides the main source of light. Brightly lit, the room evokes a sense of concentrated energy. Books lie open on tables, pieces of fabric lie side by side with measuring tools, and sketches bear the impression of hands. The markings and makings of industry. When the light recedes, however, those same walls turn a shade of indigo and the room becomes a grotto someone has carved into the side of a mountain. Around me are their treasures: grave, variously shaped objects of indeterminable age and use. Books take on the aura of arcane knowledge and cutting tools appear as relics of a lost art. The effect of the space is almost talismanic. It is the bluest room I’ve ever been in.

To the extent that it serves as a kind of incubator, an artist’s studio can reveal much about the processes, materials, and conditions that inform that artist and which constitute the formal qualities of their artworks. These spaces can also, in themselves, possess a vividness and potency not unlike the artworks they house, producing their own range of affects. More than mere backdrops for creative output, such spaces arrest the imagination. This is certainly true in the case of designer Adeju Thompson’s Lagos studio, where I spent a day observing their work and talking with them as their dog, Bowie, watched on.

Adeju Thompson, photographed in their studio (image by Kadara Enyeasi, courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

The space functions as a small showroom and, along with adjoining living quarters, their home. In the past few years, the studio has served as the locus of Thompson’s sartorial project, Lagos Space Programme, which has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for its treatment of queerness, craft traditions and ideas around African futures through the medium of garments.

After a while my eyes grow accustomed to the blue and I can start to take in its details more closely. The room, long and narrow, has been arranged along a horizontal orientation. At one end, a carpeted seating and study area; at the other, a work table. Between these poles is a middle space that is mostly just that – space. Something in this arrangement makes walking across the room feel less like walking and more like striding. While the carpeted area, filled with books and objects, absorbs the sounds of my body, the room’s bare centre makes every step pronounced and, through the vibrations in my legs, intensifies my awareness of my body’s density and its dimensions. It is, at first, an uncomfortable sensation, not unlike the feeling of walking alone down a hallway. The hallway often seems much longer than it is and my body more ample, filling the space with sound and movement. The body unable to escape the fact of itself.

The blue studio of Adeju Thompson (image by Kadara Enyeasi, courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

What mundane, daily habits remind us of this fact, the fact of the body, more intensely than the act of dressing? When, if not before the mirror, trying on clothes, do we confront the great and terrible power of our own gaze? Or admit our desire to entice and hold the gaze of others?

Watching Thompson work, I realise how essential this feedback loop between body and space is to their process and their understanding of what clothes do and why we wear them as we do. To properly assess the rightness of a garment’s fit, I learn, is to see and feel how its formal qualities enhance the body’s sense of dexterity and lightness in the space it occupies, complementing the need for stability with a need for versatility, as well as how it gives the body a kind of mood, whether still or in motion. Looking through some pieces that Thompson has hung on a rack, I can’t help but feel that the proof of this approach, of keying into the spatial, haptic, and sonic qualities of body (the gendered body in particular) and material, is evident even when clothes are unworn. They are not limp, mute objects waiting for a wearer. They attract, provoke, and attest.

A look from the *Post-Adire* collection (image by Isabel Okoro, courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

This view of fabrics as objects imbued with presence independent of their “functional” use recalls a Yoruba saying, “Aso là kí, kí a tó kí ènìyàn”, whose rough translation is, “We greet dress before we greet its wearer”. It is also the title of Lagos Space Programme’s fifth collection, dating from 2021. Through their work in fashion, Thompson has been finding new ways to rediscover and express their connection to indigenous Yoruba cosmology, within which textile traditions that are typified by hand-woven fabrics such as aṣọ-òkè play a significant role. Never separate from other aspects of life, modes of dress are used to denote status in the material world, as well as access to the immaterial. In variations of colour, pattern, plainness, and embroidery, clothes symbolise the wearer’s movement through physical and social environments, and the changes that occur as a result of those movements. Marriage, the birth of children, professional accomplishments, death: the events that shape and give meaning to individual and collective life are narrated in cloth. The historical importance of dress in Yoruba communities meant that in many cases weavers have performed their task under special conditions, weaving specific types of cloth depending on the occasion. A great example is found among the cloth weavers in Ọwọ historic Yoruba town, where chosen families produce the ashigbo cloth used specifically for funerary rites. Cloth here represents the link between the living and the dead.

In recent years, Thompson has made trips to Osogbo, a city in present-day Osun State, and the site of both the Osogbo Sacred Grove, where worshippers of the Yoruba deity, Oṣun have gathered for generations, and the Osogbo Art School, from which a radical modernist art movement emerged in the 1960s. These visits, often resulting in collaborations with local craftspeople, reinforce Lagos Space Programme’s position as a kind of intermediary between traditional Yoruba artisanship and modes of contemporary design. At the same time, the objective, for Thompson, isn’t merely a synthesis by force. Rather, what seems important beyond honouring these craft histories, is developing a practice that works with fabrics on the materials’ own terms. By emphasising the status of fabrics as carriers and repositories of cultural meanings, Lagos Space Programme highlights their “interpretational possibilities”, in the words of scholar Toyin Falola, writing in Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. “The language of Yoruba textiles is intelligible,” Falola explains, composed of “contextual codes, metaphors, stylo-artistic conventions”. When these elements are foregrounded, as Thompson intends, textile becomes text.

Looks from the *Post-Adire* collection as worn at their fashion show (image by Isabel Okoro, courtesy of Lagos Space Programme).

Texts can exist as closed systems, comprehensible only to a select few. They can also exist in layers of intelligibility, opening themselves to the possibility of being read while evading definitive interpretation. This realisation informs Lagos Space Programme’s evolving visual language, exemplified in its latest collection, Cloth as a Queer Archive, which maintains the studio’s familiar spare silhouettes, while incorporating Adire, a Yoruba resist-dye technique, Australian Merino wool, and references to classic European styles.

In Nigeria, where lawmakers have passed anti-queer legislation such as The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (2014), and where dominant attitudes toward queer people range from snide ridicule to overt hostility, queer life is subjected to constant surveillance. Clothing choices, then, become closely policed markers in the strange terrain between imposed obscurity and hypervisibility. Because, or in spite of this, clothes also become a shared vernacular among people whose existence defies the language of law. As in ancient Yoruba practices, in which fabrics were enchanted to protect the wearer from elemental and spiritual forces, and used to identify members of secret societies, the concept of cloth as a queer archive emphasises adornment as an insistence on survival and as an invitation to forms of gathering that are necessarily vivid, divergent and multiple. Self-presentation, as Thompson believes, does not only carry the powerful proclamation “I am here”. It says also, “I am here as others have been before me”: a decisive counter to the claim that queerness in Africa is a contemporary aberration or a fad taken up by exuberant youth. And if one is privy to the vernaculars of the wearer, such proclamations bear a third meaning: “Come, let us speak amongst ourselves”.

Thompson’s work is a homage to their collaborators, many of whom are based in Nigeria, while others are spread across the world. Each collection follows an arc of creative exchange, and the visions they proffer are made brighter by the visions that constellate around them. As I listen to stories of how some of the studio’s most ambitious ideas have come about, I realise how broad Thompson’s interests are and how wide the network of artists, craftspeople, writers, and designers that help feed those interests is. It’s perhaps one reason why Thompson has always struggled with the term “fashion brand” in relation to Lagos Space Programme. Too often, this term is used to mean a singular narrative, fixed identity or mass-market product, which has never seemed right for the experimental, multifaceted, and intimate experience that Lagos Space Programme has always been, or reflective of the places, people, ideas, and stories contained in any one of its creations. Thompson founded Lagos Space Programme in 2018 after years of working in supporting roles at some of the fashion houses and concept stores, such as Maki Oh and Stranger Lagos, that have made Lagos an exciting hub for promising design talent over the past decade. In the five years that have followed, the project has made incredible strides. At the time of my visit in November 2022, Thompson was making final adjustments to Cloth as a Queer Archive, which had been selected as one of eight finalists for the 2023 International Woolmark Prize. Since its inception in the 1950s, this prize has been juried and won by some of the most illustrious figures in international fashion. Names such as Balmain, Lagerfeld, Dior, and Saint Laurent dot its history and, earlier this year, Thompson told me the news over the phone: Lagos Space Programme had won the prize and become its first African recipient.

“ Histories of dress intersect, are placed in unexpected, cross-directional, and sometimes uneasy, dialogue. Textile as text. Textile as intertext. ”

Thompson’s winning collection was judged on its use of Australian Merino wool, a material from the breed of sheep which gives it its name. The fibre and structure of the wool give it an incredibly fine texture. Finer even, experts argue, than cashmere. Still, when I try on the Venture Vest, a core piece in the collection, I’m surprised by how light it is, and how cool it feels over my skin. The vest, a design that Thompson has experimented with in previous collections, is somewhere, in both look and intended function, between a chore coat and a tunic. It’s easy to recognise the influence of Japanese minimalism. This and other pieces are accompanied by jewellery designed with Dunja Herzog using recycled e-waste, which Thompson commissioned from Phil Omodamwen, a seventh-generation bronze caster in Benin, and the collection’s full effect is more deeply felt when the clothes and jewellery are paired. They lend their wearers a delicate, sculptural grace. Thompson, meanwhile, is wearing pieces from Lagos Space Programme’s seventh collection, Post-Adire (2022). The tailoring, as usual, is excellently understated. When Thompson moves, the coat curves around them, almost like a shroud. The pants drape without crease. Coat and pants are matching black. The colour of coal: deep and knowing, with a slight lustre.

At some point, evening comes, and we decide that today’s best work has been done. Whatever else requires attention will be handled tomorrow. Thompson recommends a restaurant not too far from the studio. It is owned by a family member with whom they share a love of plants and, before the food, we go to see what new ones have arrived. There are hibiscus, and dracaenas, hyacinth and pottos, jasmine and orchids. As we sit down to eat, we talk about some ideas they’ve been thinking about for the next collection. Again, the references are disparate: the baroque period, workers’ uniforms, and lace blouses. Histories of dress intersect, are placed in unexpected, cross-directional, and sometimes uneasy, dialogue. Textile as text. Textile as intertext.

The past is not yet done with us and therefore calls for continued re-examination. The present is apocryphal, a story we are yet to substantiate, even as we live it. If the future, as scholar José Esteban Muñoz wrote in their 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, is “queerness’s domain”, then Adeju Thompson has returned to us from it, laden with its gifts. In Lagos Space Programme, they have conceived the means by which more of us might visit it for and amongst ourselves.

Words Joshua Segun-Lean

This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #3. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

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