Navigating Friction
Image by Florian Lafosse, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
A dialogue is a beautiful holding space for candid thoughts and questions tracing the intricacies of material culture, memory, and design. For me, conversation is also a site for memory work, interweaving different dialects, oral traditions, references, insight, contemplation and laughter. During this particular conversation, designer Yassine Ben Abdallah unveiled the complexities of his practice and offered a set of questions and thoughts on the intersections of identity, heritage, design, and research.
In 2022, then a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven’s Geo-Design MA, Ben Abdallah presented The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation at the school’s graduation show during Dutch Design Week. Set up to resemble a museum archive, the project saw Ben Abdallah place a series of machetes he had cast from sugar upon metal shelves, where they melted away into sticky pools over the course of the exhibition. The piece was a reflection on the colonial history of La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean that is governed as an overseas départment of France, having previously been a French colony. La Réunion’s official language is French, but Réunion Creole is more widely spoken, with its mixture of French, Malagasy, Gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, and Tamil revealing the multiethnic makeup of the island’s inhabitants. Ben Abdallah grew up on La Réunion, where his family had moved in exile from Tunisia, and become interested in its history of sugar plantations, and the enslaved and indentured labourers forced to work on these sites. La Réunion’s history has been shaped by sugarcane, but Ben Abdallah discovered that few material traces from the historic plantations had been conserved – bar for objects that had once belonged to the island’s white masters.
Yassine Ben Abdallah (image by Bachir Tayachi).
Ben Abdallah’s machetes, tools of the plantations, were designed to question what is, and is not, preserved from contested histories. The project re-formed elements from La Réunion’s past that have hitherto been absent, but allowed them, in turn, to perish
and slip away. Ben Abdallah received Design Academy Eindhoven’s 2022 Gijs Bakker Award, a prize given to an MA student whose final project “[demonstrates] outstanding skill and imagination, tenacity and originality, personality, and relevance to the profession and the outside world”, and was selected in 2023 as part of France’s prestigious Design Parade Hyères competition for young designers – a competition in which The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation won the overall Grand Prix du Jury. Off the back of this success, Ben Abdallah is due to spend much of the coming year participating in residencies with ethnographic institutions and manufacturing centres across France and the Netherlands. His work will come to occupy the same institutional spaces whose colonial legacies it criticises.
To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories. It was a delight to have an unfiltered, critical and joyous conversation, one that navigates the challenges posed by the hegemonic, colonial and Eurocentric value system, and its attempts to erase marginalised people, their realities, knowledge systems, and lifeworlds. Within his research and practice, Ben Abdallah delves into the essence of what the writer Saidiya Hartman has termed “the afterlife of slavery” and colonialism, working and thinking through how societies define and preserve their stories, and how objects both embody and transcend the passage of time and space. Preservation and archiving come to the forefront, echoing the sentiments of Hartman in Patricia J. Saunders’s 2008 essay ‘Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman’, published in Anthurium. “I try to make a statement about the cost of not imagining,” Hartman tells Saunders, “and I ask: can critique just be another way of remaining faithful to the limits of the archive.” To what extent can designers and makers critically and unapologetically reflect and engage with archives and histories, without fetishising or commodifying the violence of these histories and archives? Can we be less faithful to “the limits of preservation” in the Western sense, remembering that in caring for these histories and material cultures, the oppressed often still elude tangible representation? And where can imagination find pockets of space for artists, designers, activists, writers or hustlers to dream out loud or breathe freely?
The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation exhibited at Dutch Design Week, 2022 (image by Femke Reijerman, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah).
These are the questions that I am concerned with. The art, design, and heritage worlds are intertwined with a hyper-individual and neoliberal capitalist market and politics. It is this tension between dreaming, realities, and histories where imagination goes to work – where some of us dismantle our conditioned design sensibilities, while engaging with the vivid colours of our migrant heritage. We open up a reservoir of aesthetic value that might not be easily digestible or graspable. In our conversation, Ben Abdallah touched upon the capacity of objects to encapsulate life, memory, and pain – a profound comprehension of the intricate dimensions of identity and lifeworlds. I am grateful for his openness, curiosity, and deep research that challenges the conventional boundaries of design, art, and academia, while also forging a path for vulnerability, doubt, and humbleness.
To speak about exile, colonial conditioning, and absence or loss is never a trivial matter. The weight of violence is ever-present, casting its shadow over artistic and design practices, shaping everyday realities and collective memory. Amidst this heaviness, storytelling emerges as a potent force, carving a space for dialogue – a space where oxygen and laughter rejuvenate, paving the way for alternative ways of being together across time, dialects, and differences.
The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, exhibited at Design Parade Hyères, 2023 (image by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah).
Amal Alhaag I’ve been thinking about something I read on your website a while ago, which I reread yesterday. In your description of The Bittersweet Memory of the Plantation, it says: “The history and culture of the oppressed are rarely embodied by material objects.” I felt that was such a clear statement and says so much about your practice.
Yassine Ben Abdallah That sentence is one I took from Françoise Vergès, who is a theorist from La Réunion [the sentence is drawn from ‘A Museum Without Objects’, Vergès’s contribution to The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (2014), ed.]. I think it’s a strong sentence. It’s this thing of growing up as a minority: what are you left with materially? My family are Tunisian, but we grew up in exile in La Réunion. So there’s this intersection of different minorities and a question of how we hold memory. For example, I saw my mother building an Arab home nearly 10,000km away from Tunisia. Objects became so important for her, as well as being a source of tension because she was hoarding them. We had so many Arab rugs, but I realised how important it was for her to have a materialisation of her own identity and culture. In La Réunion you go to French school, you have French history, and specifically the history of the kings, yet you have no traces whatsoever from the population who sustained that system. We did not feel recognised in that history.
“To speak freely together is to be unburdened by formalities and to find a rhythm that beats to the drum of lived experiences and histories.”
Amal In the Somali context, the materialisation of our life is language. It’s not tangible, but at the same time it’s sensory. So I often think about what it means to not have access to a material culture, and to hold onto an oral tradition because it’s the thing that can travel with you. But having material [residues] from those places – you know, having the carpet, the rug, or the curtains – is interesting. In my conditioning from growing up in the Netherlands, you develop a certain idea of design. And then you’re like, “Oh my God, these curtains are so ugly, they’re gonna give me a headache. Why does it have to be so over the top?” It was only later when I was like, “Actually they’re quite a funky colour.” You know, other designers are now trying to aim for these kinds of colours, but migrant communities already have them on lockdown! So I’m interested in the value that is in those pieces as objects that don’t enter the Eurocentric value system, because for the Eurocentric value system they’re useless. They don’t create any type of aesthetic value, or cultural, corporate or neoliberal capitalist value. Unless they’re performing that ethnographic dream of Moroccan carpets or Persian rugs – well, I don’t have to tell you.
Yassine Exactly.
Detail of melting sugar machete (image by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah).
Amal It’s the aesthetics of working-class migrants. Françoise’s work has also been fundamental for me, because I feel like she somehow speaks into existence the language that many of us are looking for to address the dreadfulness of our social condition. She’s writing about things that very few others are, such as the social conditions of cleaners in France [see ‘Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender’ from e-flux Journal #100 (2019), ed.]; there are very few people writing about that who have the understanding of their racialised position. This also speaks to and about labour. You and I have a shared interest in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism, and labour as an afterlife of that, so I’m interested in how you relate to that through the materials you work with. They’re so loaded with history and pain – laborious pain.
Yassine Most of the stories I collected were from people affected by the plantation system. Because there is no material culture left, the only thing you’re left with are the stories, but these kinds of voices are not considered legitimate enough to exist in an institutional space. That’s where I feel there’s a way to use the materialisation of stories through the sugar machetes. Those machetes melt, so they challenge this institutional system that always wants to preserve, immortalise, and control. It’s this tension that I wanted to play with. In terms of labour, most of the labour in France, for example, in the ethnographic museum [the Musée du quai Branly, ed.], are people of colour. Two years ago I went to Palais de Tokyo for a beautiful exhibition about African artists, where I saw that all the visitors were white, but all the museum’s guards were Black. There’s this duality of what it means to exhibit Black art in white institutions when this is the social reality. Lately, I’ve also been reading about how in the Musée du quai Branly, some cleaners don’t want to go to certain spaces because they’re loaded with stories of ghosts, stories of haunted spaces, and specifically with objects that were stolen, but which are still exhibited. The people who feel this discomfort are those lower down on the social chain. It’s not the curators, it’s not the people in the offices.
Image by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Amal An ethnographic museum has objects without their people. To then have people forced to work in those spaces is a continuation of the colonial relation. So there’s a lot to say about ethnographic museums, but I also feel that at least with an ethnographic museum you know what the conditions are, whereas contemporary art spaces behave as if they’re not part of the same type of European, ethnographic, modernist project. For me, Palais de Tokyo is a synopsis of racial relations in France. You have the Black security, and then you have all the white citizens who are very accommodated in the space. But the moment I entered with my small child and my partner, the guards were trying to control us. Sometimes we don’t need white overseers, because we have people who look like us who enact the plantation system in the present. It’s like how you have security at airports and they treat you more shittily if they’re a person of colour.
Yassine Always.
Amal Because the dynamic is that if they treat you well, it might look as if they’re giving you favours. It’s the internalisation of supremacy. It’s the policing of the body, which has a genealogy of colonial policing. So the question for me is what it means for us all to be so invested in a modernist project, when it has done so little for us besides making us sick and dismantling our cultures. I’m also thinking about you as a designer and a researcher. When it comes to an ethnographic museum, everything is dismantled. These objects have been put in a very beautiful building – a colonial, spectacular building – and there is nowhere else to research them. You have to go to this place where they’re behind bars and you cannot touch them. So there’s a cut-off lineage. You might want to know how they were made, or the craftsmanship behind them, but all that knowledge has disappeared. The object remains, but the knowledge fades out.
Image by Jeroen Van De Gruiter, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Yassine About disappearing knowledge, I feel that as minorities we’ve learned to mourn. I watched my parents let go of a country that was once theirs and seeing them mourn that was memorable. I feel that death is quite present in our culture – we saw in France just lately, for example, when a young Arab kid was shot by the police [in June 2023, Nahel Merzouk, 17, was shot dead at point blank range by police during a traffic stop; his execution prompted widespread riots around France, ed.]. Death is omnipresent. So there are all these questions about preservation, but one of the strengths we have, which white culture seems to have completely erased, is this need and ability to mourn. How do we collectively mourn the stories that are gone, and through this mourning, what is the possibility of building new ones? Saidiya Hartman talks about using critical fabulation while researching the Middle Passage [published as ‘Venus in Two Acts’ in Small Axe #26 (2008), ed.], because there are no stories, so fiction became a way to tell those stories. The use of design is this possibility to create new stories and build on new things.
Amal I actually bought Saidiya Hartman’s book, so it’s nice to hear you mention her work. There’s a quote from ‘Venus in Two Acts’, which goes: “How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it?” I was curious if you see your work as stories, because it’s interesting to think about objects and their making as the idea that Hartman is addressing.
“How do we collectively mourn the stories that are gone, and through this mourning, what is the possibility of building new ones?”
Yassine I didn’t originally study design. I studied social sciences, where you learn about how we shape each other as human beings within societies. But I later realised that objects do the same. Eating with chopsticks or eating with a spoon completely changes the experience of eating, for example. The obsession with the chair in design says, I feel, a lot about the Western centrism of elevation, whereas in other cultures we sit on the ground and we sit collectively. Objects tell stories, they’re building ways to see reality. There’s a certain sensibility too, because you build a relationship to an object through touching it. You touch it and when you touch something, something touches you back. There’s a certain power in an object and maybe that’s why there is so much fuss around ethnographic museums. What do we do with past objects? What are the stories behind past objects? How do they touch us in the present?
Amal You’ve made work around the fabulation of the ethnographic museum, and I’m interested in the way you have circumvented the white gaze. Personally, I’m always interested in thinking about how artists cope with it, sidestep it, or return it.
Yassine I like this idea of having a divided gaze. I grew up in a culture that is Western, but Creole culture is also mixed between enslaved people and the white masters. From the beginning, this culture acknowledged that it has confrontation within itself. One of the people I interviewed told me that her grandmother was white and had married an indentured labourer from India. Each time they would go to visit her, the grandma would shout “Oh, the maids are here to help me,” to make sure that everyone would think they were servants. Creole culture is all about this ambiguity, these kinds of confrontations even within families. Creole is about friction. But the white gaze prevails. The question then is, how do we hold this friction in a certain way to, I would say, reclaim the awkwardness, and make white people uncomfortable?
Image by Jeroen Van De Gruiter, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Amal How do you approach that in your work with institutions? How do you engage with that and still keep a form of materialisation in the practice?
Yassine I’m really conflict averse. I try to handle things diplomatically and there’s a lot of code switching. Coming from the social sciences, this idea of having academic language gives me a certain security while navigating museums. But my work is always about smuggling something in. Machetes for me are so embedded in agricultural culture and the culture of La Réunion, for instance, but at Design Academy I had a Dutch teacher. When I showed some machetes in the class, he told me that he was really scared by the fact that a student could bring machetes into school and see no problem with that. He was deeply uncomfortable, because he was seeing weapons. Which I could understand, but he was seeing them from his own gaze as being dangerous, whereas for me they’re agricultural tools. I wouldn’t say I have the answer to your question, but the only solution I have found is to play with ambiguity. The machete is an ambiguous form, which is why I chose it.
Amal It’s funny you brought up this practice of smuggling, because I often speak about the work I do as a form of scamming. I’m interested in the way that these institutional spaces are transformed by you arriving there and your body being there. The body hasn’t even produced anything like labour yet, but it already does a lot of work by just being present.
Image by Florian Lafosse, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Yassine Could you expand on that, because you were part of the Research Center for Material Culture [an institute within the Netherlands’ Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Wereldmuseum and Afrika Museum ethnographic institutions, ed.]. How was that?
Amal For me, an ethnographic museum is a very pragmatic space, where we see an accumulation of colonial practices. Spending time there, I’m not really learning about the objects. Most of what I’ve learned isn’t about becoming a better researcher. I’ve learned much more about whiteness, preservation, collection, and tradition. I’ve learned about the politics of all that, but also how much of it is just theatre and spectacle. Édouard Glissant [a Martinican philosopher and poet whose book Poétique de la relation (1990) called for the “right to opacity for everyone”, ed.] talks about how it’s OK to not know something, and what I really love about these places is that they’re one of the few places in the West where you read that they don’t know something. They know jack shit, so in the classification of an object it will often say: “We don’t know.”
There will be some nonsense, like a classification of what the object could be, but it’s entirely fabrication. It’s not even fabulation because it’s just telenovela nonsense – you know, something someone wrote in 1919 that has since become fact. It shows the arrogance of the West to think that not knowing anything is expertise. Ethnographic expertise is just having been places and documented what you extracted. So it has made me think a lot about abolition work and what it means to rethink the industry, because the ethnographic project is also an industry. There are so many people and governments invested in not returning these objects because people would lose their jobs. But these ethnographic museums are founded on the cornerstones of colonialism: missionaries, business and the state. That’s a toxic cocktail for me, so it’s very interesting that more and more artists of colour, people from marginalised backgrounds, are engaging with these places and becoming tricksters.
Yassine But the closer you get to an institution, the more you become dependent on it because it has money and power. How do you hold space in those institutions and what’s your agency at the end of the day?
“The closer you get to an institution, the more you become dependent on it because it has money and power.”
Amal I was at the Tropenmuseum seven years, but always as a freelancer. For me, it was a place of mutual aid where I had access to resources to move them around – if I could create cultural capital for other people, that could be useful. I approached it in that way, because I knew that an institution always takes something from you, so it’s a negotiation. What are you willing for it to take, and what are you willing to take from it? I have a very simple rule, which is: “I’m always ready to get fired.” It’s a very liberating way of being, because you don’t really care, so you can stick to your strategies. I’m not saying it’s not been difficult – museums and institutions are really tough places in general, and in an ethnographic museum you’re reminded every day of what has been stolen. You’re in the violence and you can’t even fake the funk. It’s not like a contemporary art institution, which you know is violent, but at least things are pretty!
Yassine For me, it’s this notion of demonic ground. I’m really fascinated by the ethnology of preservation. Why are we obsessed with preserving things? There’s probably something linked to this idea of property and owning certain things. I don’t know if I care what the future of ethnography museums is, because I feel like they’re spaces you need to dismantle for something new to arise. I’m more interested in what could grow in the ruins of the ethnographic museum. I do believe in the notion of restitution, but allowing things to die is also important. For example, I believe that Burkina Faso is currently asking for the return of certain funeral masks, because they’re considered to be magic and they need to be buried [the ‘Rapport Sarr-Savoy sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain’ (2018) by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, notes that “[in] a number of African societies, statues also perish. They have a certain lifespan and are caught within a regenerative economic cycle founded on a fluid materiality and ontological identity,” ed.]. For this reason, the museum [that currently holds them] refuses to give them back, because [Burkina Faso is] planning to bury, rather than preserve them. So that begs the question, what’s the status of those masks now? Are they in agony in the museum because they’re not allowed to die? As designers, how do we allow objects to die, especially in the story of industrial design, where the pretentious modern dream was that these objects would last forever. Perhaps we don’t need cultural institutions to show all of our objects; we need funeral institutions to bury them. I’m really curious as to what this idea of object burial might look like in the West, and this is in the context of the questions around monuments during Black Lives Matter, when everyone wanted to put them in museums. Maybe it’s not a museum we need, but a place where we allow them to be let go.
Image by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Amal It’s funny that you brought that up, because I’ve said a few times that museums are places where objects go to die. I think what you’re suggesting means that you think of them in a circular way. They’re part of life and life moves on. But in a material culture, and a place where accumulation is the highest achievement, dying is the worst thing that can happen. When you make these machetes out of sugar, the material itself has the potential of melting away or no longer being remembered beyond what we have in our mind. But in art and design, everything is stacked up – there’s just more and more and more. Everyone wants to do the same thing and the economy around it is not sufficient to sustain the accumulation. With my friend Maria Guggenbichler, I opened a space in Amsterdam called Side Room and, after three years of operation, we closed it with a burning ritual where we invited participants to bring things along to burn. Some people wanted to burn white supremacy, others letters to ex-partners, whatever! There was this breath of oxygen that came from letting go.
Yassine The possibility of death is also the possibility of life. When my grandmother died, it was a really painful moment that was felt collectively within my family. But it was one of the moments where we laughed a lot while we remembered her. When we allow someone to pass away, we are left with the life. But we are in a society that has accumulated so many things. Even in the creative world, people are afraid to create because everything has been done, everything has been made. And you’re like: “What’s next? What space is left for us?” We’re still in adulation of the past. This is where there’s a certain sensibility in oral culture, because oral culture transforms things, there’s a shape-shifting – even in the objects. Things can pass away and new things emerge.
Image by Luc Bertrand, courtesy of Yassine Ben Abdallah.
Amal I think that’s beautiful. That’s why for many years, I’ve only been doing very ephemeral things, like staying within that oral literature. All the artworks would be in the moment and then disappear, with minimal documentation. But value is produced through accumulation and repetition in the art world, right? It’s also present within the idea of the single author. If you have one way of making, you cannot change your practice, because then people don’t recognise your practice and you do not accumulate value.
Yassine I think that’s a big thing. I cannot sell anything, but that’s not the purpose of my work. I had galleries asking me if there was a way to preserve the sugar machetes or make them out of resin. But that doesn’t make sense because I’m talking about something that disappeared; I’m talking about something that is changing. I also feel deeply uncomfortable trying to make money from these stories that I’ve collected. And this is why there’s a certain small window to, as you said, scam institutions to get funded research opportunities. I do not want the objects to become collectibles and accumulate, because that’s what I’m criticising.
“What I really love about these places is that they’re one of the few places in the West where you read that they don’t know something.”
Amal There’s friction in that space. Many of us have complex relations with the neoliberal capitalist machine, but at the same time we do have to find ways to pay our rent and survive in that system. You have to find ways to be in relation with it that do not undermine your spiritual politics and wellbeing in a society that makes it quite toxic.
Yassine For me, my whole questioning is about what it means to be a designer in a post-colonial society. As a designer, what is my role in my community and how can I tell these stories? Maybe there’s also this notion of time, which the academic Rolando Vázquez writes about really well [in ‘Modernity, Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time’ (2009), published in Sociological Research Online #14(4), Vázquez writes that “chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the modern/colonial systems of oppression”, ed.]. In modern society there’s this idea of linearity of progress and a future that is going to be brighter, whereas in some indigenous cultures, the past is in front of you. You go in behind your ancestors and they’re the ones that open the door. This is what I relate to. I’m not creating anything new, I’m just speaking about the past of the ones who went before me. That’s comforting, because you’re a continuation of something – you’re not something more or something less.
Interview Amal Alhaag
Portrait Bachir Tayachi
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.