RE:WORKS, 2021

SHOWCASE: furniture collection for the V & A Museum, South Kensington

As part of my Mphil dissertation, I transformed exhibition waste from the V & A museum into a 'cultural object'. In this case it was a set of stools and benches, which were then exhibited in the museum itself. Thus, this horizontal critique of conventional top-down design processes utilised my positionality as a researcher, ­­identity as a British-Ghanaian Londoner, and subsequent socialisation to explore boundaries of potential resistance in Barking. Instead of taking a purely ‘academic’ approach to unveil heritage,  my methodology allowed for a separate means of understanding  past and present.

I believe there is much to be gained from a finer-grained anthropological understanding of the creating and shaping of environments across a lengthy 'life cycle'.  Joining re:works and hosting workshops at the V&A allowed me to use my  dissertation as an active and reactive milieu, influencing and influenced by interactions of others.