RECOVERING DISAPPEARED RECORDS THROUGH DESIGN
Honoré in 2023 during his appearance at the Design Parade Hyères, designer and researcher Yassine Ben Abdallah has created a singular body of work that evokes his native Reunion Island, while evoking Europe's colonial past. Acumen took advantage of his participation in the "Dutch, More or Less" exhibition at the Nieuwe Institut to talk to him about four of his creations. Interview.
THE BITTERSWEET MEMORY OF THE PLANTATION
(2022)
" I wanted to work on the history of Reunion Island, and particularly that of the sugarcane plantations that really shaped the island. During my research, I realized that there were very few, if any, material archives belonging to the enslaved communities who worked there. And it was from this absence that my project was born, but also from this question: "How do we remember as a community when we no longer have any objects that bear witness to a narrative?". So I started working with the only archive available to me, sugar itself. I remodeled the tools that were used by the enslaved populations, the machetes, and that continue to be used by cane planters today. [The machete] carries an interesting ambiguity, since it is first and foremost an agricultural tool that has enabled displaced communities to "reindigenize" by reworking the land. It's common for every family to have this tool in their garden. And there's not a week that goes by without the newspaper reporting that someone has been hacked with a machete. It's an object that both connects and disconnects, becoming a weapon that still carries a history of colonial violence.
ĀLAMĀRĪ (2024)
WITH MATERRA-MATANG AND CABINETMAKER AYMERIC DELMAS
"Ālamārī was born out of a residency I did on Reunion Island at the Ravate company, which belongs to a large Indo-Muslim family. There are very few public archives surrounding this community, which settled on the island in the 19th century. One of the only ways to gain access to these archives was to collect them from families, including the Ravate family, but also from Indo-Muslims. To make it a reality, I created this cabinet to house the stories and family archives. Like the materials it's made of, it had to tell these stories. For example, the cabinet is made from tamarind wood, endemic to Reunion Island, which enabled the patriarch of the Ravate family to start his business by trading in it. Inside, the three shelves recall the triptych that organizes the Indo-Muslim community: family, business and religion. "
THE CHAIR SITTING SOCIETY (2023)
WITH MILENO GUILLOREL-OBREGÓN AND NADINE DUTREUIL
" This chair was born of a constraint I encountered during my participation in the Design Parade Hyères (2023). Once we'd been selected, it came as something of a surprise to learn that there was a new partnership with Tectona, and that we'd each been asked to produce a chair. At the time, I was in La Réunion, a little annoyed, to be honest, by this last-minute constraint, but above all by this question of the chair, which is very recurrent in the design world. It's a symbol I wanted to question, because many cultures, including my own, sit not on a chair, but on the floor. And in my extensive reading, I've learned that the chair has a relationship of elevation to the ground, an inheritance from the throne. In the end, it all stems from a culture of elites who were able to sit in this way, which gradually became more popular. The question of the chair in design was also that of the individual object par excellence, which approximates the human body while at the same time modeling it. And I wanted to challenge this narrative, of a seat that elevates, individualizes and excludes, with the sézi, a braided mat found on Reunion Island, which is a collective seat since, when unrolled, it allows several people to sit together. This sézi is tied around the chair's skeleton, to raise the question of what we sit on, and what we don't allow, ultimately, when we sit in this way. "
NEW PLANTER'S CHAIR (2024)
WITH MILENO GUILLOREL-OBREGÓN
" The Chair Sitting Society project led to another, with Mileno, on the occasion of a commission for the Nieuwe Institut, in Rotterdam, on the question of the planter chair. It can be found in India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa and in all the colonized countries that had plantations. The planter chair is fascinating because it's ubiquitous, rather like the plastic chair, and it's hard to know where it comes from. It's also very unusual in that it resembles an obstetrician's chair, since it allows you to spread your legs and rest them on its footrests. The planter chair was exclusive to white men, and thanks to its inclination, it enabled one to lose one's gaze in the ceiling or sky, so as not to see one's servants. It's quite interesting, because this posture wasn't at all appropriate in Europe, but was tolerated in the colonies. We salvaged an example from leboncoin, stripped it down and redesigned it using aluminum profiles. Our interest was in questioning this question of Dutch design, of modernist design in Rotterdam, where modern architecture was built around resources such as aluminum and glass, which are resources that ultimately make the same journey as the resources of colonial times. We wanted to link the continuity of these narratives and this foundation, by asking the question of the relationships that continue to pre-exist through a modern design that makes a tabula rasa of this history. "
" DUTCH, MORE OR LESS"
NIEUWE INSTITUUT
MUSEUMPARK 25, ROTTERDAM (NETHERLANDS)
UNTIL MARCH 30, 2025
YASSINEBENABDALLAH.COM
NIEUWEINSTITUUT.NL
