According to Design Indaba, ‘our best design stories lie ahead of us,’ yet it could be argued that the stories that this world renowned, multi-disciplinary festival of creativity has been telling over the past 25 years are impressive enough. Its list of recent alumni reads like a who’s who of design, with speakers including architects Mariam Kamara and Thomas Heatherwick, fashion mavericks Adebayo Oke-Lawal and Selly Raby Kane, filmmakers Sunu Gonera and Kagiso Lediga and furniture pros Tom Dixon and Yinka Ilori. Not to mention its legendary legacy projects, such as unveiling The Arch for Arch, an architectural structure honouring Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

This year held at Cape Town’s Artscape from 26 to 28 March, and as it celebrates its Silver Jubilee, the festival’s raison d’etre of promoting a better world through creativity remains as strong as ever. The key tenet of Design Indaba is that a new design perspective in one industry can yield solutions that can be applied universally, and so its speakers are gathered from a global pool of talent, spanning diverse design disciplines. The one crucial quality that they all share is just how pioneering and collaborative their approaches are.

The 2020 line-up of luminaries includes Led By Donkeys, a guerrilla campaign that covered prominent buildings in the UK with posters in a bid to hold the country’s politicians to account. Sunny Dolat from Nairobi’s multi-disciplinary group Nest Collective, will talk about working together to craft culture-shaping fashion, theatre, music, film and art. Natsai Audrey Chieza is a Harare-born, London-based biotech designer who creates chemical free textiles. Nhlanhla Mahlangu is a vocalist, composer, dancer and teacher. Ibrahim Mahama, the Ghanaian installation artist and author, will delve into his monumental works, and Finnish empathy designer and artist Enni-Kukka Tuomala, is among this year’s selection of Global Graduates.

As ever, the speakers will be simulcast live to South Africa’s biggest cities – from Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, to Port Elizabeth and Potchefstroom ¬– allowing a wider audience of design devotees to join in the ride. And this part is crucial because Design Indaba yields results, having been the seed of over 100 impact-led projects over its quarter century of refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer.

Alongside the conference itself Design Indaba will run its fun-filled Nightscape, which will feature a dizzying roster of live music, masterclasses, performances, exhibitions and installations. This includes the annual Emerging Creatives platform, which gives young South African talents invaluable exposure, which this year is curated by milliner Crystal Birch, conceptual art director Mokoena Kobeli and furniture designer Siyanda Mbele. The finalists of this year’s The Most Beautiful Objects in South Africa competition – chosen by the public and with the aim of disrupting what we perceive as beautiful - will also be on show, with nominees including Nataal favourites Thebe Magugu and Rich Mnisi.

Keep an eye on Nataal for more stories on Design Indaba 2020 in the coming weeks.

Design Indaba Festival is from 26 to 29 February 2020, at Artscape Theatre Complex, Cape Town. Buy tickets here

Words Miriam Bouteba

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Published on 13/02/2020