“Ƙarfi” is hausa and stands for strength, power and empowerment. With the tools of art, we take a critical, decolonial look at society, the world and realities of life that we want to change.
DECOLONIAL AND ANTI-RACIST
In this way we deal with discrimination and racism that we have experienced ourselves and with colonial continuities (streets, squares, places of remembrance) that surround us every day – in our shop at Schlesische Straße 10/11 we develop and design our artistic interventions:
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
In 2023, we turned our shop at Schlesische Str. 10/11 into a very special research laboratory. “Domestic Affairs” stands for a broad conceptual focus that is not limited to physical spaces and inventory, but relates the domestic to history and colonial history, politics, rituals and emotions.
Our neighbour is the antique dealer Aatik - what happens when we remove the utility value of things?
Our first experiment, COPY SHOP, consisted of transforming our neighbouring shop 1:1 into cardboard and paper.
In a second experiment, we converted junked furniture and other collected items into a fleet of “carpet scooters”, living up-cycling sculptures, next to which the e-scooters in the city, which are increasingly tending towards e-waste, look old.
The static nature of the carpet was also to be set in motion, with imitations of oriental carpets from the GDR’s “Deutsche Werkstätten” and the West German furniture market of the 1970s being cut apart and carefully hand-stitched into footwear. The avant-garde slippers are perplexing – they have thus reversed the qualities of statics and movement; what otherwise lies flat and appears stable suddenly runs away… A sign of our times?
With: Philip Crawford, Amine Mohammed, Brooke Meenan und anderen.
In a second experiment, we converted junked furniture and other collected items into a fleet of “carpet scooters”, living up-cycling sculptures, next to which the e-scooters in the city, which are increasingly tending towards e-waste, look old.
The static nature of the carpet was also to be set in motion, with imitations of oriental carpets from the GDR’s “Deutsche Werkstätten” and the West German furniture market of the 1970s being cut apart and carefully hand-stitched into footwear. The avant-garde slippers are perplexing – they have thus reversed the qualities of statics and movement; what otherwise lies flat and appears stable suddenly runs away… A sign of our times?
Download (german only)
Photos: Luis Krummenacher, Philip Crawford
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. A project of Studio Karfi, supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
WAKE UP & LIVE (2022)
Large cargo loads of old textiles from Europe regularly arrive in African home ports. We brought back textile waste bales from Benin and Kenya to develop our own textile statements from the re-imported clothes.
For our pyjama collection, however, we opted for colourfully patterned wax fabrics, so-called “African fabrics”.
Everyone and anyone knows them - or not quite?
With each new cut, we uncovered hidden knowledge about these pattern fabrics, colonial continuities interlinked with a nightmarish clothing industry that now ensnares the entire globe. Sleep was out of the question for a while.
A look at Ghana, however, opens up a different way of reading wax fabrics, because African producers have indeed inscribed their political struggle for freedom in the fabrics with special orders for subjects and patterns from European fabric producers.
Our team from Studio Karfi will present the controversial pyjamas with wax prints to a broad public during a catwalk through Görlitzer Park during Berlin Fashion Week. In the centrally located Kreuzberg Park, which has been in the news because of the obvious drug trade, numerous refugees, also from African countries, try to secure a minimal existence for themselves and especially for impoverished relatives in countries of origin under the worst conditions through the illegal sale of drugs. A very sad consequence of an ongoing colonial catastrophe – because in order to save livelihoods at home in the global South, uncompromising, immediate far-reaching world trade revisions and far-reaching labour rights for refugees and migrants are needed. The climate crisis will create huge migratory movements, it is against human rights to refrain from regulating world trade and to tighten restrictions on flight and migration.
It is therefore less easy to sleep in Studio Karfi’s pyjamas than to fight for justice.
Buona Notte? Buon Giorno!
THE COLONIAL WAITING ROOM (2021)
In a first action we create the installation “The Colonial Waiting Room”. We understand the waiting room, especially the one we know well of the German immigration authorities, as a colonial space and invite people to join those who are stuck in the “waiting room of history”. The Decolonial is now.
Photos: Luis Krummenacher, Marla Gaiser, Marc Waldow
In Cooperation with:
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS was funded by:
The various course groups of Bildungsmanufaktur are funded by:
