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Several years before Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung began collaborating with Yinka Ilori, the Cameroon-born biotech scientist turned curator and writer began collecting Ilori tableware for his own family home. “He had an Aami Aami cup and an amazing tablecloth,” Ndikung recalls, referring to Ilori’s enamel cup decorated with bright yellow sun-shaped circles and orange and green stripes. “If you look at them,” he continues, “they remind you to be cheerful. “There is no reason why a plate has to be white.”
He smiles and leans back in his chair in his office in the Berlin neighborhood. House of World Cultures, a 35-year-old cultural institution known as HKW. The office is located inside a mid-century modern conference hall nicknamed the “pregnant oyster” that Americans gifted West Berlin during the Cold War. The first non-white, non-European director of the institution, ndikung has been shaking things up since accepting the job in 2023. She also doesn’t think the museum’s walls have to be white: Her office is painted hot pink and royal blue. Shortly after taking over HKW, he had several of its showrooms painted colorfully. Picto Sonic mural by the Cameroonian artist and composer based in Berlin Tanka Fonta. Many entrances and rooms have been named after writers, artists and thinkers as well.
But it’s not just about the happy aesthetic of IloriThe work that attracted Ndikung. It was also the designer’s way of seeing the world that impressed him. “From an initial chair recycling project in 2015,” Ndikung says, “I could see that he was looking at design and trying to rethink what it really means and what he does.”
Ilori, who is sitting across from Ndikung, appreciates the compliment. “I really want every object I design to offer a sense of hope, belonging and joy. I want people to feel something from my work,” she says. “My background was furniture design, but my first love was chairs. We take chairs for granted, but they contain our emotions and our stories. We sing about them. We throw them away. We argue about them. They also define how we sit, although outside the Western world people sit in many ways.”
The curator first asked Ilori to collaborate with him in 2021, when he was artistic director of the international arts festival. Sonsbeek 20-24, set in Arnhem, Netherlands (a country with a hidden past of colonial slavery of the people of Suriname, Indonesia, and other countries). She was looking for new ways to approach the Black Archives, which document the history of black emancipation and people in the Netherlands. Ilori’s response was an immersive experience to show this oppression but also the resistance to it, through sound files, paper and images.
For their next and highly anticipated collaboration, Ndikung asked Ilori to design a pavilion to coincide with the upcoming HKW exhibition. mass ballet, a series of performances, films and installations that premieres June 7. The project, funded by the Euro 2024 Football and Culture Foundation and the German federal government, focuses on the role football plays in society. Ndikung and Ilori have embraced the idea of using play as a framework to examine human nature, although they admit that neither of them plays.
Both recognize the almost religious fervor of being in a stadium. “There is music, chanting, celebrations and people crying with anger and joy,” Ilori says. In football there are the same sublime moments (a deep connection with the community) and moments of conflict and abuse. For Ilori, it was important to embed a message of self-reflection in the space. “I was thinking about accountability,” he says of his desire to shed light on the racist behavior that can occur at the stadium and the FA’s frequent ineptitude when it comes to disciplining fans.
Unlike the pavilions Ilori has created in the past, including her first permanent installation in Berlin, a kaleidoscopic canopy on the banks of the Spree titled Filtered rays – this design, called Reflection in numbers, is relatively monochromatic and insular: a covered space 10 m in diameter by 5 m high, with two entry points. Painted in royal blue and sunflower yellow, its interior is lined with amphitheater-style seating. But, most dramatically, the walls are built with round mirrors made from more than a thousand pumpkins imported from Senegal and cut in half. “Basically, your reflection is everywhere,” Ilori says of his concept. Ndikung adds: “Basically, you are forced to look at yourself or others and realize that you are not alone in this space.”
The structure also houses two koras, West African stringed instruments made from gourds, which are placed on either side of the pavilion so that visitors can play them spontaneously if they wish. It’s an idea that has captivated German-Cameroonian Emilienne Fernande Bodo, curatorial assistant for Architectural and Spatial Practices at HKW: “The idea is to transform those racist chants that can be heard in a stadium into a calming and more spiritual sound.” She says the purpose of the series of pavilions at HKW “is to reach out to the city, invite people in and create a human-scale space for discourse and events.”
For Ndikung, temporary open-air structures like Ilori’s HKW pavilion not only break down the walls of a museum but are a way to “talk to people passing by, serving as a magnifying glass or amplifier of the museum.”
Both have, at times, felt unwelcome in public spaces, so Ndikung sees his task as “making these institutions more accessible.” Ilori adds: “Growing up in London, I never felt like I could go to museums, that I didn’t have a license to enter those spaces. What Bonaventure and his team are doing is very important work: inspiring future curators and directors, and deconstructing those narratives that we don’t belong here.”
Ndikung nods his head and accompanies Ilori’s observation with a “yes, yes” response. “Design can do the same,” she concludes. “Designers bridge that gap between us and the world. The good ones have always found ways to make environments more comfortable and beautiful.”