Annotations cc: Giles Tettey Nartey

Giles Tettey Nartey, architect, researcher, and Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, explores a design language rooted in the physical intelligence of the body and the cultural resonance of material traditions. His practice is an ongoing inquiry into how objects acquire meaning—how they are shaped by history, memory, and use. Drawing from craft, embodied knowledge, and diasporic narratives, Giles constructs a spatial dialogue between the personal and the collective, honouring the intimacy of use, and the depth of cultural legacy.

Anoe: Your work feels like it gathers. The way it’s used, or even just encountered, it creates a sense of togetherness, a kind of center. It draws you in. I’m wondering how intentional that is, and where it comes from?

Giles: The concept of the collective, of gathering, is central to my work. Some pieces explicitly invite multiple participants, while others do so more subtly. At the core of it, I’m always thinking about the body: how it relates to objects and material presence, and how it sometimes edges into something symbolic, and immaterial. As an architect with a research focus on West African material cultures, I’m drawn to rituals of making and use. Communion reimagines the traditional act of pounding fufu, a shared practice in Ghana where one person pounds cassava and plantain while another turns the mixture. I transformed this ritual into a communal piece that enables several people to participate simultaneously, creating synchronicity, rhythm, and conversation. This interest continues in Interplay, my reinterpretation of the West African mancala game Oware, which is typically played by two players capturing each other’s stones across twelve carved hollows. In my version, it becomes a communal bench that invites multiple players to sit and engage. Another work, DA/Body Rest, draws from the African headrest—a design widespread across the continent. I expanded this form to suspend the whole body, not just the head. This design references pastoral communities that historically used the rests as both functional tools and culturally significant artifacts, often embellished. At the same time, it critiques how such objects from the global South are frequently displayed in the West—isolated, decontextualized, and placed on plinths.

 

A: References to the collective naturally lead to thoughts of public space, while the scale itself creates a sense of multiplicity. In relevance to the ritual or game, I’m wondering how much of it is intuitive. I get the sense that, while the forms might be unfamiliar, or even the rules of the game might be unclear, you can probably figure it out just by engaging with it. It invites people in without requiring prior knowledge. That kind of intuitive engagement becomes a way of communicating across cultures. It opens up a space where the work can speak by itself—a kind of global language of design, and an expanded sense of cultural understanding.

G: It’s actually hardwired into the work. In a sense, I design for gestures. Those gestures have a language of their own. They’re not necessarily linked to specific communities. Serwaa, an aluminium chair, that I designed is something you see across West Africa: low, grounded stools, usually carved from a single piece of timber. Serwaa, is an ambiguous six-legged aluminium object in a space. You might not even know it’s a chair. Intuitively, there’s a feeling—a desire to approach  it, to sit in it, or to understand it physically. And that’s what I’m really designing for. Even if someone doesn’t consciously know how to interact with the design—even if the references are completely unfamiliar—their body still knows.

 

A: I’m interested in what you’re saying about historic design references, and how far we can reconsider them—bringing them into the present by reimagining and reintroducing them. Across your different projects, you draw on various references and rituals. When you talk about crafts and rituals, I assume they are still active and operating today, say, in an African context?

G: Yes, this is crucial in my work: to take everyday, hyper-local rituals and objects and reframe them through my own language, imagining them as something that could hold more than just a singular function, something that could hold the community. The stools, the fufu pounding, the Oware game—they still very much exist. The act of pounding fufu is traditionally singular, but in my memory, it has always been a performance. Communion tries to reimagine and even distort that memory, designing for the gestures I’ve always seen. The headrest is maybe the only exception. That one opens up a bigger conversation about the erasure of a design tradition.

 

A: In the context of erasure of design history, it’s often unclear whether something disappeared by chance, by force, or through neglect. What fades tends to be tied to marginalized communities, raising the question: was the typology no longer needed, or did circumstances shift so it could no longer be claimed? The reasons are rarely singular or obvious, and that ambiguity itself is telling. How do you study that controversy?

G: It’s a pivotal question. Often when we think of erasure, we see it as a kind of violence or destruction. But actually, the answer is more complex. There are many forces that contribute to something becoming obsolete. Sometimes it’s just evolution. With the headrest, this is tricky because it’s all kind of speculation—we’re filling gaps in history. In the Asante tribe in Ghana, around Kumasi, the stool, like the Asante stool, is very important. The word stool is even interchangeable with seat of power. Historical European accounts indicate that headrests were in use in the region around the 1700s, but they are no longer culturally prominent. You could imagine that over time, the stool became so prominent that it replaced the headrest. In East and South Africa, headrests still exist and remain prominent. They didn’t evolve into stools the way they did in Ghana. Instead, different ideas about how people sit developed in those regions. I tend to think of it like branching—in Ghana, the design might have split and evolved into the stool, whereas in other regions, the headrest form persisted.

 

A: What happens when we take a design rooted in history and bring it into a contemporary context? Displayed ancient objects or fragments, are often grouped and displayed, yet they’re isolated from their origin, and the scene they belonged to. As you said, the context is everything. It’s the usage and the interaction that give objects life. Particularly when we think about history, culture, and curation.

G: I find it really interesting how everyday practices—and the objects we use daily—can hold so much significance and prominence. A central theme in my work is the idea that everyday practices need activation, a form of performance or use. Objects don’t exist in a vacuum; they require the practice to animate them, and to some degree, to ascribe meaning to them. In a museum you often see something that was meant to be lived with—used in a domestic or ritual context—now elevated on a plinth, objectified. It’s filtered through this imported, Western idea of what constitutes art or craft, which is in most cases totally disconnected from the original sensibility behind its making. You start seeing the object through the lens of the extractors, through the legacy of imperialism, of taking things, of detaching objects from people and places. And that’s... the question, isn’t it?

 

A: It’s something that’s been addressed in critical theory over the past few years. There's still a kind of archival rigidity to how the majority of cultural institutes function, as if they're locked in a system that's impossible to shift. Have you been thinking more about that? Not just the object, but the frame—the setting, the environment of display, and how that shapes meaning?

G: Absolutely. For me, that’s what it’s all about: challenging the norms around how we treat objects, especially those displayed in art or design spaces. It’s about reintegrating the rituals and lived practices that originally gave rise to these objects, proposing a new sensibility and language for design—one that resists objectification and insists on context, interaction, and meaning through use.

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Text: Anoe Melliou
Images: All credits are courtesy of Giles Tettey Nartey; Communion at V&A London, Photography by Christian Cassiel; Interplay, Photography by Andy Stagg.