There are complex challenges to stimulating the design scene in the most unequal country in the world, the founder of Design Week South Africa Margot Molyneux tells Dezeen in this interview.
Design Week South Africa is a new two-part event with an instalment that took place in Johannesburg earlier in October and a second chapter starting in Cape Town today.
Molyneux – a fashion designer and former managing editor at the magazine House and Leisure – launched the event with an ambition to invigorate the local industry and increase public awareness about the importance of design.
She told Dezeen she had in mind members of the community "who don't have the privileges of travelling and being inspired by creativity".
"One of the things that I really wanted to do with this is to have events that are free," Molyneux told Dezeen.
"So the barrier to entry is much lower for people to exhibit and to attend, so that people can actually feel the joys of inspiration and pride of viewing something interesting and beautiful and creative," she continued.
"Locally anyway, this has always been reserved to a convention centre space, which obviously then only allows certain people to enter and to exhibit."
Wealth gap an obstacle to growth of design
Molyneux explained that the wealth gap in South African society created a distinct set of issues for its design industry. South Africa is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world, and by some measures – such as the World Bank's reputable Gini index – it is the most unequal.
Ten per cent of the country's population owns more than 80 per cent of the wealth, the unemployment rate is a high 33.5 per cent, and due to the legacy of apartheid, race continues to be a key determining factor in people's economic circumstances.
One of the consequences of this, believes Molyneux, is that there isn't the market for the local design industry to flourish, without massively exporting overseas.
"We obviously have an extremely huge gap between the wealthy and the poor," said Molyneux. "So your percentage of people that can actually afford to buy products that have been made locally, made ethically enough for people to be able to have a livelihood out of designing is very small."
While throwing free events alone won't solve this problem, Molyneux believes that a vibrant design week can be part of the solution. She hopes that it can be help educate a growing middle class about the benefits of buying local.
"It is more expensive, but look at all of the people that are being employed by this," said Molyneux. "What would they do without that employment?"
In the long-term, the numbers of people in that middle class with money for discretionary spending needs to grow.
"My thinking is always, how do we get more people educated and more people working?" said Molyneux. "Once someone starts working and they're earning a salary, they can make more choices."
"At the moment, so many people just have so little," she continued. "You can either buy something that's imported from China or something made here, but since the thing made here is actually just more expensive, then that choice is not really a choice."
"I feel like it's the same problem that the world over faces, ours is just layered with more complexity."
Organising involved giving creatives "a strong push"
While she has one eye on the local audience, Molyneux is also targetting global tourism and business with Design Week South Africa.
Compared to a period of momentum around design in Cape Town last decade, when the city hosted the Design Indaba conference annually and was named World Design Capital in 2014, the last few years have felt stagnant, Molyneux reflects.
She hopes Design Week South Africa will grow every year and soon become a "reliable date in the diary" for overseas visitors interested in the country and the region.
However, for this year, she has had to start small. She has organised the event in just a few months, with the help of urbanist Roland Postma and culture and communications expert Zanele Kumalo – one based in Cape Town and the other Johannesburg.
They have worked with a modest amount of funding from local payment platform Yoco, which the organisers passed to designers and businesses to run their own events. There are no large anchoring events in the programme this year.
"I thought that we would have key events," said Molyneux. "It fell away because we're such a small team with so little time and resources that it became completely overwhelming to think that we were going to be hosting or curating specific exhibitions."
"So what I've tried to do is give people quite a strong push and get them to do what they want to do – which I personally feel better about anyway, because it should be the industry speaking, and not my opinion of what is cool and isn't cool," she added.
The resulting programme is broad and varied, incorporating exhibitions, walking tours, open studios, panel discussions, film screenings and product launches.
The Cape Town event, which runs until Sunday 27 October, includes an exhibition of chairs from across Africa and a showcase of pieces made in a "waste workshop" facilitated by furniture brand Wunders, and an urbanism-focused event in one of the city's townships – a term used to refer to South Africa's impoverished outlying settlements, formed through racial segregation.
There is an installation of a "modular parklet" (top image) where a youth unemployment advocacy group will welcome people with conversation cards, and the last day of the festival will launch Cape Town's first Open Streets Experiment, which will see the popular Bree Street closed to cars every Sunday.
Design weeks the right format for the times
To an outsider, it is tempting given the location to compare Design Week South Africa to Design Indaba, which was very influential but hasn't been held since 2020. However, Molyneux sees the events as essentially different.
"I think what they created was an incredible platform and it is definitely missed," said Molyneux. "But in my mind, it's a very different thing. It was a conference at heart."
While there has been no formal statement from Design Indaba about its event, there is a widespread belief that it is not coming back. In Molyneux's eyes, this may have been a response to changing times, as conferences have fallen out of favour and more open design weeks have sprung up around the world.
"I think it's the way the world is moving anyway, and maybe that's partly what Design Indaba saw and felt that that they would rather just end it, I don't know, but I think it is the way that it's moving," said Molyneux.
She has found inspiration in the Cape Town Art Fair, which has grown gradually over 10 years to become a draw for international collectors, and has found affinity with the organisers of design weeks in Australia – another geographically remote former colony trying to reckon with its past and forge an inclusive identity.
She hopes that by giving curatorial power to Cape Town and Johannesburg's creators and small businesses, the festival will come to have a truly representative local character all of its own.
"We have a complicated history and a complicated set of cultures," she said. "I think to try and grow pride internally will ultimately mean that we have a stronger foot forward in terms of being taken seriously on the global market."
Design Week South Africa takes place in Johannesburg from 10 to 13 October and in Cape Town from 24 to 27 October 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.