Tapeti

When Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo adorned her 2017/18 collections for Comme des Garçons with lumps, bumps, and bulges that deformed and radically deconstructed the human body, she turned her back on classic silhouettes and subverted the idea of women as commodities.

Instead of developing objects for the body, the Congolese-Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga designs an “in-between” that merely suggests the body, charged with Afrofuturism, digital spirits, technology, and human-animal hybrids. It is found in thin skins, in heavy cotton, in leather, in light tulle. The artist artfully drapes material around iron rods and foam, folds it into dramatic pleats, and masks baskets, supposed heads.

Mujinga’s faceless “in-between” inhabits a unsettling zone of indeterminacy. It is based on the concept of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, who calls for the “droit à l’opacité,” the “right to opacity.” I do not need to understand my counterpart, he says, in order to live with them, and advocates for a coexistence that accepts the other’s strangeness without “erasing” it through understanding.

Sandra Mujinga’s work in the evn collection embodies this open, non-coercive attitude and resistance to political power structures.

Text: Brigitte Huck, 2026

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)