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Reminder that design began and ended in the 20th century, which makes it all the more comical when people react against "modernist" or "eurocentric" design. Just like Heidegger wrote that there is no philosophy that isn't Greek, there is no design that isn't European (and modern)
There is a political obligation today in the anglophone world to obfuscate history for ideological reasons, and there is a profound irony in this when people try to coopt things like islamic typography or african craft into "design"; colonizing under the guise of "decolonialism"
These people perpetuate what they claim to fight, flattening all culture under your own. But I don't need to tell you that, everyone can see it including the very people who signal support for them and amplify their claims because there is social and moral credit to be reaped
The second irony is that people like me, who frenzied activists hate, admire and respect indigenous craft, traditions that go back millennia, and that is precisely why I wish for them to be recognized as the product of a cultural genius loci that "westerners" should not co-opt
There is no "African design" that is not a colonial act, just like there is no American design, no Canadian design, no Australian design, &c. Those things exist as names, and are in the same relationship to 'design' historically understood, as scientology is to religion
'Design' is an historically located concept born of the confluence of cultural-technological factors that arose, peaked and began to dwindle all in 20th century Europe. To the extent that it got to America, it came in the suitcases of European refugees sent over by Adolf Hitler
All the same, the concept became meaningless across the board once the preoccupations that had generated it moved to the background. We still 'do design' the same way we still do religion, in a tired way that should 'rebrand', but not as a tool for American globalist imperialism
