AKHO BANTU
AKHO BANTU emerged by invitation as part of the INOVA × HAY Kaapenhagen Design Challenge, presented during Cape Town Furniture Week 2025 — a brief that invited Cape Town–based designers to reinterpret HAY's About A Chair AAC 222 through the lens of place.
Rather than treating the chair as a neutral canvas, FEDE Studio approached it as a language already formed — one shaped by European modernism, functional clarity, and the promise of universality — and asked what that language makes possible, and what it renders absent.
Comfort is withdrawn.
Function becomes
symbolic.
Designed by Hee Welling, the AAC 222 is a modern classic: generous, restrained, efficient. In this iteration, its most accommodating element — the seat — is removed. What remains is a structure that still stands, still performs order and balance, but no longer offers support.
With wooden legs severed and replaced with slender black steel rods, the chair's posture shifts from grounded to tenuous. Its silhouette sharpens, acquiring a presence that feels alert, watchful, and slightly estranged from use. The timber is darkened and stained, drawing the object away from the clean neutrality of contemporary interiors and toward something heavier — marked by time, memory, and wear.
AKHO BANTU
materialises a design logic
shaped through absence.
The title, AKHO BANTU, holds layered and uneasy meanings. In isiXhosa and isiZulu, the phrase translates directly to "there are no people." In everyday speech, it describes an empty place. In other contexts, it carries a more loaded implication: a condition where ubuntu — relational presence, mutual recognition — is diminished or absent.
Historically, Bantu was used during Apartheid as a racial category to designate African people. In this sense, the phrase cannot be neutral. It echoes a lived and ongoing reality in Cape Town's urban landscape — particularly within its modern, commercially coded spaces — where black bodies are strikingly scarce, and where the city often appears designed without them in mind.
AKHO BANTU draws a direct line between this contemporary absence and the inherited logics of space. The chair does not represent a person denied access; it embodies a system shaped through exclusion. Its alien, almost creature-like form is not anthropomorphic, but architectural — a visual logic that feels complete unto itself, yet indifferent to who can inhabit it.
The work holds a tension between
design excellence and erasure,
situating the city within inherited
architectural logics.
Within the context of a design challenge that celebrates Scandinavian functionalism and global exchange, the work resists decoration or reconciliation. Instead, it performs a subtraction. It removes what makes the object hospitable, leaving behind a structure that continues to circulate as "good design," even as its human reference erodes.
Presented at INOVA Concept Store, AKHO BANTU does not resolve the tension between design excellence and lived reality. It holds it. It allows the chair to stand as a quiet indictment and an open question — one that situates Cape Town's present within its architectural past, and asks what it would mean for design to begin elsewhere.