If This Then That: Sculpture — John Chamberlain → Gonçalo Mabunda
If you understand why John Chamberlain’s crushed cars matter, you’ll recognize what Gonçalo Mabunda built from the weapons of a war. IF YOU LIKE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN John Chamberlain transformed crushed automobiles into sculpture, showing that industrial scrap could carry the same expressive force as bronze or marble. Rather than erase the material’s past, he preserved […]
How Nigeria Was Everywhere and Nowhere at the World Cup
Where the 2026 World Cup rank in recent history is discourse for another time, there’s no doubt that it has uniquely taken its place as a cultural tentpole. A reason for this? The host nations, particularly the United States, which, months before the tournament kicked off, was speculatively doomed because of anti-immigration sentiments, ICE crackdowns, […]
The First Release: TEMESGEN’s Second Chapter
In Amharic, temesgen (ተመስገን) means gratitude, a name rooted in appreciation, reflection and connection. For the Stockholm-based label TEMESGEN, gratitude is not simply a word but a philosophy: a way of honoring where one comes from while imagining what can be built from that foundation. At Guzangs, we have followed TEMESGEN since its earliest chapter. […]
Who Gets to Write the Future of Fashion?
The mopani worm is one of Southern Africa’s most familiar delicacies. It is also, at the end of this month in Cape Town, the name attached to a silk, one of a slate of materials asking whether the continent’s next fibre industry is already here: in its rivers, farmlands and forests, in leathers tanned from […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
In Mwangola, Gelmira Gourgel Exhibits the Music That Fueled Angola’s Independence
Gelmira Gourgel, an Angolan architectural designer and curator, wants people to see Angola in all its depth, not as the country that rarely enters conversations about Africa, but as a nation whose rich cultural traditions, enduring craftsmanship and creative resilience have long shaped the continent’s artistic imagination. In her own words, it is a politically […]
The Burden of Silence: Why African Men Struggle to Talk About Mental Health
Femi*, a tech analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, says he grew up being bullied in his boarding school due to his size, which forced him into depression from an early age and interfered with his grades. It got worse until he asked his parents to help him see a therapist. “One day, after […]
The Game Is Already There
This conversation was recorded in mid-June, as the group stage of the World Cup was opening. Anita Asante remembers the game before it became a career. She was eleven or twelve, back in Ghana on a family visit, playing barefoot with her cousins on whatever ground was nearest, a patch of grass, a stretch of […]
The Africa Azzedine Alaïa Carried
Azzedine Alaïa left Tunis as a young man and built his life in Paris, but the leaving was never really finished. “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa,” Olivier Saillard’s exhibition at the couturier’s foundation in the Marais, takes that unfinished departure as its subject. There are around fifty pieces, most of them from the collections Alaïa made […]
Francis Kéré Builds the Goethe-Institut Dakar from the Ground Up
In Dakar, a new cultural landmark is rising from the soil. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the new Goethe-Institut Senegal turns earth, memory, and craftsmanship toward a new era of African architectural possibility. In Dakar’s Fann neighbourhood, a baobab tree stands at the centre of a building that appears to have grown […]