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Why Artists Keep Returning to Grand-Popo

Performance n:u, Howlihoué: pour ce(ux) qui reste(nt) at the Lọpọ Lọpọ 2026 festival in Grand-Popo, Benin

When Joshua Gbengene visited Grand-Popo for the third time in December 2025, he was simply keeping a distance from work. After months of working nonstop on a series of creative projects, including a pop-up and an installation, the multidisciplinary artist travelled to the coastal town in search of somewhere quiet enough to slow down, clear […]

How Nigeria Was Everywhere and Nowhere at the World Cup

Nigerian fans in green Super Eagles jerseys celebrating during the 2026 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 Africa Azzedine Alaïa Carried

Azzedine Alaïa, special creation, 1996. Bodice and belt in printed foal hide and horsehair, installation view at the Azzedine Alaïa and Africa exhibition, Paris

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 […]

The Index Is the Institution

Designed hero graphic for The Sovereign Stack Part Three, "The Index Is the Institution," showing a 2026 timeline of AI content and provenance laws being set elsewhere — California's content-marking law, the UK's licensing-first position, and the EU AI Act on 2 August — against an empty African-governed standards track marked "No enforceable standard yet."

Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation. It returns names, a few studios, an archive or two, a marketplace. The answer arrives as though it were a window onto everything that exists. It is closer to a door that someone else hung, opening onto the rooms they chose […]

Love Has Become Bad Manners

Eugénie and François Odouffan and a younger couple in the living-room set of Michel Odouffan’s Generational Love

Hasna and Ryan kept giving themselves away, a shoulder leaning in, a collar fixed with a care no collar has ever needed, their bodies doing what bodies do before pride gets involved. Nobody in the room minded that the two of them wanted each other; the discomfort was that the wanting kept showing on their […]

Generational Love

Generational Love sets two couples in Michel Odouffan’s childhood living room and asks them to do the one thing we have trained ourselves out of: to be obvious about wanting each other. Against wax-print backdrops and a familiar red sofa, the newer couple lets the wanting spill over — a hand, a kiss, a head […]