Auntie Renée’s green mission in Ghana

New York-based designer Elise McMahon launched the studio LikeMindedObjects, an incubator for quirky furniture and custom interiors, 14 years ago. Her sustainable approach to design led to experimentation with upcycled materials, but she wanted to do more. “I wanted to make a positive difference to the waste and overconsumption habits I was seeing all around me,” she says.

A friend, the American artist and designer Chris Wolston, had years before spent several months at Ghana’s Kokrobitey Institute, and raved about the work of its American founder, the artist-teacher Renée Neblett (known as “Auntie Renée”). Neblett had established the two-acre green campus as a design lab dedicated to sustainable ideas benefiting the local community and the wider global environment. Wolston made an introduction.

“Within 30 minutes, we were planning a four-month work trip,” recalls McMahon of the life-changing conversation that followed. “And ever since, I have been in a collaborative conversation, zigzagging between projects and product development with Auntie Renée, the Institute and her infectious orbit.”

The most critical literacy is to be able to read your environment

Neblett founded the campus 30 years ago. It was conceived by the late Ghanaian architect Alero Olympio and has since evolved into a design school, makerspace and environmental think-tank spread across several buildings. Despite its remote location, in a rural fishing village outside Accra reached only by a rugged road, it’s become a pilgrimage destination for experimental design.

On a tour of the campus, McMahon and Neblett highlight the fruits of their ongoing collaboration: a collection of rugs made of recycled denim, chairs constructed from upcycled bicycle rims and lighting conceived from old glass bottles. Their latest project is a ready-to-wear collection of dresses, trousers and skirts constructed from reclaimed T-shirts, which they have called Mash Up World Wide. McMahon quotes research from Ghana’s Or Foundation, a charity established to seek alternatives to the often destructive processes of the fashion industry that encourage ecological prosperity. Ghana has become a dumping ground for the world’s unwanted clothes: 40 per cent of the millions of garments exported to Ghana end up as waste, fuelling an escalating textile crisis that is suffocating its environment. T-shirts account for up to 25 per cent of the second-hand clothing waste sent to Ghana from the Global North. “We’ll be showing the collection at Lagos Fashion Week in October, and in June Nordic Poetry in London will sell the line exclusively,” she says.

The two women pause to sit on one of their first projects: a curved sofa upholstered in salvaged denim, which furnishes a light-filled conference room in the Alero Olympio Design Center – a space named after the architect, who died from cancer aged 46 in 2005. The two-storey building contains ceramics, glass and visiting artist studios, alongside the main office and a large sewing space.

“Renée and I jointly designed furniture for this building,” McMahon says, pointing to a 9ft-long bright cerulean-blue “zigzag” table. Neblett flashes a smile. Tall, willowy and appearing much younger than her 77 years, she is wearing trousers from her six-year-old Wote collection composed of strips of textile-waste offcuts that recall a sportier version of Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please designs.

McMahon, a 38-year-old artist-designer who grew up among a family of artists and recalls making her own clothes as a teenager, graduated in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 before moving to New York where she began making furniture. There, she found herself increasingly involved in projects addressing social issues, including what she calls “the American landscape of waste” – the more than 11mn tonnes of clothing thrown out by the US every year. She now teaches part time at Parsons School of Design. Neblett believes McMahon’s holistic, maverick way of thinking is part of the future of Kokrobitey. “While I have collaborated with many other young people over the years, Elise is the most mature in her practice,” she says.

Neblett has lived many lives – all of which inform the raison d’être of the Institute. In the ’60s she was a student, a civil-rights activist and teacher in her hometown of Boston. By the ’70s, she was an artist, model and mother in Düsseldorf, Germany; in the following decade she was a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and taught art at Milton Academy, a Massachusetts boarding/day school. In 1989, Neblett visited the African Academy of Music and Arts (AAMA) in Ghana and had a profound experience as an African American. “There was no running water or even electricity but everything the locals needed was at their fingertips: they would hunt for crabs by the shore for a meal, dig up a root and make a tea from it, or steam the bark of a neem tree when they were sick,” she recalls. “It was then I realised that reading a book, while important, is a secondary kind of literacy. The most primal and critical literacy is to be able to read your environment.”

Returning to the US, “I realised I didn’t want to reduce myself to fit within the country’s narrow tract of race politics,” says Neblett, who was inspired to create a high-school programme that would enable American teenagers to spend a semester in Ghana. “Ghana is as important to American history as Jamestown,” she says. “I wanted to give students – Black and white – the opportunity to understand that Africa is the old world and to learn about its sacred cultural heritage.”

Neblett approached the architect Alero Olympio, then in her 30s, to help her conceive and build the campus with a socially conscious approach. “I told her I wanted to create a beautiful place for cultural and intellectual exchange and for people to learn and create things influenced by African narratives and traditional knowledge.” The campus references traditional Ashanti architecture: low-slung buildings of compressed earth bricks made from local red soil, shaded by overhanging roofs, and courtyards lush with medicinal and edible plants and fruit trees. The architect’s influence at the Institute is palpable. Says Neblett: “Alero planned the campus to descend to the sea, allowing the view of the distant horizon to leave one with a sense of endless possibilities.”

In addition to her collaborations with McMahon, Neblett is currently working on – with environmental researcher Hannah Riley – a new educational programme she calls “More than Just a Tree”, intended to teach young people environmental literacy. “The word for body in the Twi language [spoken by the Ashanti] is ‘nipa dua’, which literally translates as ‘human tree’,” Neblett says. “I learned early on here that a tree is like the arm of God. It gives you everything you need. The root, the bark, the flower, the seed – every part is useful. When I got malaria for the first time, they stripped and steamed me with the bark and leaves of the neem tree,” she says. “That was all it took.”

“It will take teams of people bringing all their strengths to the table to heal this world,” says McMahon. “It requires a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach, and Auntie Renée’s role as an educator has allowed her to support growing minds who will go into a range of fields informed by the ethos of the Institute.”