Sharjah — Anne-Lise Agossa

_{research, concept, spatial design, photos and all drawings are by Anne-Lise Agossa for Limbo Accra}
_{textile design by Super Yaya}

_{Super Limbo. 2023}
_{Sharjah Architecture Triennal}

_{Commissioned by Limbo Accra
as Lead designer in collaboration with textile designer Super Yaya}

_{curated by Tosin Oshinowo}

_{How might liminal spaces in the form of deserts and unfinished buildings, help us approach South-South relations ?

Linking my ongoing research in Sahelian desert cultures with Limbo’s ongoing archive of unfinished buildings and their activation, I was commissioned by Limbo Accra to design Super Limbo. It is a public architecture intervention and installation that stands as an eloquent response to incomplete building projects in Sharjah through the occupation of Sharjah Mall. Our challenge is to transform this building into a symbol of abundance, reversing the stigma of unfinished buildings, from symbols of desiccation, into spaces with untapped potential.

Drawing on my environment in Bahrain where I spent most of the year, where unfinished buildings were often elegantly and poetically draped with fabric, as well as pulling from my research on the significance of storytelling in desert cultures spanning West Africa to the Middle East, and its ability to invoke imagery, our pavilion is soft yet impactful. In order to communicate through monumentality the capacity of oral tradition to design spatial imagination, this vision is manifested through the creation of spatial softwear.

Billowing, hanging and draping, the multiple layers of curtains connected together by attaching onto existing or added hardware structural elements create pockets of space for people to inhabit and interact in direct proximity with, contrasting the delicate nature of fabric with the brutalist quality of this monumental unfinished structure, as well as mitigating the monumental scale of the site and the intervention with the interaction of the fabric with the body. Having long wanted to work with fabric manipulation as space-making, Super Yaya was the most obvious choice, itself embodying the duality of a West African and Middle Eastern identity. Over many months, Super Yaya designed the beautiful yards of draped calico cotton, its interlacing and push-and-pull, much of which was also done on site during the install. They brought a unique vision to the project that translated its poetic intentions in the most impactful way. The curtains themselves were fabricated in Pakistan by a skilled team of 20 women.

As in the Mushaira, a space where poetry and stories actively live, our pavilion becomes a collaborative exercise with visitors, inviting them to create their own stories and develop a unique relationship with the shell of Sharjah Mall.}