LIMBO ACCRA is a fresh-thinking, architecture-infused spatial design studio, offering an extensive and flexible outlet for experimentation in public art, design, and architectural production. Much of its work emerges from research and interdisciplinary design projects, rooted in aesthetic and cultural innovation relating to unfinished, decayed concrete structures in West African cities.
Thadiwe interview
LIMBO ACCRA was co-founded by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip as a response to the massive urbanisation Accra, Ghana, has undergone; the widespread changes have left a number of buildings in a state of structural limbo. LIMBO ACCRA’s aim is to turn these buildings into spaces for creatives, especially among Ghana’s youth. Through the work of Petit-Frére and Emil Grip, many of these public spaces have been used to host art exhibitions featuring diverse contemporary African art mediums. Petit-Frère says she wants to repurpose unfinished concrete structures into hubs for innovation and prompt conversations around imagining what cities can look like in the future. The team and its collaborators engage in projects ranging from waste to photography to film to spatial design.
What led to the founding of LIMBO ACCRA?
There is a renaissance that's happening. It's a divine time, and Africa, or at least west Africa, is experiencing a high rate of modernisation. We have this influx of the diaspora returning, and we have these capitalist elites that are exploiting our resources. Driving through our cities, there are a lot of commercial activities. Also, in west African cities there's a lot of disparity between the social classes, so you have the local, traditional way of living next to all these mega mansions, super fancy condos, and luxury estates. In this spectrum, you also have a lot of uncompleted buildings or properties that have never had occupancy. There are three major gaps reflected within the built environment in the process of Africa getting to where it is. So for me, LIMBO was a response to an urgent call brought on by what I described. It was important to ask, 'What are our intentions in building the future of the city, of this country, and of this continent' 'What are we actually building?' 'Are we just coming here to live in luxury apartments, or are we coming here to actually do the work?' I'm trying to have a conversation about what it is that we're actually building from an architectural and socialist perspective.
LIMBO ACCRA is art meets curation meets architecture meets urban research. Help us wrap our minds around the complexity and sort of broadness that is your platform?
It's basically encapsulating a modern city. You need all of those facets. I'm originally from New York City. I come from a space where I've inherited a city, a city that's been thriving and existing for over a century. I'm sure you know we had different periods like the rolling 20s, the Harlem Renaissance, hip hop, funk, and house music. The city has been beating for so many years, and I've been inspired by that. The accumulation of all those facets of creativity is kind of fostered within this space, and as much as we touch on different disciplines, such as art, such as curation, and so forth, those are just some soft power tools to be able to communicate the larger picture, which is our built environment, which is the architecture of our spaces. They are more or less playful elements to speak to what architecture brings to audiences.
The discipline of architecture has been closed off from the rest of the world for many years. You need to cross many barriers or prereqs to be deemed an intellectual when it's actually something that is humane—when you go to sleep, you go to sleep in some form of shelter, when you wake up, you're waking up in some form of shelter, you're eating, you're bathing, you're going to a shop, whatever commerce that you're doing is in a built system. Architecture is for the people, and the idea is to use these playful elements of art, curation, and urban research to speak to that larger discipline which is the African youth.
What is LIMBO ACCRA’'s mission?
It is to create accessible public space for the modern African city and to democratise space in the modern African city because spaces have been developed in a privatised way. The idea is to create this playful energy within the built environment by using architectural practices.
The city of Accra is ridden with incomplete urban development projects and architectural structures. What do you think accounts for these unfinished structures?
A lot. I would say the big thing is failure. People fail to conduct proper land surveys to know if what they're trying to build is suitable for that space. This can be seen in the La Beach Towers in Labadi; they're building on the coastline, and they found out that there is a lot of water that is entering the foundation, so the structure is weak. Secondly, people underestimate their construction budget, so when they run out of money, construction stops. It takes time for people to save money and get loans to continue projects. You can have sites just sitting for 10 to 15 years until the property owner is ready to finish the work he or she started. Lastly, in our research, we're discovering a lot of these sites and construction projects are fronts for money laundering. Scammers and crooks are trying to launder their money by building luxury apartments that many people, including myself, can't afford. There's a gap. Where's the affordable housing? Where's the fairness? Where's the justice within our spatial environment?
What does the term afropocencia mean?
My partner and I are interested in this idea of the anthropocene—the age of humans and how humans dictated the trajectory of Earth and all its resources and its livelihood. Afropocencia plays with this ideal and places a focus on the African continent, asking the question 'What does the influence of African beings have on our built environments and our spaces? We're specifically looking at black bodies within urban city spaces.
Tell me about designing Freedom Skatepark, the first skatepark in Ghana.
When we started LIMBO in 2018, we started it as a huge activation in an uncompleted property. We invited nine contemporary artists here in Ghana, and as part of the activation, we thought it would be cool to have skaters skate in the space. That's where I got into contact with Sandy Alibo.
However, when you're operating within an uncompleted property, it's quite chaotic, and there's a lot of construction debris that lingers around. We couldn't ensure the safety of the skaters, so we agreed to collaborate and to continue to keep in touch. A year later, in 2019, she reached out to me telling me that she's been working on this project of building a skatepark, and at the time, she had no partners. We were able to create this master plan and kind of plug people on the different parts to which the construction should be executed. We were also collaborating with the late Virgil Abloh on designing the actual built space so the interior and other parts that will come like the WiFi cafe. It's quite cool because, again, what we do and represent at LIMBO is this idea of you using architecture as a tool to collaborate with others and create the spaces that we have in our minds of how we want to collectively come together under different creative practices. It's quite cool that you can do that through buildings.
It's evident that in order to sustain growing populations, new structures must consistently sprawl out of nowhere in city centres like Accra and Kumasi. What do you think is the right way to urban develop or city-plan these centres?
There are many avenues. Our priority is this idea of creating public space and making sure that it's felt throughout the city. I'm speaking from a crop perspective, because what me and my friends or young people in the city can do is really just converse at bars and cafes and restaurants and maybe some elitist galleries. We're a capital on the coast of a beach line, yet, we can't even access the only public space that's here, the beach. Yes, we can sit on it and look at the water and whatnot, but if it was clean and tropical, then you wouldn't need to create all these parks or green spaces or recreational spaces in the city. The idea is for us to use these different knowledge systems to come up with how we actually build for our generation and the next generation to come. My answer is to be fair, to be intentional, and to be considerate of the wider population and not just the group that's making money in the city.
LIMBO ACCRA's mission lends itself to being quite expansive. Incomplete buildings as a result of urbanisation are not solely found in Accra or Ghana. Do you have plans to expand outside of the region?
Yeah, of course. That's kind of the ongoing engagement that we have on our social media platforms. We call it the 'Limbo' series, by which we connect with different urbanists, architects, photographers, creatives in different cities in Africa. From Abidjan to Marrakesh to Lome to Botswana, we've been able to amass a community of people who constantly send us photos saying that on their walk, they've seen a site in limbo in their city. We definitely want to activate these structures and spaces continent-wide and also across the globe. This is not a phenomenon that's just isolated to one crowd––this is global. There are legit cities that are incomplete in China. There's even a term coined Phantom Urbanism that speaks to this kind of urbanism that's just ghostly.
What plans do you have to grow the platform?
We're working on a few projects. We had an architectural dinner event in December, and we just launched a design competition in collaboration with an industrial design studio in Lagos, Nigeria. The design competition is to really foster the next generation of product designers and create design solutions for the home and the public space. We're working on a few residential projects, an art gallery project here in Accra, and the construction of a design school. These projects speak to the creative renaissance that we are engaging in.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.