Frauke Stegmann
—
Recently I travelled through the south of Namibia with an anthropologist/archaeologist, through a landscape that consists of nothing else but miles of long stretches of gravel planes, some grass shrubs, and indigenous/endemic trees growing in the dry riverbeds.
Walking along the rocky fields, the archaeologist picked up a few of the stones and noticed that they weren’t just stones, but in fact ancient tools that have been lying untouched for perhaps the past 100,000 years.
In an ancient pristine landscape like the Namib (the Namib desert is the oldest on Earth) you would imagine it unreservedly untouched.
I can’t tell you the strange sensation of realising that the last person that might have stepped on the same plane that I was on, did so 100,000 years ago. It felt as if I was looking deep into the past, and that perhaps on a personal level, not a lot had changed, perhaps ‘they’ had similar fears, hopes and struggles as I/we have today; that maybe technology had evolved and different standards of living, but, emotionally, maybe we are still in a similar place. Maybe that is our link to the past and the future.
In that moment I took a piece of charcoal which I picked up at the campsite where we camped, and wrote eight words on eight stones:
ok/become/useless/dirty/short/will/uneven/ordnung
I left them lying there.
I am not sure.
—
Namibian-born, with utopian ideals, Frauke Stegmann initially studied communication design in Mainz, Germany before heading to the UK to study for an MA in Communication, Art and Design at the Royal College of Art in 1998. Having worked briefly at David James Associates on Prada and Miu Miu, then freelancing for a variety of fashion clients, Stegmann is now based in Cape Town, South Africa where she continues to work for almost exclusively European clients, as well as fiercely independently on self commissioned and humanitarian welfare projects.
She works from the kitchen of her mother’s and sister’s food shop in Cape Town as silent protest against the strangely hierarchical class system that seems to be eerily prevailing in south african society; she has come to believe firmly in parallel economies as an option of self sustainability in Africa – from growing your own vegetables in your garden, making your own pots and plates for your house, building your own house from found materials, participating in the economy via a parallel economy.
She also self-publishes an abstract communication device “The Country Feels Lonely Without You” which functions as an ‘inspirational’ hand-out for children’s educational programmes in South Africa.
Her vision is to set up a workshop that perhaps works without electricity – craft, book binding, letter press, old printing techniques, setting up a type of design school in Namibia for the people, for the community. If you are interested in supporting the development and integration of such a project, please contact Frauke, she would love to hear from you. Frauke believes that the future in Africa also lies in its deep-rooted identity and history of traditional crafts.
www.ineedtimetothinkaboutwildlife.org
—
