Left The buildings are designed to minimise the need for electricity, instead maximising daylight and ventilation through the optimal arrangements of skylights and windows


SCHOOLS 103


CASE STUDY IBRAHIM MAHAMA’S RED CLAY STUDIOS


When you see something that needs doing, there’s nothing like being able to raise a spare million or two to sort matters out. Luckily, as an established star of the global contemporary art scene, Ghana’s Ibrahim Mahama was able to put his hands on the $1m required to buy six decommissioned planes for his Red Clay Studios arts hub and technology education campus in Tamale, northern Ghana, which opened in 2020. These he has now repurposed as classrooms, arranging for free lessons to be given in physics, computer science, basic engineering and creative thinking for local schoolchildren. Mahama also funds the buses that bring them – and their parents – to the facility to see what’s on offer (there’s nothing like recruiting parents to your mission early when opening up children’s horizons). The studios are packed out during the school term – as many as 2,000 pupils a week – and the planes are also used for film screenings. Mahama estimates that Red Clay Studios has around 100,000 visitors a year. The reuse of industrial


equipment to inspire new inventions is both poetic and appropriate, given that Mahama has made his name by using salvaged colonial-era materials (from jute cocoa sacks to decaying school furniture) to create his own architectural-scaled installations that interrogate the political ambitions and failures of past governments. And so far, most of the proceeds from Mahama’s work have been reinvested in the blossoming arts education infrastructure he has in mind for northern Ghana. It was with his first sale – to Charles Saatchi, in 2014 – that he decided to convert any profits into a building, on land that his father had set aside for him


in Tamale. Originally intended to be his studio, that building turned into the two-storey Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), completed in 2019, an exhibition and research space that showcases new artists but also those from Ghana’s past whose collections and reputations were in danger of vanishing due to lack of institutional archives and resources. He says: ‘There was a gap in the system that needed to be filled. There were no institutions for the younger generation of Ghanaians to connect to the work of older generations – in engineering, architecture, textiles.’ All of his buildings are designed to minimise the need for electricity – a very unreliable resource in Ghana – instead maximising daylight and ventilation through the optimal arrangements of skylights and windows, and are mostly constructed from local, sun-baked clay bricks.


Mahama credits his tutor, Professor Karî’kachä Seid’ou, at Kwame Nkrumah University where he studied for his BA and MFA, for the original inspiration. He tells FX: ‘He is a Marxist and he always talked in class about the way art needed to go beyond the idea of the object. We needed to find ways in which we could disseminate art. It’s not so much about what you produce, but about the relationships that are created in the process when the object comes into being. That’s where my interest in building institutions and communities came from. If you say you are an artist and you want to make or create something, does it have to be a commodity that someone has to buy, or can it be more like a community or an institution that can disseminate art a lot further?’


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