Mami Wata x Pieter Hugo
A photographic creative collaboration.
Our Spring Summer ‘22 lookbook was photographed by renowned South African photographer Pieter Hugo.
Hugo, who lives in Cape Town, is a sometime surfer himself. His work straddles fine arts and commercial photography. Hugo is renowned for his powerful and unsettling portraits, often of outsiders or marginalized people and cultures. He usually photographs them in a way that unsettles unconsidered, voyeuristic ways of looking. A recent solo exhibition of his portraits at Rencontres d'Arles in France, titled Being Present, explores atypical ideas of beauty. His work is included in the collections of institutions such as MOMA NY, the V&A, Centre Pompidou and the Rijks Museum.
Hugo has recently shot fashion features for the likes of New York Times magazine and the US editions of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He has collaborated with brands including Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta and Hood By Air.
The SS22 lookbook, the brand’s creative director Peet Pienaar explains, explores the concept of distortion and reflection using trick mirrors (and occasionally digital manipulation).
The concept of the collection has its roots in an animist way of relating to the world, especially as it informs surf culture in Africa. When Mami Wata produced Afrosurf, an astounding coffee-table book that assembled and documented the stories of surfers and the details of the various surf cultures in 18 coastal countries around Africa’s coastline, many African surfers testified to a spiritual connection with the ocean. Some African surfers relate to the ocean in a particularly animistic fashion. Animism involves understanding and relating to inanimate objects or entities – such as the ocean – as a sentient being possessing human qualities, such as a personality or a soul.
The design of the SS22 collection takes as its starting point the way in which animism in contemporary West African cities influences graphic design. In the Senegalese city of Dakar, for example, it is not uncommon to see images of eyes adorning buses and motorcycles to indicate a humanized or spiritualized conception of them. Mami Wata’s designs build on and extrapolate such prompts they find in animistic-inflected visual cultures.
The image of the eye in various permutations is central to the Mami Wata SS22 collection, as are various graphic representations of dice, which indicate luck, a proxy for an animistic sensibility. The collection’s slogan is, “Luck is Alive”.
Speaking of the concept behind the use of distortion and reflection in the photo shoot, Pienaar explains that it is a way of representing how, as a surfer, you might “see yourself within the ocean”.
“It’s almost as if seeing yourself reflected in a wave transfers a kind of sentience and a spiritual quality to the idea of a wave,” he says.
Distortion also conveys a sense of movement and transformation, which relates to the spiritual effect the ocean has on many African surfers.
Pienaar also points out that mirrors have a strange kind of power in all kinds of contemporary cultures: It’s where you go to “see yourself”, as he puts it. Mirrors reveal an image of ourselves, but simultaneously take us out of our bodies. Distorted reflections, such as those we see in circus mirrors, further complicate the idea of a self-image or reflection. We find ourselves transformed and defamiliarized, not unlike the way surfers might find themselves in the ocean, but somehow transformed.
Follow the conversation between Pienaar and Hugo in which they discuss visual culture, the relationship between art and fashion, surf culture, popular culture and their creative processes. Read more here.
