Notes from Berlin

So in terms of acceptance of self, where are you right now? Are you at the point where you’re like I am comfortable with who I am and what I stand for and what is that?

I am always comfortable with who I am right now, but I will never feel like I’ve reached the personality that I’ve wanted, because it’s changed so many times. Not the core of my personality, that didn’t change. But what I was interested in and what I was struggling with, and what I liked about myself and what I didn’t like, has changed, in my 20s, so often that now at least I can say I’m crazy, or I was psycho at this point. Maybe a little bit of a sociopath, but I am very okay with that. I can own it, and it doesn’t bother me anymore, when random people have some shit to say about me. I don’t worry about how I appear to people.

You are what you are and people are always going to take what they want.

Exactly, that’s where I have reached. It used to bother me so much as a teenager. I was really upset, I used to want to fight people for it… When I was younger I didn’t think about what consequences it had to speak badly about others. When you don’t know them or when it’s not constructive. It does something to people. If you want to talk bad about me and you don’t understand what that does to me and you, then you probably don’t have much respect for yourself, then I don’t want you in my life. That’s where I’m at. I don’t feel bad if our paths seperate, that’s totally okay.

That’s an interesting thing, in terms of perceiving it as someone actively disrespecting you, because it’s, I’m very big on empathy and trying to see it from their point of view, maybe sometimes the person doesn’t see it as disrespect, they just say things.

I don’t think you have to carry evil in your heart to be disrespectful. But if it makes me feel the way it makes me feel, I don’t want to manipulate myself into feeling differently, just so I can accommodate you. You might have not had the intention to hurt me but that doesn’t change the fact that it hurts.

I am not trying to push people away from me but I think that self care is crucial, and I think that it is a big part of self acceptance to not be influenced by the possible intention of others. I don’t have to think about your intentions. If I don’t trust you, if I cannot trust you with your words, I don’t have to trust you period. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, but it will mean you will not be in my life right now.

Friendships, relationships are not things that you have to make happen, you should have the privilege to allow happen. It can only happen when two people want the same thing, when they want the same type of relationship; when they want to give each other the same amount of respect and loyalty.

That’s completely fair.

Yeah just keep it fair.

Sometimes I look back like man you were wasting so much time.

Yes! And you drag yourself through a lot of damage, a lot of shit that causes a lot of damage. That, I at least, had to work on a lot in my twenties. I wasn’t nice to myself, not always.

Why?

I can’t say I had a rough time, but if I look back I am like you could have been way nicer to yourself. You could have taken better care of yourself.

How did you know this is what I have to do for me?

I think it was the last two relationships that I had, romantic relationships. [Laughs] They definitely got me there. I felt like after a while both those relationships, even though I had gotten older, I somehow slipped into a very similar pattern and then I figured out why that was and I realised if I don’t break this pattern… Obviously what happens in this pattern frustrates me, it makes me very unhappy and then makes me doubt my own sense of reality, and that’s really bad.

I think what happened was that I stopped seeking this ‘please explain it to me so I can understand why you’re an asshole’. That’s what stopped and I was like woo, new freedom. If I don’t see it, I don’t see it. I don’t have to understand it. The fact is I don’t like it.

What has music taught you?

I don’t know, did music teach me lessons? Writing and music had a similar effect, because you really like something and you can somehow turn this love you have for things inside out and get a positive response. You create a really good aura around it. It could have been something else but in my case it is music and writing.

How did you get into music?  

I was always, naturally, interested in music. My parents both make music, that’s their profession. Most of my family members happen to work as musicians, so i was kind of born into it. And I really like it, I really enjoy music and I am curious about it. It doesn’t stop, music is mind-blowing, there is always a reinvention of it.

What influences your writing?

My family a lot. My skin tone, definitely. The way I perceive myself, the way I think people perceive me. I think I have a look that isn’t classified into one group, I get a lot of different, weird perspectives from people. My complexion could be from anywhere. That is always very exciting for me, it’s a very interesting topic to me —how we look and what makes us different and what makes us the same. What are the parallels to other cultures, that influences it a lot. And as you’ve already heard relationships. [Laughs]

Is that something you think about mashing up the two worlds of writing and music?

Yes, I am working on it now. When I start working on something I am in the dungeon, no one can know [what] I am doing this, like a witch. Cause learning processes aren’t easy for me, I feel like I should be able to learn quick, then if I don’t, I’m frustrated.

When you picked which pictures to put out first, what was going through your mind?

I don’t know. It was a long process, because it was hard to say if what really touches me could touch someone else. It’s very personal. You looked at my website and it’s mainly people I know, very intimately, because I was with my camera all the time, taking pictures, moments, travels, nature time, parties. I [always] had [my camera] with me so people forgot it, completely, after a while. I was really inside, never imposing it. All the people around me took it really well actually. For me, it was very innocent. So, to choose, let’s say it was just accepting that showing something about you is not about trying to look nice, it is showing a part of yourself. That can touch everyone.

Then I tried to organise series. Normally, you have an idea, and then you go shoot it. I did it the other way round. For years, I did pictures without for one second thinking to show it to anyone but my friends. I had all this material, so I thought ‘Okay, what is actually important? What [is there]? What do I want to show?’ That’s where I began.

In terms of themes, what stories do you think your photographs tell?

It’s always a bit hard to say. Before you came, during the last days, I tried to think about it more precisely. I don't always decide everything, things happen by themselves. I take pictures, that’s it. I work with my instinct, ready to capture what I feel is strong or important or beautiful. I’m learning, and understanding what I do, what I like to do, and what I have to do little by little. It’s a lot of different stuff, that’s the way I am.

One theme is clearly intimacy. I feel that going deep into some people, without being brutal, just accepting the fact that this depth of relationships can make some sense, is very nice. When I see these pictures -- some people I know, some I don’t know -- it makes something emerge that I like in human nature. I think human beings are really fucked in many ways, I’m not such a big fan of this species that we are from, but a picture of someone looking strongly into the camera and a picture of a tree can really relate to the same thing. Which is a sense of life, the essence of life... and everything is forgotten. I think intimacy can bring that out.

There is a series about my girlfriend – I really hesitated to do it…

Why ?

I don’t know, because I didn’t want to annoy her, I didn’t want to expose that for a while. Then I understood it was not at all exposing. I don’t deliver the core secrets of it. But it speaks about every woman, every love, everyone. Love is also clearly a subject.

The beauty and secrets of what we call nature is another theme that moves me. I go [to enjoy] nature as often as I can. I didn’t always see it before, but when I look at the shots, it makes aesthetics, patterns, secrets or weird details show up. It is a lot about capturing a feeling in front or inside such elements. Looking at [those] pictures relaxes me. I can be nervous sometimes, and doing these pictures takes it down.

But there is also my relationship with the city. I was born in Paris, I am full of city. It also carries secrets - and can be fun!

One of my loved themes is, [obviously], Berlin. Many of my city pictures are taken here — first because I live here, because I love here and also because for me, this city, always, left space. Mental and physical space. Until now, it’s changing. When I look at my pictures of Berlin it speaks about the emptiness that we can find in this city, this desert in which you can lose or find yourself.

I am very sensitive to the way the world is. I can be quite dark about it but I believe in something better, and I try to capture, I guess, some kind of hope. In people, in nature, into what is hidden in there. Putting all these things together creates an image of the world that I like and want to share.

Decrees and decrees were promulgated by the military to keep us quiet, but poetry, because of its technique of indirectness, helped me. In fact, that was the time that I started publishing a poem every week in the Nigeria newspaper. People read the poems [and] liked what I was saying. The military queried me a number of times but they couldn’t detain me or put me in court because I didn’t mention anybody’s name. I mentioned names without mentioning names. Those moments gave me some uneasy pleasure if you like. 

Another moment came years later, Hurricane Katerina, 2005, met my family and me in New Orleans. We lost everything. We had 8 and a half feet of water in our house —I lost my manuscript, my books, my family lost everything. Then my wife and I nearly got drowned in our own bedroom. We had to go up to the attic, after two days, miraculously our neighbour came and boated us out. It took me six years to be able to write about it because I was having nightmares. Eventually, when I was able to write, I started feeling better. 

So poetry, for me, is not just something you do because you want to write, it is something I do to live. To live and to help others live. I consider myself lucky to have had this facility really. I say this all the time but for poetry, I probably would have run mad during the military dictatorship. I was close to it. We had to go underground, you hid somewhere and you wrote, it gave you an outlet because you knew other people were reading. Conscientisation was very important. Many of our people had given up. There is a poem of mine which is everywhere on the internet, ‘Not My Business’, I remember I wrote that poem during that time, about how people behaved toward tyranny. ‘As long as it is not me that is being affected that’s not my business’. First person said it, second person said it, until it was sustained. When they came for [them] there was nobody to say anything in [their] defence. 

What advice would you give young writers? 

Hard work! Writing is hard work. Don’t you ever be under the illusion that one day it is going to become easy; the more you write the harder that you discover it is to write. Why? There are certain things I could write and laugh [about] ten years ago, five years ago that when I write now I say this is not good enough. If you’ll be honest with yourself, the more you write, the more critical you also become. It’s good because it means you have outgrown the works you’ve done.

I remember my publisher wanted to do a new edition of my book and I was changing things, she said, “No. No No. This is already here, these have no grammatical errors, let’s leave this the way they were in 1985 or 1986.” It took me some time to really agree, but I was happy because that meant I had outgrown it. The only thing I tell my doctoral candidates [is], “If three months after you’ve submitted you PhD dissertation, you’ve not started discovering errors, it means you haven’t grown beyond it.” 

Self-criticism is very important. Thick skin. Don’t get too shirty, too anxious about criticism. Criticsm is good, as some people would say, ‘Criticism is manure. It smells very badly but it makes crops grow.’ 

You can not be a writer if you are not a reader. You must read voraciously, every aspect of human endeavour is legitimate province for the reader. Don’t say, ‘I am a writer, I am not interested in physics’, you should be. ‘I am not interested in space travel’, you should be, because these are all extensions of the human imagination, and you do create characters of all kinds. 

[Finally], humility. Don’t write one or two books and begin to go all over the place with your head up, saying ‘Don’t talk to me like that, don’t you know I am a poet?’ No. It takes time. I still don’t refer to myself as a poet, I don’t know, I am still shy because I know I am still learning. The terrible thing isn’t not knowing, it is not knowing and then not knowing you do not know. Knowledge cures self-presumptiveness, destructive ignorance. So read voraciously —newspapers, magazines, science fiction, mythology, religion, all of them are legitimate. 

What do you think about the state of Nigeria and how do you think that people can come out of it?

I don’t know, our country, Nigeria, [a] country we all love so much, but a country that is so abused. There is nothing we don’t have, except leadership. Our people have to learn to take their destiny [into] their own hands, by, one, turning themselves from mere subjects into citizens. 

There is a difference between being a subject of a country and being a citizen. Citizenship is a qualitative attribute, it means you are a person who knows your right, who knows what is due to you, who also put himself or herself in a position to criticise the leader and to say we are not taking this any longer. In Nigeria, we don’t have that yet. 

Why? We are too easily boxed up into ethic cages. Somebody steals my money, the money that should have been used for constructing roads, for building schools, putting medication in hospitals and so on, steals this money and everybody is shouting this is a thief. He goes to his ethnic enclave and people say, ‘Yes he is our son, he has stolen and so what. People in your own ethnic group have stolen too, what did they do to them?’ That is the kind of predisposition that breeds impunity. Impunity happens when people do things and there are no consequences. This is the problem with Nigeria. I can’t remember any prominent politician that has stolen our money and has been tried and jailed. 

A very important episode, there is a new organisation in my name, it is called, Niyi Osundare International Poetry Festival, they held the first edition in the University of Ibadan in May last year. The vice chancellor of Kwara State University was one of the keynote addressors, there and then, he said, “My university is bidding for this, it is going to be with us 2016.” Everybody slapped. He hit the ground running, set up a local organising community and they did a wonderful job, but one week before that festival was to take place on May 19th, I was in Sierra Leone, when he called me and said that some people were protesting that they should not host someone like me because I had written a poem to criticise Senator Saraki, their son. 

Now, what happened was that in June last year, that Senator Saraki moved from his party, which had just won the election, joined the opposition and they made him Senate President over night. That was not what his party wanted, he boycotted his party and went to the party that had been defeated and they made him Senate President. He didn’t go to his house, he didn’t allow anybody to know where he was, so he hid behind the Senate building. 10 o’clock when the place opened they rushed him in, within 10 minutes, everybody said ‘Yay’, that is how he became number three citizen in Nigeria. When I heard it, I felt assaulted and insulted as a citizen. I said ‘Nigeria has become a Banana Republic’, how can anybody do this? So I wrote a poem ‘Blue for the New Senate King’, which went viral. I must tell you when I was writing that poem I knew it would have consequences, I knew they might not allow this thing to happen, because he is a very prominent politician in Kwara State, where that festival was to take place, but I didn’t care a hoot. 

[The festival was relocated back to Ibadan]. That’s the price I [had] to pay for speaking out. I don’t mind. You can not be a martyr without dying. There is no glory without a sacrifice, as they say. I don’t have a martyr syndrome, but I know there are certain things you have to deny yourself because of public good.

[There is] a choice we have to make between courage and cowardice. It’s a lot of risk, asking questions and being a critical scholar or critical writer in Africa today, but some of us have no choice.

What were some of the highlights from the making of Each Other; the new record?

Aidan Knight: It feels like a long time ago because when we started to record it, it was at the end of 2014. So it was a long process, but what I remember of it was that there was a lot of positives and a few negatives. Kind of like with anything creatively inclined. You feel good about some parts of the recording, like you find a new sound or you find a new breakthrough and those always feel really good, and then you have to go through the process of listening to that breakthrough and you second guess whether it was ever good at all. So that’s kind of what all my recording process is. That’s really what I remember.

In terms of bringing the music to life, with video, how important is that for you as an artist?

I am pretty new to making videos for songs. One of my favourite bands is a band called, Wilco, from Chicago. They are a band who didn’t really make any music videos and I thought that was the way to go. Then you see ‘Beastie Boys’ and ‘Run the Jewel’ videos, I think there is a lot of interesting story telling that can go on with a visual video, that can go along with the music. 

What about Wilco inspired you?

Aidan Knight: I remember my parents had bought this CD, they had read about this band that charged a major label twice for the same album [A.M], which they thought was so cool. They brought this home, I was probably 16, I remember pressing play on this CD player and the first time I heard it, I hated it. [I thought ] all the vocals suck and everything [was] all scratchy and noisy, [but] as soon as I got to the last track, I started it back over again. [I] listened to it over and over again, until it became one of my favourite records of all time.

That’s kind of unusual, because if you hate a record you’re, kind of, like fuck this.

You have a limited amount of time to take in music and movies and art, theatre, everything. So I understand why people would give up. If someone listened to my music, and they are like, ‘I hate this’, I would understand if they never listened to it again. I would understand if they got to the end of the album and they didn’t press play, because there is a limited amount of time. But there is something to be said about challenging yourself on what you think about anything. So that was, for me, very important.

I traded the CD with another friend of mine in high school and he gave me this Canadian band called ‘Broken Society Scene’, which is another --sort of-- noisy [band]. These bands are not necessarily experimental but they are bending what is expected, which I like. That is more or less what I try and do. I try and take that spirit of bending something that’s expected into something that’s at least a little unexpected.

Speaking of expectations, how do you deal with that? Because once you put a record out, there will always be an expectation.

In my own --sort of-- personal life, I don’t thrive on confrontation, but there is a part of me that does thrive off confrontation. In that expectation of ‘he is just going to put out another album that’s like the first one’. The first one was folksy, the second one was more strings and horns and this one is a different, more direct direction, for lack of a better term. I think the next thing I make, if I get a chance to make it, would just be different or it will include elements of those things. The one thing I have to remember is that, as much as I want to make things that are different and new, there is always going to be a part of myself in things that I make. I can’t escape and I can’t mask the parts of myself that happen to get through this expression.

How much of yourself do you give to music?

Right now, everything is put into music. I don’t have much of a life outside of touring and playing and recording, but that’s what I really wanted to do. Ever since I started seeing really loud bands in really horrible spaces that my friend put on shows for. As soon as I saw that, part of me identified with that sort of DIY aspect of it. There is another part of me that identified with the performance and mystic of trying to become a musician, trying to be a person who can observe other people, and myself, and turn that into song. 

It’s funny because I am 29 now and when I first started focusing on the quote on quote ‘Adrian Knight project’, I was 20, so I have been doing this for ten years, and I am getting that feeling in my mind that’s like what’s next.

You want to progress. But you’re already progressing, you spoke about how different each project is. You’re still moving, so what do you mean what’s next? Are you talking in terms of the next album or whole new project?

Do you ever have this feeling like ‘what am I doing?’

All the time!

For me, the two sides that I see [are], I want to do something that is good for myself. Like I don’t want to do things that make me feel horrible about myself, no one wants to do that. I realise that I come from this place of privilege, that I get to do what I want to do, which is great. There is this other part of me that wants to do something that actually impacts and helps other people. I am not sure if that’s just other musicians or other humans. So I don’t know what I want to do next. I do know, without a doubt, that I love what I am doing right now but I don’t want to do this forever. 

What are some things you want to do before you get “old”?

I am not sure, because this is the only thing that I am good at. I do think that I am relatively good at playing music and keeping a fairly straight head while we tour and stuff. Like no-one has a really horrible drug addiction and stuff like that, I think we are all pretty reasonable, so I think if we wanted to we could probably continue to do this. 

What I’d like to do is something that aligns with the way I think about the world and the things I think are really important; which are food, art, family, friends. I could see myself trying to create a community of artists…I don’t know…maybe like a venue on a farm, that’s also a restaurant. I daydream about these things.

Aidan Knight was photographed outside Berghain. 

How did the Real Junk Project come about?

I was reading about the Real Junk Food Project in the UK and about Adam Smith and what they did and how they started, I found it very inspiring. I got in contact and asked if there was something in Germany, and he said, ‘No there is nothing yet, just do it.’. He was very encouraging.

What about the project inspired you originally?

I think it was the combination of food and activism. I loved cooking before that and I was reading a lot about the impact of food production on [the climate] and food waste. It was just the perfect combination of doing something useful and working with food.

What was the most shocking thing you found out in your research?

The numbers are quite shocking. The UN says at least a third of all food produced is wasted. If you then add it up in values it’s almost a trillion dollars a year that’s lost.

As we started with collected food, you see that it’s just food with a scratch that can’t be sold. It’s perfectly edible. Sometimes it is really heartbreaking when you go to the supermarket and it’s really good stuff.

It’s been about a year since you started, what has been the biggest learning curve?

There is a lot of logistics —you have to coordinate volunteers and arrange the food collection, which we do without a car at the moment —it’s a bit of a challenge but it works okay because public transport in Berlin is quite good.

A challenge at the moment is that we still have to figure our formal structure and found an organisation.

What do you want to do next?

It would be great to have our kitchen —a mobile kitchen or food truck. At the moment, we do pop up and we have to figure out if there is a kitchen there, that’s a bit of a challenge. Hopefully maybe we’ll find a space. 

What advice would you give people who wanted to cut down food waste?

Just be very conscious of how much you buy, maybe make a list of what you use —so it doesn’t rot in your freezer. Also don’t get scared by expiry dates.  If there is a spot on the fruit, you can cut it away.

The EPs are named after the seasons, which was the trickiest to write or what season had the trickiest songs?

I didn’t start with the concept of seasons, I just wrote songs. I wrote songs about a love affair that took a course over a year. Then it was like I am singing about ‘Cherry Blossoms’ (below) and [Roses & Wine], I thought I could chop this up into four sections and make it into EPs. I knew just releasing an album, as a new artist, is hard without anything coming before.

Splitting it up like that gave me a chance to enjoy each season. I think my favourite season to do was ‘Summer’, because I made a video using an old photographic technique called cyanotype. It was a lot of hard work but I did an exhibition in Paris with the photographs as well and it was summertime. It was really nice, that was one of my favourites.

You spoke about making videos, how important is the portrayal of your music? You seem to have quite a lot of control in terms of making the imagery.

I do get a lot of comments like ‘We can’t see you Alani, you’re just a silhouette’, or ‘Oh you’re so mysterious’. I didn’t even set out to hide myself. I was working with limitations because I did my videos on my iPad. I started off just filming myself, I was limited. So the way to make it more interesting was to use a shadow or something that wasn’t just me standing and looking directly at the camera. I work with people now on videos and I can actually walk and you can see my full body and stuff like that. It wasn’t a huge thing for me to have to reveal myself. I had the freedom or the control to do it the way I wanted to and that’s the way I did it.

What I am thinking is more about how important are images in telling the story?

When I started writing, I am very visual, it was a film in my head. I wanted to make a film; I wanted it to be like a silent film with just songs and acting and movement —no dialogue. So the visual side is very important. I did a film editing course so I could learn more about the process but my background is more photography, that’s where I learned or trained my eye. That’s why the videos are very simple as well, because it’s more about capturing a natural frame than ‘Oh look, she’s got the latest, I don’t know.’

Above video: ALA.NI’s Cherry Blossom.

The simplicity of it, I think, makes it beautiful and interesting.

Well, we hope that there is something beautiful in simplicity. –Laughs – There is beauty in simplicity, we hope still, even though there is so much choice. There is so much noise and chaos around us now. For me, a big thing, being a woman, is the over sexualisation of music. I am not trying to make a stand because I am happy with my body, I would quite happily show it off but I wouldn’t… I know I can use my body to sell my music but I don’t want to. That’s my choice and I will not let anyone convince me otherwise.

What is sad is I don’t think a lot of girls —young women —in this industry feel like they have that choice, because it is such a male dominated industry. It could just be that you do a photoshoot and you get five dresses, or five outfits to wear and the one where your tits are out, all the men go that’s the best one. And it’s not even your decision and that is how these things usually work. So yeah it’s been very important for me to know that no one is fucking with my shit.

In music, sometimes you’re not sure what’s the person and what’s the machine. With your work, it’s really beautiful and it feels, not necessarily controlled but it feels you. But then it can feel like the machine, because you’re not sure.

It frustrates me that there is not a lot of emphasis on everything but I do a lot of things so I can’t expect everyone to be able to acknowledge the fact. I want to, sometimes, be like I make my own fucking videos on an iPad.

I think that’s really good that you’re in a position that you feel in control or you have authority of what is happening with you.

I don’t think I could have done it any other way, to be honest. It’s a tough industry and if you’re a creative, if you’re an artist…it’s different. If I was just miming on a track, that’s different but that’s not why I do my art. I’d like to think that what I do is artistic and people would want to appreciate the art that I make, whether it is music, or a video or a photographic exhibition. It’s more about the world, like here is my little world, whoever wants to come in and join it please do.

The thing with writing or being creative is even if you have all the control, there will still be misconceptions.

Totally! It just takes one person to misquote you or take it out of context.

You come from a development background, how does it inform what you do now with Folkdays?

The whole business idea is very much based on that because I worked for Oxfam for two and a half years, then I went to work for a consultancy that concretes on the public sector. I had a lot of projects with the Ministry of Development in Germany. At the same time I saw, for myself, a very big gap in the sense of when I went shopping everything I liked wasn’t sustainable. And everything that was sustainable, I didn’t like.

So it was a little bit of a combination of my experience working in the aid industry and being fed up with the fact that dependency is reenforced all the time. People in a lot of developing countries make stupid decisions but only based on their knowledge of ‘if we do it like this we are going to get more funding next year’. If you give anybody, here or there, money and say invest it in a way you think is smart and I think the outcome is much better, and development can happen.

I also noticed on a lot of trips I took that there are still a lot of crafts around and high quality materials being produced. The combination of all these made me come up with the idea, then I quit my job.

What’s been the biggest learning curve?

It’s a really hard business model. I, kind of, did know that before but now I feel it every month. My personal biggest learning curve was becoming someone who is a boss herself, and being a good one. I am not sure if I have managed to be a good one but I’m on my way to getting there. That was personally challenging because I thought once I am a boss I’d do it well but then I realised I have to do this or that better.

Above image shows the Savor collection by Folkdays photographed by Patrick Desbrosses. 

For you what makes a good boss?

I think a good boss is somebody who puts total trust in the people that work for him or her, and also [someone] who bring the best out of their employees. Who give them self confidence and fun in their work —that creates the best results.

What are some of the things you focus on when you decide you want to stock a piece?

For one, quality is always super important, then the material itself —the raw material. I always try to plan my trips around material; when I want to source great wool I go to Bolivia and Peru, when I want to source silk I go to Cambodia and Laos. It has a lot also to do with who well you click with the people.

What are your thoughts on the current state of fashion?

I just watched part of this short film and someone in [it] said something like: Why fast fashion is so hard to get rid of is because we love reinventing ourselves all the time. It really fits well with our way of living and we try to do it via social media, but we can also do it with fashion. We can buy something new everyday or every single week.

Of course I find the fast fashion industry very difficult because they produce a lot of waste [and] in most cases they can’t really control the working standards their producers work under. From an environmental and social point of view, it is craziness. I think the sales in the garment industry went up 10 times over the last couple of years, there is this explosion of consumption. At the same time, I see a lot of alternative approaches never really make it to be scaleable. I don’t know we are still small, but I do think it is a scalable model and I think people who are against fast fashion, have to come up with way of producing cool designs in a good quality and not make it too expensive. There is still a big lack.

It’s great obviously to want to create something that good for the environment and people, who aren’t necessarily the consumer, but the reality is you need to talk about the consumer and the fact they don’t want to spend a lot of money. Not a lot of people can actually afford it.

There is the question of money, of course. A lot of people come here and they tell us you are selling your stuff too cheaply. We only do B2C; we don’t sell to other businesses cause that would reduce our margins too much. Because we do B2C we can give people prices that are not crazy.

What advice would you give to people who wanted to be more conscious in their consumption?

I think it is a good idea to ask yourself if you are actually happy, because the happier you are the less you consume automatically. I think it is important, not to be too judge-y on yourself, like ‘oh now I feel super shitty because I went to Primark and bought some stuff.

Speaking of how new things are popping up every week and fashion is fundamentally designed to be quick. How do you think sustainable fashion fits in in the industry? There are so many things that can make a label a sustainable label, how do you pick labels?

For the labels I pick for Rabenmütter, the basic thing is a gut feeling. First of all, you can read what they are saying and a part of it is based on trust because I can’t check out every label or supply chain. That’s impossible But I do believe you can tell by how things look and are presented.

The other thing is I don’t believe there is just not one truth that says when you are following that road that’s sustainable. It’s a mix, think about what you read and don’t just buy —buy less and choose what you buy —aim at quality. Also I think its really important to support smaller designers and smaller labels, and not aiming at super companies.

One of the issues I, personally have with sustainable fashion and the conversations being had is how people aren’t including the big labels. H&M seems to be the only one involved.

I do believe the discussion can be continued on different levels. I mean I don’t have the illusion that the whole industry is going to change and I have no illusion that the way people are involved with food or automotive, there are always going to be different groups of people. I only hope that it is not going to [remain] the niche.

You spoke about women who read Rabenmütter being interested in making changes to their consumption style but not knowing how to. What advice would you give them?

I really think it starts with the awareness. Food is a good example, I have two daughters, they eat meat, and the first time you tell them its an animal they are completely shocked. I think you can make the same comparison to clothes -what are you wearing and where does it come from?

So if you go into a store and something costs €1 or €5, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The platform focuses on women and you have cofounded a network, Hellow, for women. How important is that aspect? Because now there are a lot of conversations around gender equality and equal pay.

I wasn’t quite objective, because I am a woman. So I was interested in what does it mean for women, what does it mean for me, where can I shop. To protect myself not getting completely lost in online fashion, focusing on men, women and even children, I just primarily focused on women.

For Hellow, which is hopefully going to be launched in fall this year, we had the same discussion. It’s mostly for women, only women can be members of the network, but in the same sentence, every event we share, everything that’s happening because of the network is for both men and women. Networking is Networking. But we noticed, that it is given fact that where men are coming from —or women —the way they work or haven’t been working are different. You can’t compare those two and the way you communicate or speak to them is different.

It’s okay to have a niche. It’s funny because I am aiming for gender equality but a little voice in my head says it’s quite weird because I have Rabenmütter [and Hellow] which are only for women.

Once I was asked to be a part of an event on diversity, and while speaking to a man about the women’s network he asked why isn’t there a men’s network. I had to hold my tongue. There isn’t a men’s network because the whole company is male.

That’s a dangerous trap because when you’re not paying attention you’ll [get into] a discussion where you don’t want to be.

You’ve put together a book called, ‘Fashion Made Fair’, what was that process like…how did you choose which designers to feature?

That was not the easiest, because there are so many beautiful sustainable fashion labels right now. But you have a book with 192 pages and you have to decide which is the most relevant or which have the most outstanding concepts. My co-author Magdalena Schaffrin and I choose 33 labels worldwide which are outstanding in their design, concept and story. Amongst them are big brands like Vivienne Westwood and Patagonia, as well as small labels like Isabel de Hillerin from Berlin and Lemlem by Liya Kebede from New York. In addition we interviewed fashion experts like Bruno Pieters, Lily Cole and Michael Braungart.

What was the biggest lesson you learnt from putting the book together?

One of the biggest lessons was that the consumer has more impact than I knew before. Both Bruno Pieters, [founder of Honest by], and Orsola de Castro, one of the founders of the Fashion Revolution movement, told us that if the consumer ask in the shop; where the fashion is coming from, who made your clothes, under which conditions, it goes right to the top of the companies. They’ll know that people are interested, and they have to do something more for the social aspect and also in production.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the term ‘sustainable fashion’, there have been questions about it being more defined, or called something else because sustainability isn’t an attractive term. How do you feel about that discussion and what’s your point of view on it?

We discussed about the title of the book very often and very long with our publishing house. In the beginning, Magdalena and I thought, it would be better not to have wording like ‘Sustainable Fashion’ or ‘Slow Fashion’ or the like in the title, but they convinced us for them as a publisher, they need something that summarises what the book is about for people who are not as deep in the issue as we are.

Sustainability is such a word…it doesn’t fit [with] fashion because fashion, itself, is something that changes very often. So it’s a contradiction, to have sustainability on one side and fashion on the other.

Nearly none of the labels we talked to are happy with this labeling of ‘sustainable fashion’ or ‘slow fashion’ or ‘ethical fashion’ or ‘green fashion’ because they say it is just fashion. Orsola de Castro told us it would be good to do it the other way around, to name all unsustainable fashion, unsustainable fashion and sustainable fashion just “fashion”.

Since putting the book out who are some players doing interesting stuff in sustainable fashion that you’re watching?

There are so many. I guess during the last two/three years, the big fast fashion retailers like H&M [have been] doing lot about sustainability. If you say it is greenwashing or not, [that’s] a big discussion. The business model of fast fashion is not sustainable at all, but they are doing something and they have a big impact. If the big retailers are sourcing sustainable materials then the world market will follow. Maybe it’s not 100 per cent pure organic cotton that H&M sells but they have a big impact. They have a big impact in the discussion because people who normally [go] to the fast fashion retailers don’t think about sustainable fashion. But if they put it on the topics, they might.

I’m really interested in education and the empowerment of women and I know you’re a part of Intel’s ‘She Will Connect’. I wanted to know what brought about that partnership and how important is education and empowerment of women to you?

It’s huge! The collaboration came about because I actually have a background in engineering. In my former live, I was a Civil Engineer —designing and building roads, while I was writing poetry on the side. I knew I loved poetry and I wanted to make a life as a writer but engineering was something I was good at, and for the most part I enjoyed it, but it just didn’t feel like what I was called to do.

Intel reached to me because of that background, as well as my work in the arts. [It was about] how do we take a tech message and merge it with the arts so it is more interesting and more accessible. When I heard it was for women and girls I was like ‘where do I sign?’ because we are underrepresented and under appreciated. Particularly on the African continent. It was important for me to contribute.

For me, in my work with them, what I have seen is that it’s more than [just a tech conversation]. When you have a conversation with a young girl and say ‘You can be an engineer, you can be a computer scientist, you can be whatever you want to be’, something psychological happens. There is a confidence that is built up, that is what I am more interested in.

Do you think it is more about telling or showing them?

It’s telling, it’s showing. It’s all of it combined. You being able to repeatedly say to someone ‘You can. You can. You can’ and then showing them how they can.

I think that’s an important thing. It’s one thing to be like you can, then it’s another to say you can and this is how and these are other people who have done it. You can say you can do it, but then they go out there, into the world, and its slapping you in the face left, right and centre.

One of the things the program does well is it provides training opportunities for young girls. It is not just saying you can, it is connecting them with NGOs doing really important work in the tech space and saying ‘Hey, have you ever wanted to program a little robot? Here is how you do it.’ Pairing them with NGOs that do that work and allowing them to do hands on work. At the end of the training they have actually done something they can see. Then also reenforcing those ideas with images of women who have done it as well.

Part of the reason I am involved with the initiative is because I speak to women and girls one on one. That is important for me and important for them.

For an African child who studied science and wants to transition to the arts, how does that conversation happen?

I am a bit of a problem child. At the time when I left engineering officially, it was only a couple of years ago, I had sort of been working myself up to do it for some time. Poetry had become a big part of my life; I was teaching workshops in school, I had lived in South Africa for a few months at a writing residency, I had been invited to the Achebe Colloquium so I had performed for Chinua Achebe, and I had met Maya Angelou.

I say this to say that for my parents at least they were manifestations of things I had done that they could brag about. Which is very important to African parents. I think they weren’t too too surprised by the time I said listen I want to try.

One of the things I have learnt is that sometimes, when it is time for you to do something and you take the first step the universe responds with a bunch of different things, to re-enforce that you are doing the right thing, which is what happened with me.

What was the most surreal experience?

All of them. Aside from my fan girl moment when I meet these people, it is just realising that even as time has gone on, they have remained steadfast in their principles —who they are and what they stand for. So as I grow in my work, I am at the beginning of the journey, it is always in the back of my mind, being able to clearly define who you are and what you are trying to say. So when you look at your body of work, you can see the thread from start to finish. You can say she decided and she followed through. Of course, you are going to grow and evolve but generally at the core of who you are let your message but pure and let it be true. Maya Angelou in particular was one of those people who felt so true and authentic. In the work of becoming a better writer and a better person, I look to those people and think if I can be a speck of what they were, then I have done very very well.

You spoke [during the poetry talk] about how Nigeria influences your poetry, can you expand?

I was writing poetry about being Nigerian before I moved back to Nigeria. It was coming from a place, very far off. It was like looking at a place in the distance. The way you write about it is very different from what you write when you are living in it. Me moving back home was an attempt to write more honest, authentic and true place. Nigeria is a bed of inspiration. Some of the greatest writers of our time come out of that country and it is easy to see why.

There is something about our spirit that inspires poetry and literature. Trying to become a woman under the pressure cooker of living in Lagos is a very fascinating thing and it is an endless well of possible material -every day, all the time. I don’t know, yet, where my journey is going but I know a big chunk of my time living in Nigeria has left an impression on me, that has changed me. Changed who I am fundamentally and how I write and what I want to write about —what I think is important or relevant or useful.

You performed the ‘We are Ready’ poem for the inauguration of President Buhari, there is a line, which felt like a plea to the President and also God. I wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Poetry is interesting [because] people interpret it differently. At the time when President Buhari was elected, leading up to it, there was this contagious hope in the country. People were excited and thought that we had a chance as a country. Out of that came this #BabaNowThatYouAreThere, in this hashtag people wrote their wishes and hopes for the country –really heartbreaking and moving stuff. So me including that was a nod to those people and their wishes and requests. The entire poem was supposed to be a nod to those people and what had been expected of us and what we actually made happen.

In a sense it is me saying, remember the people who put you there —it is both a request and a silently veiled threat. It has a dual meaning in that sense, that the people are powerful and they now know that they have a voice.

The featured video of Titilope Sonuga reciting was shot during ‘kein shöner Land’ in Berlin. More of Sonuga’s work can be found online via titilope.ca.

Also special thanks to Jana at ‘kein shöner Land’ for organising this interview. 

So what role does or can Fillipa K play in that? [In changing the patterns of the industry]

It depends on how you look at it. We are part of an industry, we are part of a society, so we do play a really important role. How we produce our clothes affects, of course, the whole value chain going up stream. But it’s also about the values and aware we create looking at the customer and society as a whole. It is really important for us to work with both —how can we not only do better but do good in terms of production but also create awareness through being a part of these sort of things to create a dialogue with our customers and help them think in new ways.

How do you feel about the state of sustainable fashion right now?

There is so much going on. Most of the brands are really addressing these issues and working with them —there has been a big leap going forward, but at the same time we are still working in the same manner. It is the same, you know, system. We need that system change, I hope it’s going to come, but we are not there yet. This is a transformation and a learning process, we know there are a lot of solutions and techniques out there but the connection hasn’t been made yet. These kind of get togethers, collaborations, creative forums are really important because that can create those new connections that are needed.

You spoke about creating fantasy, is that something you do with music?

I think so. Maybe I didn’t think about it, but yeah, because I am always viewing things like that. So when I make [music] I am putting my world into a tangible form. It’s like magical realism. I am really into that genre of writing, where it is real life but it has a tinge of magic.

How do you balance both —fantasy and reality?

It varies on the song. A personal story is sometimes more universal even if it’s a personal story. If you read mythology, a lot of stories are about one character but for some reason it represents humanity. I am really into myths too and I feel that mythology is a way for us to relate to each other. So even if I am telling a personal [experience], I try to make it in a way that’s more a story, so people relate to it.

We’ve got to talk about misconceptions. On Controversial Confrontational you touch on the idea of misconceptions, so what are some of the misconceptions associated with you?

That song is funny cause the lyrics I feel them all the time. I’m not trying to be this, it is just what i mean. Sometimes when you say the truth it ends up being a controversial thing, even though it is the truth. If you lie and gloss it over people are happier...maybe [lying] creates more of an orange glow.

The fact that I would talk about what happened to me publicly [with Foxygen], a lot of people would be like don’t be negative, stop talking about it. That’s a misconception too; that you can’t be a woman who is angry about something. They act like I am not doing anything with my life -I am releasing an album, I’ve already written another one, I’m on tour, but somehow if I talk about something negative, [it’s] like do something with your life. I am a human with a spectrum of emotions. Just because I am angry about something doesn’t mean I am an angry person. I hate those misconceptions.

You spoke about Foxygen, how did that experience inform this one?

It just gave me a lot of insight into how the music world works. It made me more confident as a performer and now I know what to expect —now I am not that naive.