In The Viral Aesthetics of Poverty, Jon Jacobsen captures how makeshift public and domestic objects – from a Yeezy Foam Runner toothbrush holder to plastic-bottle “lightbulbs” – stand out against mass-produced product design. These chimera-like objects, born from necessity, fuse unlikely materials and functions together to reignite usefulness and increase their users’ chances of survival.
Ironically, the same environment eroded by discarded plastics and carbon emissions from fast-objects is also where intuitive folk-design and folk-architecture emerge, giving everyday items new destinies.
Angolan interdisciplinary artist Sandra Poulson explores this same logic of necessity through her installation Hope as Praxis. For Poulson, hope is the fundamental resource for progress in Luanda. Her work features fabric-coated plastic chairs at every stage of collapse – broken legs, bent backs, fully unusable frames. These disposable garden chairs, designed for replacement, are instead adapted and stitched together, extending their life well beyond planned obsolescence. Each patched chair embodies the hopeful phrase espera condição – “waiting for conditions” – where survival and optimism become inseparable.
Recently in Cairo’s Zamalek district, which I wrote about on my Substack Soft Systems, I noticed makeshift stools, chairs and tables made from cement blocks, scrap wood and discarded furniture, all with a Frankenstein-like quality. Most visible was the iconic monobloc chair, which appeared on nearly every street. Designed to last only months, the chair is continually revived and reimagined, serving as an anchor for Cairo’s street culture and social life.
Architect Shahed Saleem calls this kind of practice “folk-architecture”: spaces and objects created through local intelligence, vernacular materials and communal effort. In Cairo, authorship disappears entirely. No designer, no blueprint, no brand deck – just the cultural imperative to keep the streets social. That imperative becomes the instruction manual, creating new uses for existing objects.
Where The Viral Aesthetics of Poverty emphasises necessity as the mother of invention, what I saw was creativity, anonymity and social impact. Egyptians are poetic, hospitable and wired for connection. Unsurprisingly, they create improvised “systems” that sustain these values.
One such example is the spotaya – when young people transform cars into impromptu third spaces, parked along informal streets to prolong nightlife into the early hours. The vehicle is less important than the culture of togetherness it enables. (It’s also a meme at this point.)
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