Synthesis is a collaborative studio project between Nubuke Foundation and Studio Digital Native, a BA design studio at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Rooted in mutual inquiry and creative exchange, the project invited three artists based in Ghana to submit a material-based artwork or concept. These submissions became starting points—provocations—for a cohort of design students in Eindhoven to imagine speculative digital environments that respond to the materials' form, meaning, and memory.
Over the course of the studio, students engaged with the materials as portals—reinterpreting them through game engines, 3D modelling, and immersive media. Their digital responses reflect not just technical skill, but thoughtful and often surprising ways of rethinking how we engage with heritage, symbolism, and storytelling in virtual space.
At Nubuke Foundation, this exhibition presents the original works of the artists—Jeremiah Obuobi, Frederick Quansah, and Nyahan Tachie-Menson—in dialogue with these student responses. Alongside the physical installations, a video work on view in the gallery captures key moments and outcomes from the students’ digital explorations. This moving image installation expands the conversation—inviting visitors to witness how materials shift, evolve, and transform when reimagined through another context, culture, and generation.
At the heart of Synthesis lies the concept of worlding otherwise: a speculative design approach that challenges dominant ways of seeing and invites us to imagine alternate, co-existing futures.
Jeremiah Obuobi presents a 3D-printed Dogon mask fabricated in PLA bioplastic—a sustainable material that carries forward the spiritual and cosmological significance of the Dogon people of Mali, especially their deep knowledge of the Sirius star system. By using contemporary digital design tools to remake a sacred form, Obuobi builds a living bridge between ancient insight and new material possibilities.
Frederick Quansah offers a work composed of Louvre glass and sellotape—two humble, everyday materials that together capture the fragility of memory. Through image transfers, transparency, and layered textures, Quansah evokes the tension between presence and absence, holding and letting go. His work invites close looking and a deeper awareness of the materials we use to preserve what matters.
Nyahan Tachie-Menson contributes My Heart is a Cage, a biomorphic sculpture built on the shape of a heart and rendered in acrylic over bisque clay. Inspired by anatomical forms—bones, veins, arteries—the piece envisions a speculative future in which the object behaves responsively, reacting to omens or presence through movement, color, and protection. It imagines a body that senses beyond the physical.
Together, these three material works form a constellation of artistic inquiry—each rooted in Ghanaian experience, each projecting outward into imagined realities. Through the digital translations offered by the students of Studio Digital Native—and now brought to life through a video installation—the works are given a second life: one that unfolds in motion, space, and interactive form.
Synthesis invites viewers to consider:
What does it mean to carry memory into new dimensions?
How do ancestral ideas shape our futures?
And what becomes possible when the physical and digital, the spiritual and speculative, are placed side by side?
This exhibition marks the first in Nubuke Foundation’s Nubuke+ series: a new strand of programming that creates space for emerging voices, experimental formats, and timely ideas. Nubuke+ reflects our commitment to expanding the ways we support artists and thinkers working at the edges of form and meaning—locally and globally.
Synthesis was made possible through the generous collaboration and support of Studio Digital Native at Design Academy Eindhoven.