Afaina de Jong
Afaina de Jong is an architect and researcher with a diverse practice which ranges from design and curating, to community organising and graphic design. She is an early pioneer in self-initiated architecture in the Netherlands, who describes her interest in the conditions of urban living as influenced by the experience of growing up in Amsterdam in the 80s and 90s, “when it was full of punk, squatting and grafitti“, while projecting a unique vision of the future.
In an interview published by DAE, De Jong describes her work as an intersectional feminist design practice which strives to bring forth change. “We have to let go of the idea of the universal user, which is an outdated modernist idea in a time when our identities are super complex. (…) It’s important to cultivate the power of the imagination and narrative.“
As a designer, De Jong is interested in deciphering and deconstructing given contexts and questioning positions through praxis. “If we take our ‘givens’ for granted, we assume what reality is, and then don’t even see or can’t even value something that is outside of that context, because we do not have the tools for it.“
De Jong describes her vision for the Master Contextual Design as the generation of spatial awareness and public contexts, which would necessitate a revision of our positions and power as designers, and recognise the relationships between objects and space, power, identity, ecology and history. “Once we recognise the layers that lie beneath the ‘givens’, these all start to inform the creation of new design languages.“
With a strong interest in the complex relations of people and their environments, De Jong has worked with the Japanese think tank Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living in Tokyo, and later with Rem Koolhaas at OMA/AMO in Rotterdam. In 2005, De Jong founded the Amsterdam-based architectural agency AFARAI and followed her interest in “spaces, subcultures, identities and communities that are normally not physically represented in formal architecture“ through spatial experiments situated within the art and design world. With her practice, she works towards facilitating a more inclusive experience of space using form languages, colors, patterns and narratives which are commonly othered, while integrating theory and research.
She has been active as an educator at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, The Sandberg Instituut and ARTEZ and has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University in New York, KTH in Stockholm and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
In 2021, De Jong presented her design research ‘The Multiplicity of Other’ at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. ‘The Multiplicity of Other’ re-evaluates and reconstitutes the dominance of a single-sided perspective on the design of our everyday surroundings, identifying the rich multiform human presence as fundamental.
Photo by Laila Cohen