The making of fufu, a cassava delicacy of West Africa, entails teamwork. Even if you approach it as a duo, one of you will be pounding the starch with a large mortar and pestle while the other regularly folds the resulting dough for an even texture. There is a rhythm to the process, a synchronous energy that is cultivated alongside the hearty meal. For British-Ghanaian designer Giles Tettey Nartey, this humble activity deserves reverence.

His Communion project, part of an ongoing series called Artefacts of Ritual, presents a sculptural setting for the making of fufu, with integrated stools, mortars and pestles. Soft, sensual and seemingly moulded in plastic, it is actually crafted in black-stained American maple — a stunning work of furniture-architecture that conveys deep symbolism.

Part of Wallpaper’s Class of 2024 exhibition at the Triennale di Milano, the piece continues Nartey’s PhD work, which focused on West African domestic practices that have often been viewed and presented through a colonial lens, and was inspired by a childhood trip back to his parents’ native home in Ghana. He cites the diasporic mode of reimagination — how, often, people in diaspora rewrite home — as an impetus for elevating this commonplace practice into something beyond the everyday. “For me, what’s really interesting are the gaps that are filled — that’s what really celebrates it, or evolves it. That’s always stuck with me: this idea of the fragments of a distantly remembered dream.”

While exalting the quotidian — making it “grand, bigger, surreal” — Nartey is also employing an aesthetic language that draws from the local and specific: carved objects and ornaments and skin scarification. “I like to think of my pieces as, in a way, an extension of the skin,” he says. “That’s why you have these bumps, nodules, dips, grooves.” 

That connection to the human element follows through in how the object is activated. For Nartey, performance completes the project — and he has made a film, another critical aspect of his practice, to bring Communion to life. “You need humans; you need it to be used,” he explains. “When 10 people are pounding, it becomes a dance, it becomes a performance.”