Limbo Design

Founded by Dominique Petit-Frère in Accra, Limbo Museum is a contemporary institution dedicated to art, architecture and design in West Africa, housed in a 10,000 sqm unfinished concrete structure on the University of Ghana campus. In 2026, the museum launches Limbo Design, developed and presented in partnership with Studio Marant, with Emily Marant and Dominique Petit-Frère sharing its curatorial direction.

Limbo Design launches in Tamale, Ghana, with Ground Conditions, a conversation series around material, process, culture and sovereignty. Its first edition invites Ibrahim Mahama and Nifemi Marcus-Bello into dialogue on contemporary design practice across West Africa.

Limbo Design is cultural infrastructure through which questions of materiality, making by hand, industrial capacity, ownership, West African design, contemporary aesthetics and access are investigated in practice. It is an evolving ecosystem, designed to create conditions in which practitioners can meet, and to help support, document and circulate what communities already know and make.

Limbo Design is a platform that gathers existing documentation through research into available data, institutional partnerships and knowledge sharing. This resource is enriched with content created along the way, by building bridges between practices, sparking dialogues and documenting what is missing.

Limbo Design is a network, a place to connect designers, architects, artisans, makers, researchers and cultural practitioners with the wider creative and building community, from West Africa and beyond. It creates opportunities for residencies, mentorship, research, exchange, collaboration and experimentation.

At its core is a design circle of makers, creatives and practitioners: the Baba Tree Master Weavers of Bolgatanga, architect Mariam Kamara (atelier masomi) with Yasaman Esmaili (Studio Chahar), Tosin Oshinowo, Lesley Lokko, Maison Intègre, Samuel Ross and Yinka Ilori. The ambition of Limbo Design is to create a tool to educate and inform future talent by making this archive available to scholars and to everyone who wishes to know more about West African design and craft. Limbo Design is building a network that starts locally and regionally, across West Africa, while creating pathways towards wider international design conversations.