Name Kossi Aguessy | ||
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Kossi Aguessy ( KossiGan Baaba-Thunde Aguessy ) is a Togolese and Brazilian industrial designer and artist.
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Biography
April 17, 1977, April 17 2017 Lomé, Togo, Aguessy studied industrial and interior design in the United Kingdom, at the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. He lived and worked in the United Kingdom, the United States and France. Kossi passed away in Toulouse, France in mid April 2017 in an apparent act of suicide.
Independent since 2004, he had collaborated with the StarkNetwork in Paris before establishing his self-named studio in Paris, France, in 2008, while assuming in the other hand the art direction function for the London-based Pan-African television channel Vox.
He had therefore designed the visual and broadcasting identity of the media.
In 2008, his Useless Tool, a chair manufactured using military aircraft technics, hit international spotlights during the Please Do Not Sit exhibition in Paris.
In 2009, his self-produced Sparkling Joke coffee table, designed using recycled PET bottles and caps, drove the Coca-Cola Company's attention to his work. He began a collaboration leading to the creation of the Coca Cola Sustainable Design Awards trophy and a set of recycled materials made furnitures with the US beverages company.
In 2010 Aguessy was featured with several of his works including his emblematic Useless Chair, the Soissons porcelain floor lamp, and the 3some vase by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City in the Global Africa Project exhibition co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, MAD's Charles Bronfman International Curator, and Leslie King-Hammond. His work is part of the MAD Museum permanent collection since 2011.
Aguessy's researches in matter of new manufacturing technologies and sustainable energy sources, had led him to the establishment of the first Fab Lab ( FabricationLaboratory) organized by the French Industrial Prospective and the Paris-based Centre Pompidou , in Porto Novo, Benin, in February 2012.
The same year, he designed and manufactured Koss, the official 2012 present for the presidency of the United Nations Security Council, and conceived The Guardian, the monument celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Togolese independence, while the Beaubourg Museum's Multiversités Créatives exhibition showcased the designer's first Benin Designed pieces. In 2013 The KossiAguessy Studio was moved From Paris France To London and New-York.
Aguessy's works were permanently included into the Beaubourg museum collection in 2013. He became as such the first African-descent designer having a nominative section in the French contemporary arts and design museum.
Futuristic, multi-cultural and polymorphic, Aguessy's signature results from practical, technological, sociological and formal researches. The designer and artist is considered as a "design researcher" among those who "engineer the future" and which are named multiverses.