Mariam Issoufou: Designing a museum

12:43Bassem Shaaban:I've been so excited, actually. I was really hoping that we would see the stone on the tables as well, but it's going to look amazing. It's so perfect. You know, I'm completely not jaded. Every time, even when a project starts construction and they're digging out the foundation and I always have this sensation, it's been 12 years but I still have this sensation of walking inside of my drawings and I find that so magical. And I love seeing the building coming into shape and being built and, you know, sort of obsessing over tiny little details and this little thing that I think is crooked, you know, that nobody else can see that it's crooked but me, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

13:24Nicholas Fox Weber:In the bathroom of the restaurant, Mariam immediately notices that a large golden panel that was part of her design has not been installed across the back wall.

13:34Bassem Shaaban:Would we be able to add that panel in the back? Because I want it badly. I feel like this is the only thing this room needs to be complete.

13:42Harriet Harriss:So that's interesting, because I thought about it in a similar way, but I feel like when you open the door, there isn't like an immediate wow factor. It's like you have to step in to look up to see that wow factor. And I think if we put the Gilded Osby in the back, it'll be like an immediate, like you open the door and it's boom. Exactly.

14:02Bassem Shaaban:The approach for this project was very much the same as not only an approach that we would have for the Bed-Bee Museum, but also for any other projects that we've done. And one of the things that they have in common is that it started from a place of research once again. Even though the timeline was incredibly compressed, this is an aspect of the process that we never compromise on. One of the things we discovered, for instance, is that this site specifically, historically, was the edge of a black settlement. It was the newly freed black people lived here. And so that was incredibly important to the narrative of the site.

14:36Bassem Shaaban:It has a lot to do with the colour of the walls, because we discovered also there was a centre, almost like a cultural centre, called Black and Tan, which was sort of a first members club for African-Americans, here, just a block away from this site. And the colours, black and tan, inside the space, come from that.

15:04Nicholas Fox Weber:Satisfied with the progress on site, Mariam heads back to the office. I'm wondering how working on projects in West Africa compares.

15:14Bassem Shaaban:We don't have as many regulations, so you have a lot more freedom in what you design and what you build. But getting it built is so complicated. And it's the reverse here, where it's about really making sure that you respect these different regulations, but it's not hard to build. And yeah, it just, it feels orders of magnitude easier.

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17:04Nicholas Fox Weber:You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service, with architect Mariam Isifu, who's trying to build a new museum in the town of Tambakunda, eastern Senegal. It's now mid-2025, and once again, talks about the new site seem to have ground to a halt. But Mariam is still optimistic they'll be out there building soon.

17:28Bassem Shaaban:So the new site is sort of on the edge of the town, and this is a small town. in the eastern part of Senegal, and it's not too far from Mali.

17:42Nicholas Fox Weber:Tambakunda's dusty roads are crowded with truckers passing through on their way to Mali, the Gambia, and Senegal's capital, Dakar, as well as people riding horses, donkey carts and motorbikes. The nearest large art gallery is currently a six-hour drive away. That's why the US-based Joseph and Annie Albers Foundation wanted to build the Bepi here. The foundation was set up by the Albers, two pioneering 20th century German artists linked with the Bauhaus School. In partnership with the Senegalese organisation, the foundation has already commissioned several projects in the area, including an artist's residency space.

18:25Nicholas Fox Weber:Their decision to build these ambitious cultural projects far from any large cities has often been met with surprise.

18:33Harriet Harriss:Some people were very sympathetic and some people thought I was nuts.

18:38Nicholas Fox Weber:This is the foundation's director, Nicholas Fox Weber, who first had the idea for the Bet B.

18:44Harriet Harriss:I mean, how on earth can you build a museum in Tambacunda and no one will go there? Well, first of all, the no one, the people are there. I'm not interested in bringing in the chic art world I mean fine if they want to come and visit but it is for the people who were there

19:04Nicholas Fox Weber:For the past few years the foundation has been buying examples of ancient and contemporary African art as well as pieces from the African diaspora

19:13Harriet Harriss:We built a modest collection and it was time to seek an architect so we set up a competition and it became clear that the best design was going to come from Mariam. To me, architecture can either beckon or it can sort of declare its own importance. Mariam's building absolutely beckons. It invites curiosity.

19:45Bassem Shaaban:I almost didn't participate in the competition. I was not sure I wanted to design a museum, especially on the continent, because I always felt very ambivalent about museums as a typology. But in the end, I decided to do it in order to answer some questions for myself. So I was thinking about the fact that people often complain that there'll be museums in African capitals that are just gathering dust and nobody is going to, and bemoaning that fact and thinking that, you know, that means that the population needs to be educated into going into museums. But my question was, why would they go? who decided that the only way to appreciate art and the only valid venue for art to be is inside of this usually intimidating box.

20:31Bassem Shaaban:And I reflected on the fact that there was one national museum in Niger that is really poorly funded, yet is never empty. And realize that it's never empty, not because people are going to see the art. People go there to be together. and then finally decided to explore this museum from this point of view, where the primary aspect of the museum is actually a place for people to come together, and the museum is secondary, and the museum is optional.

21:05Nicholas Fox Weber:Reframing the importance of the museum like this seems like an audacious idea, and I'm really interested in how it manifests in the design. Hello! Hello, how are you doing? I asked Mariam to show me the model of Bette B, which is currently housed at her office in New York City.

21:23Bassem Shaaban:So we have a sectional model. So when you cut through the land, so you can see...

21:29Nicholas Fox Weber:Mariam shows me the enticing space she's created above ground that would make people want to gather and spend time there. There are shady fruit trees for families to picnic under and amphitheatre for public performances. and there's a kind of elegant undulating screen made from earth that wraps around the public space. With its orange-red tone, it blends into the landscape and its shape echoes the ancient megaliths found all over this part of Senegal. Eight metres high at some points, the screen manages to be monumental but not imposing.

22:04Bassem Shaaban:It doesn't feel like this big, passive building. It gently lifts up, but also comes back down, you know, to melt back into the landscape that was also on purpose. I understand the idea or sort of the desire for a temple of art. However, temples are also intimidating or can be intimidating in their architectural expression. I think for religious purposes, that kind of monumentality makes sense. But I think for museums to do the same thing, you know, just makes maybe the art or what's behind the doors of that building more daunting, perhaps less accessible.

22:45Nicholas Fox Weber:The gallery itself is not visible because Mariam has buried it underground. There's a practical reason for this. It keeps temperatures down, reducing the need for expensive and wasteful air conditioning. But it's also a bold break with how museums have often been designed in the past. There are no grand staircases or marble colonnades here. Instead, a long ramp gently spirals six metres down to the gallery's entrance.

23:16Bassem Shaaban:And the idea is that you would just sort of irresistibly find yourself going down this ramp. And for me, I like the idea of having a museum that you don't necessarily have to go in, but the art is still available to you. So as you're going down the ramp, we have a series of openings that allow you to see down below into the collections. So you're already sort of experiencing the artwork before you enter. It keeps teasing you. By the time you find yourself, you know, down that ramp, you're in front of the doors. so why not go in?

23:54Nicholas Fox Weber:Just sort of imagining that it was extremely well used as a public space above ground and not many people going down into the gallery. Are you happy with that? Is that a success in your mind?

24:09Bassem Shaaban:That's perfectly fine because I feel like we need to bring down the museum from its pedestal. Perhaps these galleries and these museums and these objects and these paintings are not as important as a communal experience.

24:24Nicholas Fox Weber:To build the museum underground, earth will be excavated from the site and then compressed into bricks. The iron in the soil gives the bricks a striking rusty colour. As well as looking beautiful, it's another sustainable and practical design choice.

24:40Bassem Shaaban:This is an area where it's 100 degrees Fahrenheit year-round on average, so we're talking 40 degrees Celsius. Material choice is incredibly important. If you have a building in an area where it's 40 degrees and you build it out of concrete, the inside of that building will be close to 50 degrees. Because concrete imprisons heat. That is what it does as a material. Which then, I'll just let you imagine what it would mean to cool down such a building. And for galleries that need a certain level of constant temperature, that is a true challenge.

25:19Nicholas Fox Weber:Inside the building, our assumptions about what museums should look like are challenged as well. Mariam tells me she's never been a fan of the glass cabinets we're so used to seeing artifacts displayed in.

25:32Bassem Shaaban:I've always seen them as these little jail cells for artifacts where they are imprisoned inside of these glass boxes. And there's something about them that just feels so unnatural.

25:46Nicholas Fox Weber:So she's come up with a completely different way of showcasing the museum's collection.

25:51Bassem Shaaban:Well, when you go through the door, it's sort of this incredible subterranean world. And the pillars that hold up the ground, essentially, that you're under are carved in such a way that they themselves are also displaced. and that came from the fact that in a lot of West African architecture, both the walls and the pillars are often ornate and have niches in them that can be used for storage, that can be used for other things. And so in this particular case, the pillars themselves allow you to have objects, small sculptures, all kinds of different artifacts along the pillar.

26:30Nicholas Fox Weber:Nicholas Fox Weber again.

26:31Harriet Harriss:It's almost like open shelving that recedes and you can safely put an object in there but not have to have it behind glass.

26:42Nicholas Fox Weber:It's an idea that may have its roots in Mariam's childhood experience of museums and history. On the one hand, when she visited the National Museum of Niger, she would see displays full of ancient objects found in the Sahara, polished stones, fragments of pottery. But later, her family moved to the desert and she and her father would go on walks where they would find very similar objects, still part of the landscape.

27:09Bassem Shaaban:Back then, you could actually find them just on the ground. It was crazy. I literally felt that I was inside of a history book. And again, working on this museum made me wonder, which was better? Was it the experience of being able to go on this site and actually feeling that I was inside history. And then on the other side, you had this kind of little glass boxes that were gathering dust, which was still valuable, but it was so diminished. Maybe this is also where a lot of my ambivalence about museum comes from, because this is basically where history goes to die. So I'm still not, I still haven't resolved my museum question.

27:56Bassem Shaaban:I'm still exploring.

28:01Nicholas Fox Weber:When I next speak to Mariam in early 2026, it seems plans for the Bette B are finally moving forward again.

28:09Bassem Shaaban:Excavation is about to start. Everything is set.

28:13Nicholas Fox Weber:The land has been acquired, contracts signed. Mariam is planning to fly out to Senegal in a few weeks' time.

28:19Bassem Shaaban:All of these problems are finally behind us, and we can finally build and hopefully have a brand new museum to visit starting next year.

28:29Nicholas Fox Weber:I'm relieved for Mariam and amazed at how confident and upbeat she's remained, in spite of all the ups and downs the project has been through. With architectural projects anywhere, there's always a chance they won't happen. But for Mariam, it's worth the risk. And how do you feel about those projects that don't happen? I look for opportunities to imagine.

28:53Bassem Shaaban:So I see projects that way. Of course it's important that they get built. it's most important that they get built but even if they don't I appreciate the opportunity to imagine it

29:13Nicholas Fox Weber:You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service produced by me Olivia Humphries for Overcoat Media

29:28you