A Necessary Audit

There comes a moment in every practice when the central question is no longer how to grow, but on what terms continuation remains legitimate.

To continue is to affirm that the existing conditions — ethical, structural, relational, are sufficient to carry the work forward. And when that affirmation is unexamined, continuation can be a latent form of erosion.

We felt that erosion this year. Not because the work had weakened; on the contrary, things were functioning well. Objects were being made. People were buying them. But function is not the same as justification.

A structure can perform efficiently while no longer being defensible to itself. A practice can succeed outwardly while becoming internally misaligned, kept alive by habit, competence, and goodwill rather than conviction. This kind of endurance is rationalised and therefore far more dangerous than obvious failure.

This is the moment most practices avoid. Because nothing is visibly broken, and yet everything feels thin. There is no crisis to justify interruption. Only a growing feeling of unsoundness, of things being technically intact but existentially unheld.

The common impulse is to delay reckoning until crisis makes it unavoidable. But crisis is a blunt instrument. It forces change without understanding. We chose the harder route: to interrupt ourselves before inevitability provided the excuse.

The problem, as with many long-running creative practices that become commercially viable, is that success can anaesthetise inquiry. When a practice survives, the original questions that animated it — why this form? why this pace? why this ethic? — are gradually replaced by procedural concerns. How to maintain. How to optimise. How to continue without disturbance.

This year, we questioned this continuity and noticed that many of our practices were no longer deliberate. They were inherited from earlier versions of ourselves. We sensed that the work was being held together by habit. That certain patterns, how we appear, how we disappear, how we relate to the audience, had hardened into default rather than choice. Defaults are lethal to meaning.

So the existential question was:

If kkerelé were to begin today, under the conditions of who we are now, would it look the same?

The answer was no.

The practice had become opaque to itself.

Opacity is not mystery. Mystery invites attention; opacity resists it. Mystery suggests depth. Opacity conceals structure. We had confused the two.

By appearing only at moments of resolution, finished objects, complete decisions, we were presenting the work as inevitable rather than contingent. As though it emerged fully formed, without tension, doubt, and revision.

Meaning arises precisely because something could have been otherwise. Meaning depends on risk. On the knowledge that alternatives existed. That something was at stake. When the interior pressures of a practice are concealed, the work may remain impressive, but it loses dimensionality. The audience encounters what happened, not what had to be wrestled into being.

Withholding that interior labour of thinking is to flatten the work, even when the objects themselves are rigorous.

The real danger is allowing the work to exist only at the surface of itself. To produce without disclosing the interior conditions that animate the production. A refusal (often unconscious) to be present beyond transaction.

We were working constantly, but it functioned as opacity. The audience encountered outcomes, never the thinking that made those outcomes necessary.

This was our first turn inward.

At the same time, we were forced to acknowledge the ease with which we have been held by you. This practice has experienced an unusual generosity.

There has been support without imposition. Interest without presumption. Attention without urgency. You have given us space to experiment, pause and recalibrate without being rushed into explanation. This allowed us design with ease and to create without the constant pressure to perform.

Ease is often mistaken for complacency. In reality, it is the result of trust. It means trust exists between maker and audience. And trust produces a different kind of creative life, one that is not frantic. One where a practice can mature instead of constantly resetting itself for attention.

It means we can work the way the work asks to be worked: patiently and iteratively.

Trust of this nature emerges only when people sense that the work is guided by something other than a series of fluctuating external cues.

But trust is an obligation. We cannot accept temporal generosity and respond with opacity forever. Eventually, trust asks to be met with reciprocity.

So the second realisation followed naturally from the first:

If we believe in trust as a shared field rather than a one-way grant, the hierarchy must soften. We must invite people into the world of the work. The conditions that feed it. The discipline behind it. The way of seeing that produces it. Because the work has never been only the work. It comes from a posture toward life, and we must let that world become perceptible.

A practice becomes intimate when it can be felt, not just admired.

And then there was the third problem, a structural, fundamental condition we could no longer defer — manufacturing.

For years, we treated it as a contextual inconvenience. Something to be negotiated around rather than confronted at the level of principle. This is common in environments where infrastructure is unreliable: improvisation becomes normalised, and “making do” is signalled as virtue.

Manufacturing leather goods in Nigeria is inherently fragile: inconsistency in materials, power, tooling, supply chains, standardisation, process memory.

For eight years, we have been manufacturing within this fragility, learning its processes, absorbing its shocks, adapting constantly. This year, we decided adaptation was no longer enough.

This is where the notion of responsibility became clear.

Responsibility is often framed as a duty to others — customers, audiences, markets. But the most demanding form of responsibility is responsibility to the structural necessity of the work itself.

Every serious body of work carries an implicit demand: build what I require, or step away.

That demand does not negotiate. It does not care about context or convenience.

For a long time, we answered that demand by finding workarounds. We adapted designs to fit inconsistent realities.

But adaptation, when it becomes permanent, is no longer responsiveness. It trains the imagination to accept ceilings it did not choose. It forces design to pre-compromise. It produces a subtle dissonance between intention and execution that accumulates over time.

Eventually, you begin to recognise the deeper violence at work: the work is being asked to express excellence inside conditions that structurally resist it.

At that point, the problem is no longer operational but normative. Because craft is not what you desire but what you can consistently enact. A practice that claims seriousness but relies indefinitely on inconsistency is living inside a contradiction. And contradictions do not resolve themselves.

Our recent decision to pursue and build a standardised manufacturing facility was not aspirational but defensive in the deepest sense: a defence of the work against slow dilution. At a certain point, a practice cannot keep living off the glamour of its front-facing moments, producing intermittently, compensating for inconsistency, and allowing the audience’s goodwill to soften the edges.

If it wants to mean something more, it has to descend into its own foundations.

This is why scale is the wrong language here. Scale implies ambition outward.

This is ambition inward. An insistence that the work be allowed to fully become itself.

If excellence is truly our orientation, then infrastructure is not optional. We must create a system to solve the structural problem itself. A facility that prioritises process clarity, repeatability, automation, and dignity of production.

To continue producing without addressing this problem would have been easier. This is the unglamorous work we would rather not have to do, it is heavy and slow. It pulls attention away from the seductive parts of the practice and demands a different kind of devotion: devotion to process, devotion to training, devotion to systems.

But we owe it to the work.

We owe it to the designs that have been living in our minds at a higher resolution than our current conditions could consistently hold.

We owe it to the craft itself, which deserves the highest level of execution.

We owe it to the future of this practice, because a world cannot be sustained on exception.

We owe it to the ecosystem, because if we normalise “making do” as permanent, we also normalise mediocrity.

Eventually, it became clear that these three assessments were not separate but the same question returning at different points. In each case, the practice was being sustained by tolerance, our own, and yours, rather than by structures equal to its ambition.

Here is our solution / commitment:

• Allow this practice to become legible as a mind, not just a maker of objects. A thinking entity with an interior world. World, in the phenomenological sense: a coherent, cohesive field of values, hesitations, refusals, obsessions, disciplines — something you can inhabit, not merely observe.

• Confront the fact that our manufacturing environment is brittle, and to actively build toward a more standard solution, one that can support our work and potentially the work of others.

What changes going forward is simple, but not easy. If kkerelé continues, and it must, it will do so under terms we can justify to ourselves, not merely sustain in public.

That is the point of irreversibility: once you see where the basis for continuation leaks, you no longer have the option of pretending endurance is enough.

Thank you for staying with the work.

We move into the coming year with clarity, and we will meet you there.