Girl Gone Authentic is a cultural creature with a very particular appetite.
Perched in her Botswana studio, she quietly brews trouble and stirs conversations around heritage and contemporary culture, craftsmanship and technology, earth wisdom and innovation. Here you will find literary cultural translations of the season, curious keepsakes, and, once in a while, language for the worlds you create.
In 2017, Girl Gone Authentic began in Thailand with a simple idea: reconnecting kindred spirits to words and other beautiful things that matter.
The work soon led into stories of disappearing crafts, materials carrying generations of knowledge, and communities whose ways of making were being pushed aside by a faster world. The deeper the work went, the more complicated the stories became. Behind an object were histories, economies, aspirations and contradictions. People made things because they loved them, because their families had always made them, because there was no other work, and often because all of these things were true at once.
That realisation turned the gaze inward, too, inviting research and conversation around ways of living, making and consuming, and the stories told about all three. Over time, the work became less about prescribing how things ought to be and more about following the threads between people, places, materials, ideas and expression.
Today, rooted in Southern Africa, Girl Gone Authentic peruses the contemporary world with a curious eye.
The Signal follows the pulse of the season, looking for the cultural currents gathering around us. The Museum collects stories, objects, materials, people and places from the past and present. The Cabinet brings some of these discoveries into the physical world through books, objects and keepsakes. The Atelier gives language to worlds taking shape through research and the written word.