Memory, imagination and the

Nigerien Mariam Issoufou’s work does not imitate the West. It reclaims the future from the ground beneath her feet

- Kibo Ngowi

Mariam Issoufou’s architecture is distinct. Perhaps because it looks so familiar yet so unusual at the same time.

A wall might be made of com-pressed earth but curve like concrete. A window might be shaped like an arch you once saw in a medieval city, or a village courtyard or both.

Her buildings carry the weight of memory and the clarity of invention.

They seem to belong as much to the past as they do to a future — not yet fully realised, straddling the realm between imagination, antiquity and reality.

There is a kind of silence to her structures. The kind that settles over a space when it has been designed with care and patience.

In Dandaji — a village on the arid western plains of her home country, Niger — a library stands beside a mosque and both are built of earth pulled from the ground just metres away. It doesn’t feel symbolic. It feels natural. As if the village decided to rise taller and Issoufou simply gave it form.

In Niamey, a housing block built for the city’s growing middle class doesn’t mimic Western suburbia. Instead, it offers courtyards for gathering, thick walls that cool the air without machines, passages that bend and open like market alleys.

The lines are sharp but the logic is organic. The geometry never feels forced. You could run your hand along the walls and feel stories pressed into them.

In her hands, architecture doesn’t just shelter. It speaks. It honours. It reflects. Her buildings don’t shout but they sure don’t whisper either. They have the presence of something that knows where it came from and is confidently deciding where to go.

"I think the biggest trap we’ve fallen into is conflating modernity and Westernity," she told Justin McGuirk, director of the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, during a live interview at the recent Abu Dhabi Culture Summit in the United Arab Emirates.