Bunna without Borders: Coffee/Making as a Relational Space

Abstract

In Habesha homes, coffee — bunna — making is a form of domestic grounding, performed by women in three daily ceremonies. Through the political changes in the mid 1990’s which dislocated both Habesha women and Johannesburg urban functions from their origins, such coffee ceremonies have come to take place in Johannesburg’s modernist spaces. This paper traces a design probe, bunna bet Jeppe, by an Ethiopian coffee making woman, TG, and a South African architect, myself, in and beyond this context. In this probe, the relation forming power of the coffee ceremony and its ritual forms of clearing a quiet space, energising and circulating substances are proposed as designerly forms.In this retelling I consider our roles as they intersect in the development of the probe over time, drawing out our alternately overlapping and divergent ways of using the coffee-ceremony place as a strategic project in the face of gendered spaces. Through the project, and in parallel ways, both TG and myself have aligned our points of insertion into men's worlds of trader associations and modernist buildings to realise our personal intentions to make another form of space, one that enfolds critical aesthetic and economic dimensions.The relations that this project entails are interpersonal as well as those formed with space and materials. The consequent nature of the bunna bet is the coffee “set” as a kit and a stage for urban communication. But while developing an autonomous bunna bet that can exist outside of its critical and gendered role in relation to man made urban worlds, we retain our interest in the project’s transformative potentials. Arguably, it is its relational strength that still holds its promise.