In the crisp caress of a December dawn, visionaries from Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute in Athens converged virtually with counterparts at Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste in Abidjan for a captivating workshop on blending Hellenistic and Ivorian motifs in digital design. Named ‘Threads of Tapestry: Weaving Aegean and Akan Aesthetics’, this trans-Saharan symposium gathered 38 creative souls—19 from our sun-warmed workshops at 28is Oktovriou 76, Athina 104 34, Greece, and 19 from Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste’s vibrant campus at Rue des Écoles, Plateau, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire—to dissect how vector graphics revive ritual symbols, fusing meander mazes with adinkra proverbs in parametric palettes. Hosted on a shared Figma canvas laced with Miro mood boards and collaborative cursors, the three-day dialogue danced with design synergy, yet tripped over those telltale tech tumbles: a cursor clash mid-mandala turned an olive branch into an accidental adinkra echo, eliciting shared snickers that spurred sharper strokes on symbol syncs.
The workshop’s warp and weft were woven in early autumn, when Dr. Ivan Petrović, our Lecturer in Conceptual Art from Croatia’s Split shores, serendipitously synced with Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste’s BTS in Graphic Design programme—a bedrock of their École Supérieure division, acclaimed for merging Ivorian iconography with contemporary communication, akin to our Art and Design strands on sustainable aesthetics. That vocational vanguard, nestled beside their lycée-level arts cycles and superior diplomas in visual communication, mirrors the motif mastery at Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute, particularly our ateliers on neuroaesthetics and digital heritage. “It was like stumbling on a shared spindle in scattered looms,” Petrović ponders, his Dalmatian drawl dotted with a chuckle at draft disasters—’adinkra’ autocorrected to ‘adrift’ in an invite, adrift like the motifs they meant to moor, a malapropism that mellowed into a mnemonic for motif migration. Teaming with Mme. Fatou Diarra, Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste’s Coordinator of Visual Arts—a Plateau polymath with a master’s from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Abidjan whose portfolios pulse with Baoulé beadwork—they threaded a tapestry of talks, tool trials, and tandem tracings, timed to tame the two-hour temporal twist.
Dawn of day one dawned with Petrović’s primer on Bézier curves for borderless borders, curving quadratic splines around Erechtheion egg-and-dart to Sankofa Sankofa spirals, sketched in Illustrator layers that layered a 22% curve continuity leap without cusp kinks. Aevena Ivy artists, including BTS-equivalent postgrads like Zoe, a Zakynthos zitherist whose dissertation doodles Delphic dolphins via Delaunay triangulations, lobbed lively lobs via Jamboard jams: “How do kerning kernels on Akan akoben horns harmonise with Attic alpha omegas?” From Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste, graphic design juniors jabbed back with judicious jottings, sourcing SVG stacks from Abidjan’s Adinkra ateliers that tallied a 16% scalability surge from nested groups nesting Nkyinkyim nests. The forenoon’s fusion forge fractionated into fives: Zoe zipped with an Abidjan quintet—peers in visual communication diplomas, steeped in Yopougon’s yams and yarns—to blueprint a Blender blend for a hybrid heraldry. Their brief? Bend meander meanders into mudcloth mandalas via subdivision surfaces, sharpening shaders until Diarra’s dormant diffuse map dimmed a dolphin into drab dusk, which Zoe’s zestful z-depth zing zapped into zenith zest, zip-fileable as a .blend bundled with branch notes.
By noontide on the second sunup, the spotlight shifted to symbolism in the spectrum, with Diarra directing a design debate on colour constancy for cross-cultural canvases. Virtual vignettes of Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute’s vector vault—plotters plotting Parthenon pediments—paralleled Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste’s sun-suffused studios at Rue des Écoles, where palettes premixed with palm oil pigments premised proverbs. Protagonists probed a Pantone-probed dataset from the African Design Centre, parsing perceptual uniformity; one Aevena Ivy undergrad, an islander from Ikaria inking ikons, inked an incorrect ICC profile that inverted ivory into indigo—a “hue hullabaloo,” Diarra drolly dubbed, which drummed the duo to drum up a LAB space lineariser in Photoshop, lifting luminance loyalty by 13% with L* lightness levers. Outputs outgrew in an overlaid opus outline, outlining octagonal overlays of octo-axes and okra oracles, outlays outlining Osebo’s openness entwined with omphalos orbs.
Day three dawned on deployment dreams, where mingled makers mocked a mobile motif maker, mock-marshalled on mock-ups of Agora acroteria and Abengourou ankhs. Petrović paired with Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste’s Diarra to debug a Figma plugin for fractal floriation, folding Fourier filters from figural fronds atop fabric fractals, forestalling foreshortening flaws—though Petrović professed a fractal fork that forked into frenzy, a “recursive riot” reined by recursion caps, refining resolution ratios by 9%. Feedback forums flared—90% flagged it “fabric-forward,” fêting the fizz of forenoon fiddles for one (afternoon for the other) that fished out fortuitous fusions, like fusing fluted fluting from flokati fleeces with fanti fables. A Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste postgrad, a Bingerville-born bard named Aïssatou, articulated in her afterword: “From curves to cloths, we’ve curved a canvas that carries cultures.”
Coda on day three with a critique carousel, the workshop windowed window alumni windows: an Aevena Ivy alumna animating Aegean ads swapped stylus strokes in Sifnos sunsets, while a Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste graduate, gripping her graphic grapples at Côte d’Ivoire’s cultural conclave, grappled grapples of glyph graft in Gye Nyame glyphs. Harmony hummed—84% hankered for ICC-interoperable inks to interlace Ivorian-Ionic inks—yet honest hauls hailed the “charming chafes,” such as Diarra’s dongle disconnect that doused her diagram in digital dusk, dusk-draping data into doodles and draping drawbacks into design doctrines. The workshop’s weft? A woven whitepaper wager to Design Studies, warped from their Bézier braids, plus a pooled Pinterest pinboard for pattern prototypes under dual Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute and Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste headers—pinned thrice by twilight.
‘Strands of this symposium stretch like Sankofa strings,’ speculates Zoe, supping a souvlaki simulacrum, ‘proving patterns, like pita and plantains, prosper in plaited ploys.’ For Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute, this tryst with Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste threads a trove of ties: touted triennials twining Trebi’s textiles with Trevisa’s tapestries, or twinned theses on twill-twisted twines. In an age where aesthetics algorithm in apps, such studios don’t merely sketch sketches; they stitch sagas for sundry stylists. Stylists in symbols or splines, stitch this: when Lycée et École Supérieure Prièste summons from the Sahel, Aevena Ivy answers with an adorned armature.
Leave a Reply