A discarded billboard might seem an unlikely starting point for an architectural commission. But for Limbo Engawa, a new permanent installation at Art Omi, the object’s previous life is central to the work. Designed by architect Juergen Benson-Strohmayer of TAELON7, the project transforms salvaged advertising panels into an adaptable structure for gathering and rest, a testament to the revitalization of both landscape and material.
The commission also marks the first partnership between Ghanaian architectural practice Limbo Accra, which expanded in 2024 with the founding of arts institution Limbo Museum in Accra, and Art Omi, an arts center and sculpture park in Ghent, New York, from founder Francis J. Greenburger.
For CULTURED, Limbo Accra co-founder Dominique Petit-Frère and Art Omi architecture curator Julia van den Hout discuss the role of material reuse and the value of experimentation across seemingly disparate institutions.
How did the two of you first connect, and when did you know decide that this was a project you wanted to pursue together?
Julia van den Hout: I had seen the opening of Limbo Museum, and was super excited about the programming it started off with, so I was thrilled when Dominique approached us. It seemed like a fantastic opportunity to begin a dialogue between two institutions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. We had that conversation probably a year and a half or two years ago, and slowly started to develop how this could take shape at both institutions.
Dominique Petit-Frère: At the time of my outreach to Julia, we were operating as an architecture and research practice under the name Limbo Accra. That practice predates the museum, and it gave us the springboard to found Limbo Museum, which is now the institutional arm of the practice. When the opportunity aligned, it made sense to co-commission a piece of architecture like Limbo Engawa and create this opportunity for a transatlantic exchange.
The opening included a traditional tea ceremony. I’d love to hear how that became part of the day and what it added to the experience.
Petit-Frère: The beautiful thing about the Limbo Engawa structure, at least the way it was installed in Ghana, was that it was attached to the exterior of the uncompleted building that houses the museum. Within that building, we have an inner courtyard where a lot of wild vegetation, crops, and plants grow. We have a long-term plan to work with this landscape in intentional ways, whether that’s harvesting what’s on the land or creating a park-like experience within the space, especially because Accra as a city lacks public spaces and public parks.
The tea ceremony also speaks to the localized ways of engaging in this horizontal landscape approach. The Fulani are a traditional, nomadic ethnic group that exists across West Africa, not just in one key country or location, and they work with and engage with the land. There’s a world-renowned chef, Fatama Binta, whose agricultural projects and culinary practice center on these traditional ways of eating and engaging with the land through Fulani culture. It was beautiful.
The project has been described as two takes on one system, rather than two versions of the same work. What did you think would stay the same across both, and what surprised you about the transition?
Van den Hout: The two iterations are closely connected. They share the foundational intentions of being a place to gather and of celebrating handcraft and cultural traditions, but each responds to its site, climate, landscape, and patterns of use.
That’s what makes it particularly compelling from an architectural perspective. It’s not about a fixed object but about a system that can be adapted, transported, and reinterpreted. It’s much more a platform—an infrastructure—for exchange than a sculptural object placed in one place and then the next.
If someone spends an hour with the work in the Hudson Valley, what do you hope they take away about Accra and its artistic community?
Petit-Frère: First, I hope they take a moment to rest and relax. Art Omi offers that naturally, and our unfinished building, our museum, offers that too. These are often vacant spaces that rewild with nature, so you get a moment of stillness and rest.
Second, choosing Juergen as the architect was a deliberate choice about repositioning what contemporary African architecture looks like, and how it can be recognizable globally. So often, when people think of the built landscape in Africa, they think of two things. Either something traditional and vernacular, like round mud-earth structures, or the dense, informal society we get bombarded with. The in-between—these unfinished Brutalist structures that are celebrated everywhere else—never becomes the image of modernizing, contemporary African cities.
That’s something we push with the practice and with the institution. A commission like this further deconstructs what one thinks of as African architecture. Juergen himself is Austrian by blood, but he’s been practicing in Ghana for over a decade and has built significant cultural institutions here—serious, permanent architecture. For him to take on this commission in such a serious and elegant way proves our mission and our ambition to challenge ideas of what an institution, a museum, or a piece of architecture could look like.
Tell us about a design detail that may come across as incognito on first glance, but holds significance to the assemblage.
Van den Hout: The fact that it’s made of salvaged billboard material becomes really engaging up close, because there are visible, legible remnants of advertisements. It has had another life, not only between the two institutions. I also think about the reconfiguration between the two iterations. Juergen has kept the base, and the lower panel is a beautiful place to rest and is very inviting to lounge on.
The way the other two panels meet has shifted between the two institutions. In Accra, it was much more of a facade, going up the building, providing shade for an internal structure, and speaking directly to an architectural system. At Art Omi, it’s much more about the horizontality of the landscape. It provides shade and a much-needed place to hide in a context that is very open to the elements. These elements come through nicely, and Juergen was really intentional about bringing them into the design of both configurations.
What do you hope other institutions might take from this project, and how might it inform their own approaches to collaboration?
Van den Hout: At Art Omi, what’s really important to us is experimentation: offering a space for people to try new things and test different ideas. In architecture, experimentation doesn’t always have to be technological novelty or invention. It can be experimenting with scale, material, and collaboration. That’s why this co-commission was really exciting for us. We were trying to set up a different dialogue. It’s not just about bringing people into dialogue on site, but also about people having different experiences of one work. Cultural institutions can work together even with very different programming, sites, and missions, and there’s a beautiful crossover we were able to create here.
Petit-Frère: I agree. What we valued most about this partnership with Art Omi was the trust from the outset, and how a conversation led to something meaningful for both parties. I would love for that to be one of the biggest takeaways: that you can trust and engage across institutions, across geographies, and across contexts, and allow your audiences to come into contact in these ways too. This kind of experimental engagement is something I would personally love to see more of in the world, which is why we did this. I hope it can be an example for other opportunities and forms of engagement.
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