House of MARJÓN – The African Apple of Fashion

House of MARJÓN transforms ancestral African knowledge into futuristic forms shaped by spirituality, memory, sacred geometry, and uncompromising craftsmanship.

Through House of MARJÓN, Abdulazeez Sani Ibrahim does far more than create striking objects. Born in northern Nigeria, the artist and founder of the house has spent years developing a universe where art, African cultural heritage, and innovation converge to give life to unique creations. Crafted from wire and adorned with cowrie shells and precious metals, his works draw from African traditions while projecting their visual language into the future.

Driven by the belief that ancestral knowledge already contains the codes of tomorrow, Abdulazeez has built a deeply personal body of work where spirituality, memory, and identity intersect with forms inspired by sacred geometry, cosmic structures, and stories passed down through generations. Defying conventional classifications, House of MARJÓN embraces a creative practice that refuses to choose between fashion and art.

In this conversation with IRK Magazine, Abdulazeez Sani Ibrahim founder of House of MARJÓN shares his vision of art, creation, and African heritage. Exploring themes of spirituality, collective memory, cultural identity, and visions of the future, the artist offers a profound reflection on the place of African traditions within contemporary imaginaries and their ability to inspire new forms of expression. A fascinating exchange that invites us to rethink our relationship with beauty, value, and the creative richness of a continent whose stories continue to shape the world.

IRK: You describe your creations not as accessories but as “living sculptures.” At what point does an object cease to be fashion and become a work of art in your eyes?

Abdulazeez: An object stops being fashion the moment it can no longer be separated from its maker’s soul. Fashion serves the body. Art serves something older, it speaks to whoever stands before it, long after the hands that made it are gone. My pieces have function beyond the imagination, people think you can’t see through them but you can perfectly in some new light perceive the world in another dimension. They make people feel something they don’t have words for. That is where fashion ends and art begins. The moment a piece makes you stop and ask who made this, and why it has already crossed over.

IRK: Your work carries strong references to African heritage, yet it also feels futuristic and universal. How do you navigate the dialogue between ancestral traditions and contemporary visual culture?

Abdulazeez: I don’t experience this as a navigation because for me there is no contradiction. The ancestral IS the future. The sacred geometry embedded in ancient African design. The mathematics of cowrie shells, the spiral patterns in traditional metalwork, the orbital structures found in Yoruba and Benin art, these are not primitive. They are advanced. What the world calls futuristic, Africa encoded centuries ago. My work simply makes that visible. I am not bridging two worlds. I am showing that they were always one. One that will continue to evolve and take new shapes and ideas as the human species move toward the technomadic age.

IRK: You mention that each piece carries “the memory of a continent.” What stories or collective memories are you seeking to preserve through your creations?

Abdulazeez: The cowrie shell was once the currency of an entire civilisation. It moved across oceans, built economies, connected cultures before the world understood globalisation. When I place a cowrie shell at the centre of a piece worn on the face, the most public, most vulnerable, most expressive part of a human being, I am not decorating but restoring. I am saying: this object that was taken, devalued, forgotten, it still holds power. The histories I carry in my work are not only African. They are human. Stories of worth, of beauty being defined on one’s own terms, of a people who understood that adornment was sacred long before fashion existed as an industry.

IRK: Many of your works evoke cosmic forms, sacred geometry, and organic structures. What role does spirituality or the idea of the cosmos play in your creative process?

Abdulazeez: I believe the universe has a geometry. And that human hands, when working with deep intention, can touch it. When I bend wire into orbital forms those circular, looping, planetary structures. I am not designing. I am listening. There is a moment in the making of every piece where something shifts where the material stops resisting and begins to speak. I follow that. Many of the forms that emerge in my work mirror structures found in nature, in galaxies, in cells, in the mathematics of growth itself. I don’t believe that is coincidence. I believe the hands know things the mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

IRK: House of MARJÓN challenges conventional ideas of beauty and adornment. What emotions or reflections do you hope people experience when encountering or wearing your pieces?

I want the first feeling to be confusion that beautiful, disorienting moment when you cannot immediately categorise what you are looking at. Then I want curiosity to follow. And finally, I want recognition that quiet internal knowing that says: this is from somewhere real. Something ancient just spoke to me. For the person wearing the piece, I want them to feel sovereign. Untouchable in the best possible sense. Like they are carrying something that no money alone could have created, because they are.

IRK: As an artist working from Nigeria, how do you view the growing international interest in African contemporary art and design? What opportunities does this create, and what misconceptions still remain?

Abdulazeez: The world is finally paying attention but attention is not the same as understanding. The opportunity is enormous and I welcome it without reservation. What concerns me is the extractive gaze. When the international art world celebrates African creativity while continuing to expect African artists to price their work as though it comes from a developing market. My work begins at one hundred thousand dollars per commission. Not because I am performing confidence, but because I understand what it took to make it, what it carries, and what it is worth. The misconception that remains is that African art should be affordable, exotic, and grateful. It should be none of those things. It should be exactly what it is, among the most significant creative work being produced anywhere in the world right now.

IRK: Your pieces seem to exist somewhere between sculpture, performance, fashion, and cultural artifacts. Do you consciously resist categorization, or is this hybridity a natural outcome of your practice?

Abdulazeez: Completely natural. I never once sat down and decided to make eyewear, or sculpture, or fashion, or cultural artefacts. I sat down with wire and intention and made what needed to exist. The categories came later, applied by other people trying to place something that refuses to be placed. I think the most honest art always resists the shelf. The moment a piece fits perfectly into an existing category, I begin to wonder whether it is saying anything new. My practice lives in the uncomfortable space between definitions and I believe that discomfort is precisely where the most important conversations happen

IRK: The title NEW ERA 11 suggests transformation and renewal. What does this new era represent for you personally, and what message does it carry for a wider audience?

Abdulazeez: NEW ERA 11 is a declaration. Not just of a new collection but of a new consciousness. Eleven in many African and spiritual traditions represents the threshold, the space between what was and what is becoming. This era, for me personally, is about refusing the diminishment that has followed African artists for too long. It is about creating without apology, pricing without guilt, and building a legacy that does not wait for external validation to begin. For a wider audience, I hope NEW ERA 11 says that wherever you are from, whatever world told you that your vision was too much or too strange or too rooted in a culture it didn’t understand. This is your era too. Make the thing only you can make. Make it with everything you have.

IRK: Looking ahead, what legacy would you like House of MARJÓN to leave within contemporary art and visual culture beyond aesthetics alone?

Abdulazeez: I want it to be said that there was an artist from Nigeria who looked at wire, at shells, at gol. At the most ordinary materials and made the world stop and reconsider what beauty is, where it comes from, and who gets to define it. I want House of MARJÓN to stand as proof that luxury has no single address. That world-class art is being made in Africa, Nigeria right now, by hands that learned their craft not in European academies but in the sacred tradition of making by necessity, by instinct, by love.

The legacy I am building is not about objects. It is about what those objects prove that African creativity is not emerging. It has always been here. The world is simply finally looking. A legacy that will span over to the 3000s. A legacy Thats sets a temple for the rest of eternity because each creation is meant to bring that same reaction in infinite. I want even aliens to look at the work, styles & be intrigue by it & also see the wisdom to it.