Bunna without borders: coffee/making as a relational space

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.