The BASEL MISSION mission was founded as the German Missionary Society in 1815. The mission later changed its name to the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, and finally the Basel Mission. The society built a school to train Dutch and British missionaries in 1816. Since this time, the mission has worked in Russia and the Gold Coast (Ghana) from 1828, India from 1834, China from 1847, Cameroon from 1886, Borneo from 1921, Nigeria from 1951, and Latin America and the Sudan from 1972 and 1973. On 18 December 1828, the Basel Mission Society, coordinating with the Danish Missionary Society, sent its first missionaries, Johannes Phillip Henke, Gottlieb Holzwarth, Carl Friedrich Salbach and Johannes Gottlieb Schmid, to take up work in the Danish Protectorate at Christiansborg, Gold Coast.[3] On 21 March 1832, a second group of missionaries including Andreas Riis, Peter Peterson Jäger, and Christian Heinze, the first mission doctor, arrived on the Gold Coast only to discover that Henke had died four months earlier.
A major focus for the Basel Mission was to create employment opportunities for the people of the area where each mission is located. To this end the society taught printing, tile manufacturing, and weaving, and employed people in these fields.[4] The Basel Mission tile factory in Mangalore, India, is such an endeavour.
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193723
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-1937248
With the decline of the terracotta industry in the latter half of the 19th century, local factories which sustained a century of cross-continental trade are being demolished and I have made use of its material remains as a point of departure to ‘make’ and accommodate reuse and repair as a core focus in my practice :
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193590
https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-193632
Arjit is currently the 2021 James Harrison Seteedman fellow (Washington University in St Louis,MO,USA) and I will be travelling to the US next year to present the fellowship. Maybe we can meet then. Do let me know if your students or any program wants to work on this subject. My partner is currently enrolled as a phd fellow in AArhus School of Architecture, Denmark and her research focus is on the ‘ecologies of residue’ as the tile travelled, its imprints in contemporary building culture.
IIAS: Visualising history and space in the Basel Mission Archives (PDF file).