Exhibition, performance art and heritage in the grassfields
Program Reconnect Dschang 2023
Location : Alliance Franco-Camerounaise and Musée des civilisations, Dschang, Cameroon
Among the challenges that postcolonial Africa has to face stands the critical and transformative examination of persisting colonial concepts, ideologies and academic disciplines (like ethnology, anthropology, museology, etc.). Art is a particularly promising approach to this endeavor, as it opens possibilities and facilitates reinventions and reconnections. In the words of Mbog Bassong, African art is expiatory, it helps societies to recover from historic trauma.
It is from this premise that the exhibition and workshop program RECONNECTING 0BJECTS WITH KNOWLEDGE AND SUBJECTS proposes a space where artists, researchers, and practioniers of locally anchored cultural knowledge meet and exchange in a perspective that connects past and present. Here local actors develop their proposals on questions of restitution of the material components of their culture, currently kept in museums in the West. The event fosters the reconnection of this heritage to the people, promotes the invention of a new relationship with the artifacts and celebrates the creativity the people who activate them. It is thus fostering contextualized conceptions and practices of conservation, transmission and monstration of immaterial and material African heritage.
The festival in Dschang combines:
- Internal meetings of the researchers of the Reconnecting "Objects" project
- Lectures and round tables
- Artist presentations and performances
- Visits to artist studios, heritage sites and museums
- Screening of the documentary film "Lessa'a: la reconnexion et transmission vivante hors des murs des musées" by Dr. Lucie Mbogni Nankeng
In an interview on "Basart culture" Prof. Albert Gouaffo gives a brief overview of the challenges of the upcoming Reconnect workshop :
Curated by Dr. Lucie Mbogni Nankeng, in collaboration and with the scientific advice by Prof. Albert Gouaffo
Invited artists: Sidoine Yonta, Stevie Douanla, Ines Kendjo, André Takou Sa'a, Hervé Youmbi, Marios Kenfack, Emile Youmbi
Articulation of the event:
- Construction of the grassfields village
- Internal meetings
- Conferences and round tables
- Visits to multiple museums and workshops