Recently the Everyday Africa project celebrated their third anniversary. Featuring photographers living and working in Africa – ‘finding the extreme not nearly as prevalent as the familiar’ – the everyday. Started by Austin Merrill and Peter DiCampo with over a dozen photographers, they keep on adding talent and expanding.
The historical memory underpinning ‘The Matter of Memory’ is that of British colonialism in Kenya. The story of the Mau Mau insurrection in 1952, its brutal suppression, and the subsequent state of emergency which lasted until 1962, is a site of complex and contested narratives beyond the scope of this text. But the Mau Mau is an inescapable, traumatic presence in the very fabric of Boswell’s installation.
“The pressure is for you to make yourself available/visible but in that process you become static…fixed… it means you stand in one place in a way that is so tangible that you can easily be bypassed or placed … as opposed to being as mobile as you always have been. It’s a tricky thing. People are saying to you – I want to see you, but this is the lens I have. And then you say: that’s your lens, I don’t know what I have to be to be seen… but I think I want to go there.”
In a country like Suriname with a population of half a million people everybody knows each other. Because of the political nature of his work, Kurt feels inhibited. This self-consciousness is something he is letting go of, more and more. He used to think all the time about what his parents would say or think. “I think less and less each day about other people’s opinions about my work. I try not to think about my close environment. In a way the word ‘DADA’ is a sacred word and it enables me to feel unlimited freedom and space in which I can create.”
He makes new works with things he can put his hands on while he is there, works that were standing in one show are hanging from the ceiling in the next one, stones he gave a bright color in a narrow street in Siena are transformed into a pile of colored stones in London. He is not only recycling objects, fabrics, things, he also recycles his own works. So, working with Tayou will definitely be very inspiring, but it also is a challenge.