Monday, 16 June 2014

African culture ambassadors, “Invisible Borders” leaves Lagos for Saravejo by road for 2014 trip




By ADA DIKE

Poised to promote African culture in many parts of the world, young talented African documentary photographers, historians and writers, have set out this years’ road trip to Saravejo, the capital of Bosnia.
Known as “Invisible Borders: Trans-African Photographic Initiative,” the team of about 10 Africans which scheduled to depart Lagos in June, 2014 for a period of five months, travelling through 20 countries by road aimed to tell stories about Africa through photography.
Speaking at a press conference held last week in Lagos, the leader of the team, Mr. Emeka Okereke, said that more than seven Africans from Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Eritrea and Kenya, among others, would embark on this year’s trip.
The Nigerian documentary artist also revealed that Invisible Borders began in 2009 by a group of artists who came together to explore the possibilities of arts exchange.
 “Invisible Borders, which began in Nigeria has evolved to include participants from Ghana, Mozambique, Cameroon and so on. We began as photographers, but some of us later became writers. The idea we are trying to propagate is not limited to Africa. The relationship between Africa and Europe is much more horizontal so this road trip aims to address that. We focus on encounter and interaction in this year’s trip. In the past four years, we got stuck at borders, but this time, we tried to make it more interactive and defined. We had exhibition in Amsterdam last time and will have some exhibitions this time,” said Okereke.
He further hinted that funding for their trip is always a serious challenge to them.”There is always a struggle in terms of support. We have put in 12 months preparation trying to get sponsors and partners and some of them have been supportive, but we need more sponsors and partners.”
Below are the profiles of participants who are on their way to Saravejo:

Emeka Okereke
Emeka Okereke was born in 1980. He lives and works between Africa and Europe, moving from one to the other on a frequent basis. He came in contact with photography since 2001. He is a member of Depth of Field (DOF)
collective, a group made up of six Nigerian photographers. Presently, his works oscillate between diverse mediums.
He uses photography, poetry, video and collaborative projects to address issues
pertinent to his convictions. His works deal mainly with the questions of co-existence (beyond the limitations of predefined spaces), otherness and self-discovery. Often times, they are subtle references to the socio-political issues of our times.
Another aspect of his practice lies in project organising and artistic interventions to promote exchanges cutting across indigenous and international platforms. To this effect he organized the first ever photographic exchange projects between a school in France and one in Nigeria involving the Fine Art School of Paris and Yaba College of Arts and Technology Lagos. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of “Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project”. Through Emeka Okereke Photography & Projects, he co-ordinates projects based on exchanges. The most recent of these projects include: Crossing Compasses, Lagos-Berlin Photo Exchange and Converging Visions: Nigeria – Netherlands Photo Exchange
In 2003, he won the Best Young Photographer award from the AFAA “Afrique en
Création” in the 5th edition of the Bamako Photo Festival of photography. He has a Bachelors/Masters degree from the National Fine Art School of Paris and has exhibited in biennales and art festivals in different cities of the world, notably Lagos, Bamako, Cape Town, London, Berlin, Bayreuth, Frankfurt, Nurnberg, Brussels, Johannesburg, New York, Washington, Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, Paris, etc. He has also won several awards both in Nigeria and Internationally.
Although he is the artistic director of the Project, we are equally excited about
Emeka’s participation because we believe he would draw on the strength of the
success of his past work on the road trip, which combines elements of  performance, with that of spontaneity.


Angus Mackinnon
 Angus Mackinno grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and completed his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, majoring in
photography and graduating in 2013. “I grew up skateboarding and painting graffiti, which lead to me spending a significant amount of my time on the streets and in
public spaces of Johannesburg. Anyone who is from Johannesburg or has even visited will be able to testify as to the extremely dynamic and polarized community that the city produces – I believe that these experiences in this culturally diverse and dangerous city are what lead me to engage with people and issues like I do and ultimately to become an artist.
“Being an artist, and in particular a photographer, allows me to engage with the world
around me on a level which I would not otherwise be pushed to, as well as explore
and investigate situations that I find appealing and thought-provoking. By choosing to
work under the title of an artist I have consciously decided to work and think in certain
ways as well as produce work for a particular viewing platform-whether this is
advantageous or disadvantageous is something that I am not sure of yet but it
definitely gives structure to my working and thinking process.”
On why he joined for the trip, he says, “My motivation for the road trip is to find a way of presenting modern Africa to the rest of the world. The challenge in this is to first identify what I, myself, understand as ‘African’. The historical conditions of colonialism and the current stereotypes that dominate African identity allow a lot of space for this investigation.
“For the road trip, I plan on grappling with my identity as a white African; how this is interpreted and what it means. The geographical juxtaposition from the beginning of the trip in Africa to the end in Europe allows for compelling engagement with the vestiges of colonialism and an opportunity to examine it from within. I expect the trip to be filled with incredibly interesting, eye-opening, informative, engaging, exhausting, long, short, energizing, rewarding, tolling, character-building, connection-creating, experience-making situations and a whole lot of photograph-taking. As a young artist I am aware that there is an enormous amount for me to learn in terms of my own practice; I expect to run into a range of challenges on the trip but also expect to learn invaluable lessons and skills while rising to them. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime.”

Dawit L. Petro
Dawit Petros is an artist from Eritrea by way of Canada and New York.
His mixed media installations are rooted in photography but engage liberally with
the language of sculpture, performance, and painting, and he works with ideas of
displacement, place-making, and cultural negotiation. His projects have been
mapping African immigrant spaces in an array of localities around the world –
Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Dakar, Sao Paolo, and Harlem – while bringing into a critical
light the numerous borders both visible and invisible that these communities
cross.
Dawit's works have exhibited at museums and galleries across the US, Canada, Africa and China, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of African Art, DC; Studio Museum, Harlem; Royal Ontario Museum, Canada; Addis Foto Fest, Ethiopia, and Dak'Art Biennale, Senegal. He was selected for the Whitney Independent Study Program and is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, residencies and speaker at a number of lectures.
Everyone is interested in how Dawit's formalist approach may rupture or add new
dimensions to the spontaneity they have so far embraced on the road trip.
 Dawit Says: "In my practice, art has never been only about the production of objects but an invaluable means with which to restructure relationships between objects, ideas and the larger world itself. The objectives of the road trip are closely focused upon the building of spaces and events through which a reconsideration of broader political, social and economical forces of globalization and the movement of people, ideas, images and sounds that accompany it can occur.
I am honoured to be a participant in the 5th edition of the The Invisible Borders Trans- African as it enacts narratives of mobility across the African and European continents.  As an east African with ties to Europe, Africa and North America; the project represents a unique opportunity to connect transborder movements between Africa to Europe to global migrancy from East to Western Europe, South to North America. Secondly, the act of making art work with the Invisible Borders art laboratory will provide a structure to better understand the alternate meanings that artistic and cultural production acquire as they travel and migrate through boundaries of national or ethnic belonging. The meaning of the work we make will be continuously under evaluation and revision as we shift from site to site and engage with new realities. Lastly, and perhaps, more importantly, I embrace the chance to engage the numerous localities and people that we will meet from the position of the stranger and the unpredictable outcomes that these encounters will have to alter fixed points of view-both our own and those of others.”



Heba Amin
Heba Amin, an Egyptian artist and scholar currently based in Berlin. She works
primarily with film and video, with an emphasis on new media art and architectural theory. She has exhibited in corners far and wide, including the United States of America, Egypt, Germany, UK, Poland, Greece, Austria, Australia, Georgia, South Korea, Mongolia and Slovenia.  
She has won numerous awards and scholarships, including the DAAD Stipendium, Berlin and Rhizome Commissions Program, New York, and has participated in conferences in Germany, Egypt, the US, Italy, Greece, and Latvia. Heba has also spent months living with Bedouin tribes in Egypt, and has also participated in world class residencies and exhibitions.
Expectedly, her work on the road trip would bring to fore her work in digital technology and archiving as manifest by her Project Speak2Tweet, which mashed up Speak2Tweet messages from the period before Mubarak's fall with footage of abandoned structures leftover from the corrupt dictatorship.
Heba Says: "A by-product of my colonized ancestors, I had a Western education in
Egypt, I continued my university studies abroad and learned to function between languages, between cultures, and between ideologies. My artwork provides a much needed diversification of a discourse in a region that is dominated by a Western
narrative abroad. As such, I see it as my role to relay something intimate, something
personal and something human through my own experience as someone who is able
to negotiate the terrain of often clashing cultures.
In her words: “My artwork addresses themes related to urbanism and technology and investigates the impact of infrastructure on the human psyche through junctures, glitches and flawed memory. I work with various media and am particularly interested in portraying the impact of our built environment and technological progress on mobility, movement and our collective emotional state.
“As landscapes change, as cities get more and more connected via technology and as our politics become intertwined, this road trip represents, for me, a much needed dialogue and exchange about the failures of globalization. To move through the “borders” of Africa and Europe is to face the demarcations of contemporary bureaucracies. I am very excited to embark on the adventure and physicality of a 5-month road trip. While the experience will surely test my limits, I am interested in how the trip will allow me to personally confront the serious political and social issues of borders and migration and the ways in which we are all affected by these topics.”


Emmanuel Iduma

Emmanuel Iduma’s novel, Farad, was published in Nigeria in 2012 (Parresia) to wide
acclaim. He is co-founder of Saraba Magazine, editor of 3bute.com, and Director of Research & Concept Development of Invisible Borders. He is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology of interviews and short stories Gambit: Newer African
Writing (The Mantle/McNally Jackson).
 In 2011 and 2012, he was in-house writer/blogger for the Invisible Borders Trans-African road trip from Lagos to Addis Ababa and Libreville respectively. He was
longlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Prize in 2013.
Iduma’s recent writings show his attempt to become more generous and honest in his writing about art from Africa. We are interested in how he would further promote the ideas that he began to explore during the last two editions of the road trip.
“When I write anything, I imagine I’m making an object. This notion affords me two things: one, I can think of myself as an artisan, and two the object I make can be viewed, played with, disrupted, and even loved. How does this connect with this year’s road trip? Well, it means that while on the road I will carry about this object I’m making, allowing people to touch and feel it. I want to be generous with my writing—and generosity implies honesty, and a clear form of criticality. I want this object I’m making to possess utility, to be important. And because I’ll be writing about art production on the continent, I’ll like to begin with the idea that I’m in conversation with the everyday, with the everyday artist and the everyday street-person. I wouldn’t want to be a specialist. Above all, if you ask me the shape of this object I’m making, I’ll say it has three sides: justice, love and happiness. How can I write about art in a way that enunciates and translates these virtues? That’s what I’m going to be finding out.”



Renee Mboya

In December 2013, a few days before he received final confirmation of his participation in the 2014 Invisible Borders Road Trip, Renee Mboya said he  sat down across a table from the woman who would a day later become his landlady.
“She asked me what I did, "I'm a writer" I said, responding definitely for the first time in a long time. She said that she was a Jehovah's Witness. I almost passed out. This moment, significant for what it exposed of me, will be the pivot from which I look at the world as we travel this year. I hope to explore the environments that manufacture prejudice – that have made my own prejudices - the separations that we create amongst ourselves, the real and artificial constructions of culture and the specific difficulty of navigating the world as a third culture kid.
“I want to explore the contexts of language and location - the containers of history, politics and economics as they exist traditionally in textiles, music, artefact and food, for example, and examine their place in a multimedia modernity, and their revalorisation in contemporary culture through fashion, television and myth against the backdrop of post-colonialism and post-imperialism and newly contracted perspectives influence lines of perception at first instance.
I think movement, my own and those of others (the others), as the only truly trans-historical aspect, will give me unique insight into the ways of the world and I look forward to examining the exceptional ways in which my writing will learn to complete itself in motion.
Mboya, a writer from Kenya who works in fiction and narrative nonfiction, has published work in Art Life Magazine, East African Standard Newspaper, Kwani?, and others. She worked as Programs & Marketing Officer for Kuona Trust Centre,
and in curatorial, editorial, and project management for Gallery Watatu, Kwani
Trust, and Generation Kenya. Her sharp writing has a gritty honesty and fearless
approach in the telling of realities. Along with multi-faceted experience and
sharp talent, Renee brings a sense of adventure that embodies a straightforward
urgency, yet temperance and vision. Her voice is clear, sharp and generous. Without
doubt, participating on the road trip would strengthen her work, which she considers to
be that of an archivist and documentarian of the experiences of her generation.
She says, "I feel a responsibility through my craft to collect the very significant shifts
that are occurring in creed and culture at this time of seismic change in the ways in
which people interact."

Tom Saater is a social documentary photographer and documentary filmmaker/
Cinematographer from Nigeria. He focuses on social and cultural issues, humanity and development, reportage, urban portraits and other diverse topics.
He has been Working as a freelance photographer for almost a decade photographing and filming for international organisations and NGOs.
 In December 2009, he was invited by the British Council to participate in a photography project called “My Home is Here.” The project involved travelling around Nigeria to produce images of Climate Change in Nigeria and, as part of this project, he
won a Canon 5D Mk II camera and was selected to travel to Ethiopia to exhibit at the 2010 Addis Foto Festival in Ethiopia.

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