IN_PROXIMITY
(2023 - ongoing)
Moving image, single-channel video installation.
Exhibitied at 'Afterimages' (2023), Rele Gallery Lagos Nigeria, and “Once upon a time, the birth of the Staat Kamerun 1884-1914" (2024-25) at the National Museum of Cameroon in Yaoundé.
An afterimage is the lingering visual impression that remains in the mind’s eye after looking away from an object or event. IN_PROXIMITY emerged as an afterimage of a childhood memory, originally prompted by a hyperawareness of my geolocation during a visit to Lagos Nigeria and a curatorial prompt by Adeoluwa Oluwajoba. Constellations of parabolic antennas (or ‘satellites dishes’) mounted on countless structures were reminiscent of my birthplace in Yaoundé, Cameroon only some 1300 kilometres away. Questions about dis/placement and identity loom over Cameroon today, contributing to my years away from home.
IN_PROXIMITY is concerned with spatial memory, omnipresence, surveillance, access, and collective witnessing. Revisiting places, objects and sounds via satellite technologies, I attempt to map and retrieve sensory memories of home. This montage of bitmapped images allows for rumination on the ‘static interference’ that may occur when navigating our often incomplete memories, especially given the omission of certain sites and material from digital archives. Tuning between broadcasts and ‘missing signals’, the white-noise animates these images at a velocity that complicates their space/time continuum. We are tasked with untangling cycles of loss and retrieval embedded within our perceived timelines.
In the site-specific context of exhibiting/broadcasting in Cameroon, the work further questions cartographic displacement of Cameroon’s material and immaterial culture. As I contemplate my own voluntary migration, I question what we can learn from entities that were involuntarily seized and now make their way home. In what ways has inaccessibility to our digital heritage delayed restitution and return? What do we learn about wayfinding through displacement? How has the history of mapping as a surveillance technology caused yet another diasporic rupture? What does it mean for a culture to move through these realms?
