What an amazing day! Today was what I naively envisioned this entire trip would be, and is something I cynically wrote off as utterly impossible about a week ago. I met this artist named Akirash, and we connected like two artists. I mean, it worked just like my flowery spiel said it was going to: we shared skills and materials and ideas and got into an interesting dialogue about art that trancended our very different cultures.

Things he said to me over lunch (Banku and slimy okra soup, with some crab!) I had written about in my draft Fulbright application the night before, cringing at the probability that no-one in Africa actually felt the way I was proposing. He even shared my disdain for the useless art object - and this in West Africa, where contemporary art seems predominantly focused on decoration.

He is of the school of Ghanaian Artists who use trash as their material - though he claims he was the first. He said his friends thought he was truly crazy when he started collecting garbage. They even approached his mother because they were worried about him, “do you know what your son is doing in the streets?” “Leave him, he has a plan,” she supported. Girls of course wanted nothing to do with him.

But he clambered on, making clothing out of empty cans and bottle-caps; he called it the “Bend Down Boutique,” because he was always bending down to pick up garbage from the street. He said, “if you stop because they don’t understand, then you will never do it.”

I was amazed to hear him say that art must say something, because so much of the art I have been seeing is purely representational and object based. He feels art should be brought out of the hotel lobby and into the street in Africa. He says he questioned the diplomats why they were always the audience for his works, when his work was meant to speak to “the people.” So he got into a bit of quasi-interventionist art, erecting a huge stuffed condom made of garbage at a major Accra intersection at 5AM to raise awareness about AIDS.

He says he wants to set up stalls of his disturbingly fetish-like art at the everyday open air markets, next to the tomato sellers and kasava roots. He wants to make Africans realize that there is Art all over their lives, and seemed genuinely excited about my idea to “flip” the local Accra Art world by installing one of those Tara Donovan-evoking market stalls of obsessivly collected distributor caps within a gallery setting, valueing the inadvertent art of urban Africa…

I was surprised and heartened to hear his feelings about the conveyor-belt system of artists making what sells. He noted that if your response after selling one piece is to make the same thing because you figure it will sell, you are involving yourself in a cycle of depreciation. Your effort depreciates with every copy, and the earlier versions you had already sold depreciate as more and more second-rate copies are created.

At one of his shows, a patron asked Akirashi to make another version of a piece that had already sold at the show, and he refused. Surprised, the patron asked “what, don’t you need money?”

“Of course I need money, but not that kind of money.”

What we did

We were supposed to meet at the Ivy, an incredibly overpriced ex-pat coffee joint with icy air conditioning and painfully kitsch-calm muzak, but we found a not quite as overpriced open air joint for the local semi-elite nearby. He saved the Star Beer and Malta Guinness caps from our drinks, and these later became the fodder for a genuine digital collaboration - nothing super fancy, but it was like two people playing the same piano: we completed each other’s commands, riffed off each other’s moves - and he had never used Photoshop or Flash before! This flow was totally unexpected, huddled over the glowing laptop screen in his dark room, sipping fermented milk, responding to the passing “Salaam Alekum” / “Alekum Salaam,” explaining what it means to “click and drag” vs. “option-click,” and watching the bottle-cap form into something tangible together.

He took me to his bizarre but comfortable “gallery,” a dark little room decorated with eery fetish-like statues of garbage, lit by a deep blue bulb in a chandelier made of plastic bottles, and carpeted in home-made false tiger fur stencilled onto canvas.

His gallery is in the neighborhood of Nima, a predominantly Hausa section with broad quiet streets full of life yet mellow - very reminiscent of parts of Niamey.

If I do make it to Accra on a Fulbright, I think this is the neighborhood I want to live in.

We hung out for a good 8 hours straight, and it never really got awkward, which is a first for me in true cross-cultural friendships, and I genuinely like the animations we did together. Like I said, it is not earth shattering (hell, it doesn’t even have a concept behind it), but its not pedantic, it is enjoyable to watch, it meshes well with his physical work, and the digital tools we covered really seem to hold promise as part of his practice.

Some more photos of the day

an umbrella-repair shop in Nima

one of his first jobs out of school was painting movie posters in Ivory Coast

his very first job out of school

a storefront in the neighborhood, and another one of his first posters (thats joe lara in american cyborg!)

Akirash’s coffee table made from plastic bottles