Le boxeur se prépare, ses vêtements attendent dans la salle/
The boxer gets ready, his clothes wait in the room, 1999.
Documentation of this piece can be found in the site under past works, but I felt I wanted to bring this installation to the forefront. It is a work that has stayed with me after all of these years.
François (my husband) and I had at that point been in Cameroon for at least for one year. We had come to central Africa with a contract Francois had obtained with Oxfam Quebec. I was unable to do the same, but I wanted to stay busy and useful. I did volunteer work teaching at two different institutions, a wonderful experience that helped me improve my French on the way.
At the same time, it was important for me to connect with local artists. I reached out to the different art institutions and that included Espace Doual’art, in the city of Douala. Princes Marylin Douala and the late Didier Schaub speared headed Doual’art, a center of the arts, education and communication that had already made a big impact on the city of Douala for the better, and it continues to do so. At one point Doual’art offered me the possibility of presenting my work. Our daughter had already been born, and I produced the whole installation in her company.
The work was inspired by an image of a boxer on a matchbox easily found in the 90’s in Cameroon. The installation is made out of six elements. There are two images of the boxer; one in imitation gold leaf and the second one is a cut out figure at the entrance of the gallery. The other four elements are objects that make direct reference to the boxer’s clothing: a shoe, a boot, a glove and shorts. Every piece in the installation has its own particularity and presence, but each is somehow dysfunctional.
I wanted to use materials easily found in African markets: recycled rubber inner tubing which is used to tied things up, white sugar, egg-shells coming from the local egg production, false hair from the many hairdressing saloons and hand made cut gravel. Ebolowa, the city where we lived, has about 40,000 inhabitants and is located about 1h30h from the capital of Yaounde (and 3 hours from Douala). Outside of the city center, by specific rock sediment, we had encounter adults and children spending their days under a small hut, chipping on the gravel rock with small hammers. They will sell their work to local construction companies.
The activity of making gravel by hand had made an impression on me, and I wanted to use their work in one of the pieces. I bought a few pails of the gravel to build the shorts of the boxer, and then I used imitation gold leaf to cover its exterior. It is the only piece that I placed on a pedestal. All the other works were placed on the floor.
The boot was made of long rubbers pieces that occupied a large space on the floor ending on the actual boot, built by knitting the rubber the rubber pieces, and it is about three feet in length.
The shoe (standard size 10 man) is made of sugar cubes glued together, sitting on a serving tray with water around it.
Further in the gallery, there was a large object close to three feet in length made out of eggshells, with long pieces of dark false hair. It was not obvious but the eggshell object was meant to be one of the boxer’s gloves, with false hair at the end.
As I mentioned before there was an image of the boxer on the wall in front of the installation of about 12 inches in height made out of imitation gold leaf. And as one entered the installation I had hang a long piece of tracing paper and cut out the image of the boxer also of about 12 inches in height.
The day after the opening of the show, the gallery organized a discussion around the work in the presence of the public and many artists of the community. For me at the time, it was an invaluable opportunity to make a deeper connection with local artists; an enriching experience overall.
Every three years or so, since 2007 Doual’art has organized SUD the Salon Urbain de Douala. I was honoured to participate in 2010 with two different shows: an installation at the gallery in January of that year, and then a video projection out side the gallery in December 2010 in the middle of the actual Salon and the other works being presented.