MoCA of the Month
Bandjoun Station
Dear readers – after several months of offering this column on the GAM website, it may be useful to comment on our choice of museums briefly. As you may have noticed, there are many different types of museums that have found their way into this column. It is generally understood that a lot of new museums devoted to recent art are currently being installed around the globe. But it is equally certain that the common label “museum” serves projects of very different nature, which often only share the title but not the function. We therefore have tried to contact different destinations, which range from public or national museums to private and collectors’ museums. The European museum scene has been largely determined by the history of public museums, either state or urban foundations. The situation is very different in Asia where institutions such as The Devi Art Foundation in the outskirts of New Delhi (June 2009) serve as pertinent examples. This time, we are glad to present a museum from Africa where the colonial history has largely characterised and also handicapped the continuity of existing museums. Since then, the museum scene in Africa is rapidly changing. Therefore, we would like to introduce you to Bandjoun Station this time, a museum in Cameroon that was founded and is directed by an artist of international standing. We are grateful to Mr. Barthélémy Toguo for giving us the permission to present his project (for more information about his work as artist see his homepage http://www.barthelemytoguo.com/). This project deserves special attention, as it is an example of how artists take the lead in certain areas of Africa in order to promote the local art scene and to create the necessary framework for art to become visible for the local audience and not just for the international art market. Artists however, as private entrepreneurs, need additional sponsoring and international attention. It is therefore our wish to draw your attention to this very interesting institution, which exemplifies what an art museum can be in Africa today.
Bandjoun Station is a non-profit, independently-operated cultural center located in Cameroon, whose aim is to promote, support and show domestic and international contemporary art. Its history and development are intrinsically tied up to Cameroonian multimedia artist Barthélémy Toguo. Born in 1967 in M’Balmayo, Cameroun, Toguo studied art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, at the École Supérieure d’Arts in Grenoble, France, and at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany. After these years of formation and travelling through Europe, Toguo achieved a certain position in the global art scene, exhibiting extensively. His works have been featured in many large-scale exhibitiions including the Guangzhou Triennial, (China 2008), the Tessaloniki Biennale, (Greece 2007), the Seville Biennial (BIACS), (Spain 2006), the Busan Biennial, (Korea 2002) and the Dakar Biennial, (Senegal 1998), among many others. He was also part of the celebrated traveling exhibition Africa Remix.
Toguo has always been socially and politically engaged, being the only artist that declined participation in the 2007 African pavilion in Venice, on the grounds of the questionable sources of the money behind the Sindika Dokolo Collection: “What guides me is a constantly evolving aesthetics but also a sense of ethics, which makes a difference, and structures my entire approach.” (B.T.) In order to achieve a balance between ethics and aesthetics, Toguo has been working since 2005 on the Bandjoun Station project in his native Bandjoun: “Aware of the double dilemma of being on the one hand unable to protect Africa’s classical and contemporary artistic heritage, and yet keen to undertake an ambitious cultural project, I decided to use most of the money I have earned through my work as an artist to set up “Bandjoun Station”, a non-profit-making project of entirely personal inspiration in terms of concept, construction, production and implementation”. (B.T)
Bandjoun Station
Bandjoun Station is situated on the high plateaux of Western Cameroon, 3 km from the town of Bafoussam, 300 km from Douala and Yaoundé.
Contact: studio@barthelemytoguo.com
Mission Statement
“We Africans do not have the ‘luxury’ of surrender, of whining and waiting, in spite of the enormous number of obstacles encountered by Africa and her diaspora. It is essential that we find OUR OWN solutions in all areas, whether agriculture, healthcare, economy, culture, politics, education or sport. In order to do that our African countries must set up a large number of vibrant and innovative structures in order to stimulate creativity and the desire for culture, as well as to develop the practical side and bring projects to fruition.” (B. T.)
In order to achieve an independent space for the visual arts, Bandjoun Station has been conceived as a place for art production and exhibition. It’s foremost objective is a creative workshop where to gather and support fellow artists. For this purpose, accommodation in Bandjoun Station House are specifically thought for those artists who will create/produce on the premises and participate in the in situ creation of exceptional works and monumental pieces that require a lot of space for their realization. All guests are able to work on their own projects, appropriate to the human and natural context of the site, and to propose activities and events, whether in the local region, further afield in Cameroon, or abroad. Besides residencies programs, temporary and permanent exhibitions, Bandjoun Station’s mission is to establish a fervid dialog with the local community. To pursuit such an objective, the center is engaged in broad-spectrum activities which range from poetry evenings and screenings, to concerts by local singers, and even wedding parties.
The complex
The artistic adventure is constructed around two separate buildings: an art center on three storeys (25 m high) and the living space on four levels (22 m high), held up by solid pillars of reinforced concrete. At the top of the structure is a gable, 11 metres high and covered by a structure in the form of a double pyramid, which, with its tapered roof, echoes the centuries’ old local architectural tradition. In order to avoid rainwater damage the walls are covered with mosaics, whose designs are drawn from Toguo’s graphic universe.
A wall of mirrored glass, reflecting the blue of the sky, protects the art within from sunlight and adds a discreet elegance, a transparent touch of modernity, to the building. The building work took place over two years, between 2005 and 2007.
The first building is divided into five levels, each one covering 120 m². The basement houses a space for lectures and screenings and a reading room. The first and second floors are dedicated to temporary exhibitions, whilst the third floor is houses a permanent, internationally-oriented collection. Inclined to avoid the pitfall of the ‘African art ghetto’, the works have been pieced together by Toguo himself, through exchanges with friends and collectors from all over the world. A glass corridor on the second floor enables visitors to pass between the two buildings. A beautiful piece of architecture, the building has stunning views of the gardens and of Bandjoun.
The second building is built over four floors. Three bedrooms and a living room find place at the ground level, while twelve studios, both for workshops and accomodation, are located at the first and second floors. The third floor houses a vast, open and shared work space whilst a large mezzanine effectively doubles the dimensions of the fourth floor which serves as private apartment.
A third space, an interior courtyard of 300 m², is designed as an open-air theatre, whose stage faces a grass-covered audiorium. Plays, readings, concerts, performances and dinners usually take place there.
The agriculture project
In order to expand the parameters of this ambitious artistic and cultural building protect, the founder artist decided in addition to use three hectares of land for a project that integrates artistic and agricultural elements. Quoting Toguo: “This way of combining both environmental issues and social experimentation sets an example for the local youth; it is a way of creating a dynamic and equitable relationship between guests and hosts, as well as of demonstrating the central importance of agriculture in our quest to become self-sufficient in food production. It is a strong political statement; our artistic breeding ground will in turn give birth to a coffee plantation, a critical act which magnifies the artistic gesture and powerfully critiques what Léopold Sédar Senghor has called “the deterioration of the terms of exchange, in other words the lowering of prices for export imposed by the West which punishes and impoverishes the farmers of the South””.
Besides the already-existing 2500 ft of coffee plantation, the Bandjoun Station team has planted 4000 fruit trees during last summer. (among them Banana, Avocad, Mango, Orange and Palm). Furthermore, two ha of land have been placed at the local community’s disposal for onion and tomatoes plantations.
Information compiled from Bandjoun Station’s official website and from an interview to Barthélémy Toguo (http://philagrafika.blogspot.com)
