Recently, the commercial television station CNN International ran advertisements praising Africa as a future investment prospect and predicting high growth rates. In the so-called developed countries, the great lack of information about this continent is in proportion to its deficient – by Western standards – growth in prosperity, with the exception of reports on genocide, threats to whip English women teachers and the general injustices perpetrated by various regimes. The artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, who grew up in Cameroon, creates his installations against the background of this European naivety.
In the entrance area of the Milton Keynes Gallery hang panels of various companies that obviously trade and offer services in Africa: including European businesses. The names of the African industries in »Wall Street« (2004) are little known. For this reason, it is unclear at first whether the plain, digitally printed logos without any Photoshop-generated drop shadows or colour gradients belong to real companies. At the end of the entrance hall hang illuminated display cases with designs for the »Afro« (2004), a common currency designed by Tayou for the continent. They bear the motto »We trust in Pascale Marthine Tayou«. In the next room, the Paris-based artist presents »HUMAN BEING @ WORK« (2007), ten different realities of commercial production, most of them from Africa – with two exceptions from Europe and one from Asia. But even these are not all that different from those of the Dark Continent: manual work is shown, or industrial production with a large proportion of manual work. These documentary video works are shown on monitors and projected by projectors on, in and from temporary wooden huts, some at ground level, some on high stilts.
As well as the references to economic realities of the African countries that Tayou records on film – mostly his home country, Cameroon – he also shows fragments of other present-day political and social contexts. The photo wall »Men with Guns« (2007) tacitly documents armed men in the everyday confusion; »Jpegafrica/Africagift« (2006) piles up crumpled paper print-outs of African flags; on the surrounding walls hang over-lifesized fingernails with red nail polish, »Nails« (2007); in another room, finally, there is love and communication: colourfully decorated glass figures of both sexes, »He« and »She« (2007), stand in the middle of a room that also has love graffiti, »Love letters / Graffiti love« (2003-2007), figure drawings, »Les Flaneurs« (2002), and material pictures made from sticks of chalk, »Charcoal« (2007). In a concise form, Tayou presents human violence and passion from a Cameroonian point of view.
Nonetheless, the interpersonal realities in this exhibition are shaped by economic reality. If the video images of »Menschen@Arbeit« are to be believed, African economy does not differ much from European or Asian versions. A common currency like the euro seems to be a very plausible model – this has already been implemented at a visual level at least: in a window display case of the gallery, one can see »play« Afro bank notes. Tayou appears to take an amused, yet pragmatic stance on this issue, not dissimilar to the companies in the CNN advertisement. Africa is a continent with economic potential and not a backwards tribal area. Perhaps the national structures just need to be thrown over and replaced by the power of love and eroticism.
But how does violence relate to economy and love? How do the machine-gun bearers in the unnamed African surroundings differ from their European counterparts? The soldier in Belfast struts about at the order of the state to demonstrate the power of law; the soldier with his rifle at the ready at the Gare de l’Est in Paris is meant to convey a feeling of security from terrorism. In each case, it is the political state entity that is speaking through these armed people. The individuals in Tayou’s photographs appear to want to bolster, not a state structure, but local balances of power, as was also the case with recent European wars. Tayou’s observation is thus of a relativising nature with regard to other continents.
Life in Africa is only one variant of human behavioural patterns that cannot be assessed in terms of qualitative criteria. Africa is not a »backward« continent, as many economist maintain, but an arena for human relationships like other places. Places like Milton Keynes, where Tayou has photographically collected the visual emotional expressions of local residents for his big wall installation »Love letters / Graffiti love« (2003-07). It includes linguistic hodge-podges lacking in grammatical correctness ranging from »Sounso wah« to »Ich liebe Dir«, which cause all PISA students to lose their nerve. Here, as there, there is a need for economic change that gives scope for human stupidity and lovableness to join hands.
Translated by Timothy Jones