Hybridization, syncretism, interbreeding: these three words come to mind when you dive into the radiant universe of Barbara Asei Dantoni, three words which express precisely how much her “totem creations” are the meeting-point of several dimensions in perpetual interaction.
They come from the meeting of forms, spiritualities, and plural cultures, both her own (Franco-Italian-Cameroonian) and also those of other geographies. Having been nourished by all these influences, which have all left their imprint, the artist has established her own vocabulary born, as she specifies, “from colours, patterns, geometric figures, which seem to call together African ornaments, Italian gilding, and Amazonian crowns, as if borrowing from nature and the animal world…” Hence a feeling of familiarity which emerges at first sight, but which dissipates imperceptibly, because Asei Dantoni takes us to an elsewhere, on the threshold of the sacred and the tangible.
Prêt de l’artiste et de la galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris | Courtesy of the artist
and galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris © 2023 – Serenah Pictures/Institut français
du Cameroun
She opens up a space that African vernacular traditions have never really closed, butting into and shaking up the religions of the Book. Asei Dantoni’s works are thus charged as were traditional masks—a condition for being efficient during rituals—and any object intended for animist worship. Preparing for the artistic act could be assimilated to a rite of passage, not to celebrate an event or a change of state, but to access another dimension. In this, her repetitive gestures are comparable to a form of meditation and communication with the invisible. Between trance and abandonment. Maybe this is why a kind of nobility emerges from her shimmery masks, an ancestral power emerges from her hypnotic compositions, why her works are quite simply alive? They are embodied, ready to take part in a fictional ceremony to celebrate
cultural diversity.
Inversely, Asei Dantoni deals with the loss of this link with the invisible in the West, a gap opened up in the Age of Enlightenment, which intended to rationalise and understand the world through science, to master
nature by exploiting it and sorting it into categories. A sin of pride that has cut us off from a momentum that has been appearing as an absolute since the dawn of time and which today calls for restoring harmony
between human beings and nature, with humankind
being part of a Whole.
“There is something intimate at play, where spiritual, family, and identity questions are superimposed.”
Prêt de l’artiste et de la galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris | Courtesy of the artist and
galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris © 2023 – Serenah Pictures/Institut français
du Cameroun
“Some ceremonies are important in the daily life of non-Western societies, to bring together a collective and for group cohesion. In Western societies that have erased popular cultures, we have created individualistic models where the model is everyone for themselves.
However, there is no question of glorifying non-Western societies where everything is not perfect,” explains the artist.
Paper deities
An alchemist or shaman, Barbara Asei Dantoni transforms paper or leather into precious materials which she assembles and superimposes—the strata of history and memory—revealing motifs which are by no means decorative. “For me, the pattern is symbolic,” she says, “That is to say that it will allow me to appeal to an imagination often linked to nature (evoking animals or plants) while discerning in it several things at the same time.” There is always something out of kilter, an ambiguity as in these three works, Ka, Maya, Amao: the blood-colored lozenge, stretched and split in the middle, evokes a female sex, but also a diamond nestled in the heart of green vegetation.
Prêt de l’artiste et de la galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris | Courtesy of the artist
and galerie Cécile Dufay, Paris © 2023 – Serenah Pictures/Institut français
du Cameroun
There is something intimate at play, where spiritual, family, and identity questions are superimposed. The artist will condense them into a single vital question: “What is really between the roots and the sky ?”
One of the starting points of her research was inspired by the “passport masks” often seen in Central Africa, and in particular in Cameroon. These small mask figures allowed the wearer to attest to their filiation, their membership in a group and therefore to their identity. The criteria are therefore quite variable, depending on era and country, for defining what the notion of identity refers to, with all the abject ideological excesses that it can carry. This is how her series of Imaginary Identities was born, an artistic project freed from all doctrinal shackles, which she continues today and which she presents as part of the exhibition, Memoria: accounts from another History.
Instagram : @barbara.aseidantoni
Written by Stéphanie Pioda
This text is an extract from the catalog “Memoria Yaoundé”, published to coincide with the exhibition Memoria: récits d’une autre Histoire, presented at the Musée national du Cameroun from 10 February to 31 July 2023, as part of the tour of the exhibition of the same name presented in 2021 at the Frac Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, and in 2022 at the Musée des cultures contemporaines Adama Toungara, Abidjan.
The catalogue can be downloaded free here: Memoria Yaoundé