Mallory Lowe Mpoka Artist’s family photo archive on an indigo dyed cotton, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Red Earth: Mallory Lowe Mpoka’s Haptic Archives

The earth is red in the western highlands of Cameroon. Its ferralitic soils have diffuse boundaries; an assemblage of low-activity clays with oxide minerals — hematite and goethite, iron ore, aluminum — accounts for their shades of ochre and umber. In the gently sloping Grasslands — the ancestral territories of the Bamileke people — the red soil nourishes the roots of Indigofera tinctoria and Lonchocarpus cyanescens. For centuries, ancestral knowledge of the transformation of these indigo-bearing plants into Ndop textiles that transmit story and cultural value has been passed between generations.

In the high plateaus of this red-soiled region, along the line of volcanic swells that run from the Atlantic Ocean, sits Bandjoun Station. The cultural and artistic project founded by Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo in 2013 has forged deep ties among local communities and artists, as well as the confrères of the diaspora.¹ 1 - Barthélémy Toguo, “Bandjoun Art Station: The Importance of a Peripheral Institution in Cameroon,” interview by Esther Poppe, Contemporary And (website), February 27, 2020, accessible online. It is here that Mallory Lowe Mpoka, a second-generation Cameroonian-Belgian artist working between Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and Douala, began experimenting with her family’s photographic archives in her ongoing textile project Architecture of the Self: These Places that Live With(in) Us.