Photo: courtesy of the artist
Red Earth: Mallory Lowe Mpoka’s Haptic Archives
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.
