Em’kal Eyongakpa — negotiations — chapter 1-i, Dualaland-Paris — KADIST — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 22 → July 26, 2015

Em’kal Eyongakpa — Kadist Art Foundation Créé lors de sa résidence à la fondation Kadist, le projet « negotiations chapter 1-i, dualaland-paris » d’Em’kal Eyongakpa élabore... 1 - Pas mal Critique

Em’ kal Eyongakpa approaches the experienced, the unknown as well as collective histories, through a ritual use of repetitions and transformation. He works with photography, video, sculpture, text, sound and performance.

His residence at Kadist draws from a sonic experience during one of his Paris visits, in May 2013: “Walking pass a street in the neighborhood of Château Rouge, street vendors negotiating with their clients left me with a feeling of displacement and nostalgia — a sense of familiar sounds struggling in a Parisian architectural setting. The rhythmic currency, negotiation codes to product names, all perculiar to open markets public spaces across central and west Africa and the nuances inbetween.”

« Fumbua ! carton à 10 euros, 
bobolo ! 3 pour 2 euros, Safou, 8 à 5 euros, ceintures, arachide frais…. »

For his experiment, negotiations, chapter I-i, Em’kal Eyongakpa composes a fragmented narrative from sounds recorded in Paris and Douala, in selected informal market settings, transport routes with excerpts from natural soundscapes or spaces where the objects of these negotiations are extracted. 
In these spaces of negotiations, identities are in constant mutation as the ancient confronts set urban codes. The dynamics of these spaces usually tend to mirror “maximalist” urban variants of ethnic music; like Bikutsi in Cameroun, Congotronics in RDC or even Juju in Nigeria.


In negotiations I-i, the artist plays with undertones of negotiations and creolization of these highly political spaces. He attempts a dialogue between the intense anthrophony of these spaces in and with a “white cube”.

« How could one capture the beautiful essence or energies of these spaces of constant negotiations without over-altering the « maximalist » nature of the loud and seemingly chaotic environments. »