My great-grandmother is said to have been captured pregnant with my grandfather. The family only paid for the freedom of my grandfather and she was left to die. My family has many stories of loss. My artistic process is an attempt to trace the shapes of a loss that is hard to name, unpleasant to remember. It is a gap in memory that is impossible to fill, can only be related to. I am compelled to explore and search for ways to exist in this, so I tell stories. A fiction that may, in images or in words, help me glimpse where I (we) have been so I can understand where I am. For the last ten years I have been thinking about the Lukasa, a Luba hand-held, wooden mnemonic device used to both code and read history. Its shape resembles a body with the surface coded with pearls of different colors. A society of Mbudye would be the only ones capable of reading them. Reading was remembering and performing history. My drawing practice is me reading my body, which I see as a Lukasa, a code of history. I draw myself, objects from my family archive, and objects from the national archives. I see drawing as a decoding technique, the truest connection to stored memory, emotions. So my job is to expose my body to objects and do exercises like drawing silence and dancing words and see how my hand might “remember” Something.
I begin my work in drawing because the languages I know best (Swedish and French) are also languages that have no words for me. Language is filled with information. Information that commits violence, deflects, morphs, and frames the world.
The image in itself is language, I am aware of this and work within these different challenges. I use drawing to build stories. I am trying to enrich my personal language in my attempts to express history, stories and voices. Drawing is a way I can speak, bypassing language.
Images:
01.
A biography in charcoal (2024) Charcoal on canvas, 500 x 190 cm. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger (cropped)
02.
My great grandmother’s self-portrait (2024) Crayon, acrylic and oil on canvas, 140 x 210 cm. Photo: Kayo Mpoyi
03.
Dressed up in our Sunday clothes (2025) Drypoint and monotype, 40 x 50 cm. Photo: Kayo Mpoyi
