Curated by Art Bakery’s Goddy Leye and me in 2009, Elopement was an exchange project between Art Bakery in Cameroon and HMK {Hotel MariaKapel} in The Netherlands.
From the pressrelease:
“To elope means to take flight or slip away, usually with amorous intentions. We are eloping with Art Bakery in order to temporarily work closely together with a friendly institution abroad, hoping to broaden the horizon of all involved by literally having to work within each others structures. Encountering how somebody else is working (through operating within their framework) can unstitch some of your own automatisms. Finding yourself in a different artworld and working with different ingredients can refresh the approaches and viewpoints of all involved, whether they are artist, organizer or audience.”
For Elopement, Sander Veenhof, Steven Jouwersma and I went to Douala, Cameroon, for an intensive 3 week workperiod. During this time, Sander and Steven produced the NBEEP6 and Ngoso Bedima respectively. We organized evenings of screenings and discussions. Cameroonian artists Alioum Moussa, Justine Ngaga and Boris Nzebo Nzepang visited HMK later that year. Getting them to HMK proved a challenge due to visa regulations, and we decided to arrange a meeting titled an afternoon of dilemmas to elaborate on differences in mobility between artists in the Western world and those working elswhere. Guestspeakers for an afternoon of dilemmas were: Ton van Zantvoort, Robert Kluijver and Steven Jouwersma.
Full pressrelease Elopement
Project blog
