Mpoka was summoned back to this place on her father\u2019s ancestral land by a weathered black-and-white family photograph that pictures him in a crisp white boubou<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aa tunic traditionally worn by Cameroonian Muslims. Beside him is his step-brother, wearing a checked button-up shirt and belled denim trousers. Their hands are joined by a ginger flower, indigenous to the region, in a gesture that bridges tradition and globalized modernity. Vernacular images like these were common in post-independence Cameroon during the \u201cgolden age\u201d of studio photography. In the nation\u2019s capital, Yaound\u00e9, and the port city of Douala, ordinary people were using photography to document who they were and what they wanted to become\u200a\u2014\u200atheir images forged the world they dreamed of inhabiting. The back of the photograph bears the faded stamp of the studio: Photo Technique N\u2018SAMBA, 25 Mai 1973. Following this indication, Mpoka travelled to Douala and to her family village of Batoufam in search of the photography studios that reshaped the country\u2019s visual landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Architecture of the Self<\/em> combines experimentation with natural dyeing, screen-printing, embroidery, self-portraiture, cultural bricolage, and land-based learning as tools for the construction of diasporic identity.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - See Christine Checinska, \u201cAesthetics of Blackness? Cloth, Culture, and the African Diasporas,\u201d Textile<\/em> 16, no. 2 (April 3, 2018) and \u201c\u2018Cut & Mix\u2019: Collage, Creolisation and African Diaspora Aesthetics,\u201d ISSUE<\/em> 9 (2020): 46\u200a\u2013\u200a60.<\/span> Mpoka reworks her family photographs haptically. In her studies of the visual archives of the African diaspora, Black feminist theorist and historian Tina Campt attends to the hapticdimensions of photographic images.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - See Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).<\/span> Family photographs, she argues, are intended not only to be seen, but to be touched<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ato be handed from one person to the next. In her work on creolized material culture, theorist Christine Checinska notes that cloth accrues cultural memory and meaning in a similar way as craft techniques and family heirlooms are passed from one generation to the next. \u201cCloth can be cut, worked, embellished, manipulated, and transformed, then folded, packed, and transported across the continents\u200a\u2014\u200a[it is] on the move just as the people that make and use it.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Checinska, \u201cAesthetics of Blackness?,\u201d 119.<\/span> Working at the intersection of photography and Black queer craft, Mpoka touches, transforms, recontextualizes, and displays her family\u2019s photographic archive, returning these images to the ferralitc earth in order to restitch the threads of kinship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Transforming the clay-rich soil into pigment is a slow, meditative process. Mpoka gathers soil in a bag braided from multi-coloured plastic, unearthing stories embedded in the soil\u2019s ancient crystalline structures. It smells of petrichor in the morning light. As she walks the land, she develops kinship with the humid soil that archives human and more-than-human histories of the sub-Saharan region. Motherland, ancestral lineage, belonging: the red earth carries multiple connotations. In West Africa, it is made into clay and moulded into the compressed mud bricks that are used to build houses. Rooted within it is the burden of a colonial past that is ongoing. After Mpoka gathers the soil, she crushes, soaks, and sifts the particulate matter of earth sediments to make pigments. This past summer, at the Villa Lena Foundation artist\u2019s residency in Tuscany, she developed a prototype for a fresco constructed from an assemblage of fifty linen and cotton panels hand-dyed with these red earth pigments varying from burnt ochres to dull yellow. One panel is screen-printed with a portrait of her grandfather in a white suit. On another, her grandmother appears in a short frock. Mpoka asserts herself into the lineage in a series of self-portraits, directing her archival interventions toward the production of memory that is also a revisioning of the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reminiscent of the compressed red-earth brick dwellings of West Cameroon\u200a\u2014\u200aand also of Faith Ringgold\u2019s decorative Street Story Quilt<\/em> (1985) and Francesca Woodman\u2019s monumental collage Blueprint for a Temple<\/em> (1980)\u200a\u2014\u200athe grid-like structure of Mpoka\u2019s prototype evokes the role of architecture in the construction of the social identity of the Bamileke people. As J. M. Kamegne\u200a\u2014\u200aan aide to the fo<\/em>, or ruler in Bandjoun\u200a\u2014\u200aputs it, \u201cIt is not enough to be somebody, you must prove that you have what it takes to be who you are. You must build.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - J. M. Kamegne quoted in Dominique Malaquais, \u201cYou Are What You Build: Architecture as Identity Among the Bamileke of West Cameroon,\u201d Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review<\/em> 5, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 21\u200a\u2013\u200a35.<\/span> But instead of displaying status and wealth, the artist\u2019s assemblage of panels makes visible the lived experience of cultural plurality that marks the lives of individuals and communities of mixed heritage. Foregrounding migration and exchange, cultures collide and coalesce in her practice: the childhood image of Mpoka\u2019s father reappears affixed to stuffed cotton Milanese patches. Hers is a practice of building belonging between places, gesturing toward the construction of Black aesthetics as a habitat formed across the African diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mpoka\u2019s new work continues these explorations of the haptic registers of her family archive. She sews hand-dyed threads into the skin of images and traces the contours of her ancestors with red earth. Her fingerprints\u200a\u2014\u200aboth an indexical trace and a signifier of mobility and surveillance\u200a\u2014\u200amark the images, attesting to the ways in which Black communities have mobilized vernacular photography, even passport photos compelled by the state, to affirm their capacity to re-create worlds elsewhere. The feeling of these images is transformed in her hands and by her heart. The colour and tactile feel of the soil between the fingers help to rebuild affective relations with her family. Soliciting connections with past and future generations, with land, and with all the variously positioned subjects who encounter them, Mpoka\u2019s haptic images are about touching and being touched, and about the affective connections that photography and cloth together allow her to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Senegal\u2019s Dak\u2019Art 2022, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art\u200a\u2014\u200aone of the longest-running biennales on the continent\u200a\u2014\u200aMpoka presented her artistic research in dialogue with the Oslo-based queer textile artist Damien Ajavon. Together, their collaborative installation Espace-Temps<\/em> (2022) for the Off-satellite program, organized by Senegalese textile artist A\u00efssa Dione, takes the form of an artisanal workshop tucked into a corner of Galerie Atiss Dakar. Whereas Ajavon\u2019s work draws on weaving techniques from the Manjak textile tradition of Senegal, Mpoka explores the material and cultural histories of Ndop cloth\u200a\u2014\u200aan indigo resist-dyed textile with such deep cultural significance that it was recently classified as a Cameroonian national heritage\u200a\u2014\u200awhile tracing connections to nineteenth-century European denim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Espace-Temps<\/em>, a five-metre textile piece with a repeating pattern of rectangles is poised in a sewing machine on an artisan\u2019s bench in the centre of the tableau vivant<\/em>. Alongside, spools of thread line the wall. Interweaving ancestral African and diasporic knowledges, Mpoka incorporates water-based batik and couture sewing with rich geometric and figurative Ndop symbolism, her knowledge of which comes through her ongoing personal research as well as exchanges, during her summer residency at Jean-F\u00e9licien Gacha Foundation, with traditional Cameroonian knowledge holder Idrissou Njoya, personal artisan of the king in the Foumban chiefdom. For the Bamileke people, indigo is not only the colour of the sky but that of nobility, the supernatural, and the ancestors.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Jean Bernard Nguiafing and Daniela Ulieriu, \u201cLes motifs du Ndop,\u201d in Ndop : \u00e9toffes des cours royales et soci\u00e9t\u00e9s secr\u00e8tes du Cameroun<\/em>, ed. Ly Dumas (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2020), 59.<\/span> Signifying wealth, abundance, and fertility, and asserting royal status in the Grasslands kingdoms, Ndop textiles\u200a\u2014\u200amuch like family photographs\u200a\u2014\u200aare a significant part of family heritage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Reflecting on family and cultural heritage while subtly interrogating the imbrication of racial capitalism in the material histories of trade, Mpoka\u2019s installation aims to both preserve and reinterpret this ancestral textile practice. Rather than working with the traditional hand-dyed cotton, Mpoka takes as her raw material Europe\u2019s discarded textiles, which have their own diasporic stories to tell. Like Walter Benjamin\u2019s ragpicker, she collects second-hand denim from shops in the Douala Market, close to her uncle\u2019s handbag workshop. The streets surrounding the market are continually transformed by ephemeral mountains of clothes spit out by the Western fashion industry. In Kenya, these clothes are called mitumba<\/em> (bundles); in Ghana, they are called obroni wawu<\/em> (dead white men\u2019s clothes). In Espace-Temps<\/em>, Mpoka weaves the refuse\u200a\u2014\u200aof photography and fabrics\u200a\u2014\u200ainto haptic assemblages that critically engage the transnational trajectories of the garment industry while reimagining the possibilities of Black futurity across the diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Responding to the movement of diasporic knowledge, exchange networks, and colonial entanglements, Mpoka\u2019s installation alludes to the intertwined history of blue jeans, indigo, and the transatlantic slave trade. Indigo-dyed denim has roots in seventeenth-century Genoa, Italy, where waxed work pants were produced, and in Nimes, France, from where it takes its contracted name (de N\u00eemes<\/em>). But it was enslaved Africans who carried the vernacular knowledge of indigo to the United States, where they transformed it into dye on plantations through a complex process involving fermentation. By intervening in this \u201cbotanical conflict,\u201d Mpoka\u2019s haptic engagements with ancestral craft knowledge invokes the political histories and anticolonial struggles focused around soil.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, \u201cThe Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,\u201d Third Text<\/em> 32, no. 2\u200a\u2013\u200a3 (2018): 163\u200a\u2013\u200a75.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Natal alienation is the name given by sociologist Orlando Patterson to one of the constitutive mechanisms of slavery: the permanent separation from one\u2019s kin.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).<\/span> This deliberate destruction of links of birth, in both ascending and descending generations, aimed to break the ties of social relations that connect the enslaved to their people and place of birth by destroying heritage and kinship structures. Struggling against this \u201cinheritance of disinheritance,\u201d Mpoka\u2019s involvements with vernacular photographic archives and Black queer craft are part of a larger movement of collective reinheritance<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aa practice of refusal that reclaims cultural knowledge and reconnects kinship across a haunted sea.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Grace Kyungwon Hong, \u201cBlues Futurity and Queer Improvisation,\u201d in Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 95\u200a\u2013\u200a124.<\/span> While recognizing how family has been mobilized under patriarchal capitalism as a site of gendered exploitation of women\u2019s labour, reproductive and otherwise, her work is a practice of critical inheritance<\/em> that rejects the violent interruption of the thread that links past, present, and future generations through meaningful kinship relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, if Mpoka\u2019s haptic engagements register a practice of refusal, they are also, and even more, a practice of affirmation that pays homage to the empowerment and artistry of West African textile traditions.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Practising refusal means forging connections with family and land, while acknowledging the reality of living between worlds\u200a\u2014\u200aon the borderlands<\/em> that queer Chicana poet Gloria Anzald\u00faa theorizes\u200a\u2014\u200anever belonging to either, but marking the liminal in-between space as a profoundly fertile place of reimagining otherwise.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Gloria Anzald\u00faa, Borderlands\/La Frontera: The New Mestiza<\/em> (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In line with the theme of Dak\u2019Art 2022, \u0128 Ndaffa#<\/em> (forger), Mpoka\u2019s work engages ruins\u200a\u2014\u200aof home and nation, of the archive, of families fractured by time and geography\u200a\u2014\u200ato forge a place<\/em> where new dreams might be crafted out of remnants. Summoned by animate land, listening to it, transmitting its knowledge and its stories, the artist\u2019s haptic family archive seeks the resumption of threads of kinship passed on through intergenerational vectors of transmission\u200a\u2014\u200athe voice, the hand, and the soil. Mpoka\u2019s work does more than reconstruct human relations. In attending to the desires and violences that coalesce in soil, it also solicits human-soil relations. The Cameroonian red earth that traverses her work\u200a\u2014\u200afrom the photographs of Black bodies emerging from red clay waters and returning their bones to it in her self-portraits at her grandfather\u2019s grave\u200a\u2014\u200aestablishes a kinship with soil as the material that sustains life through its process of vital decomposition. The pungent smell of decay released from her family\u2019s archive\u200a\u2014\u200athis is the smell of life itself as the condition for kinship.<\/p>\n![\"mallory-lowe-mpoka-family-archive\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_FamilyPhotoArchive_2021_28_CMYK.jpg\")
Artist\u2019s family photo archives on stuffed Tuscanese cotton, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_ArchitectureoftheSelf-These-Places-that-Live-(With)in-Us-2022\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_ArchitectureoftheSelf-ThesePlacesthatLiveWithinUs_2022_26_CMYK.jpg\")
These Places that Lives Within Us<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka-family-village's-red-earth-2021\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_familyvillagesreadearth_2021_03_CMYK.jpg\")
Artist family\u2019s village red earth, Batoufam, Cameroon, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka-Deborah-grandmotherinthefamilyhousebuiltbyherlatehusband_2021\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_Deborah-grandmotherinthefamilyhousebuiltbyherlatehusband_2021_10_CMYK.jpg\")
Deborah, the artist’s grandmother, Batoufam, Cameroon, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka-Espace-Temps-2022\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_Espace-Temps_2022_15_CMYK.jpg\")
Espace-Temps<\/em>, installation view,
Atiss Gallery, Dakar, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka-Deborah's-Tale-2020\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_DeborahsTale_2020_01_CMYK.jpg\")
Deborah’s Tale<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka-talking-by-her-grandfather's-sacred-tree-with-Jean-Paul-the-family-house-caretaker-2021\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO07_Fulton_Mallory-Lowe-Mpoka_talkingbyhergrandfathers-sacredtreewithJean-Paulhefamilyhousecaretaker_2021_06_CMYK.jpg\"){kind=icon}
Artist talking by her grandfather’s sacred tree, <\/em>Batoufam, Cameroon, 2021.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n