OLÂM artwork : Evoking the colonial process through abstraction

The work OLÂM illustrates a poem of the same name that I wrote in 2022 in Montreal.

I was coming out of the exhibition: “Indigenous voices today: knowledge, trauma, resilience” at the McCord Museum.

I was extremely moved by the stories of past suffering and still-deep wounds linked to the process of dispossession and then assimilation suffered by the native populations of Canada…

These stories of dispossession, uprooting, violence, immense pain caused by the colonial invasion, took me back to my own family history.

My maternal grandparents were born in Cameroon in the 1920s.

Colonization has left stigmata, holes in family stories, visible and invisible evils.

This fresco evokes this breaking point in the history of peoples dispossessed of their original cultures, their spiritualities, their ancestral ways of life.

It tells the transition from animist rites to Christian worship. It shows the transformation of traditional societies forced to abandon their knowledge.

It evokes the dictate of standardization that came to replace polymorphic and holistic visions of life.

In my abstract artistic language, reading is done through symbols that speak of nature, traditions, beliefs, heartbreak, religion…

Shapes and colors build a language, supported by words in Mbo and Ewondo, the dialects spoken in my maternal family.

The work OLÂM is a personal project, a work that I needed to create as a tribute to my ancestors.

It’s a trace, an ex-voto. A message of hope for people whose scars are struggling to heal.