"Les Inconnues" | 2012 | stamps | etchings | Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Les Inconnues | A Performance In Writing
Les Inconnues
During her residency in Senegal and Gabon, Mba Bikoro starts to play and displace the symbols of bank notes and visa entry stamps. In that period she starts a chain of correspondences to anonymous individuals by creating her own 3rd class postage stamps with the famous silhouette of the protagonist character seen in the printwork series of Alice In Wonderland. Some postage stamps hold the portraits of old residents from Senegal St Louis whose identity remain a mystery, Les Inconnues proposes a way to retrieve, activate or create the lost identities by calling out the public in the hope that these would be recognised and their stories retold. The correspondences to Gabon make a particular critique on the lack of monitoring and breach of human rights in the postage system, illustrating the growing frustrations, pressures and isolations of communities struggling between modernity and tradition. Posts are opened before they even arrive to the correspondee or never arrive. Which makes the possibility of exchange and encounter impossible, and this remains the responsibility of authoritive powers governed by over 40 years of continual dictatorship and regressive levels of development. In the attemptive retrieval of these identities, the postage stamps not only potentially give a voice to individual and collective experiences that were never written down, they also ensure a poetic legacy that these stories survive and are not forgotten. Mba Bikoro wanted to demonstrate in this work that the modern and the archaic, the traditional archive/document and the contemporary exist in a multilayered fashion, and that they can enrich one another.
The disruptions, problems and losses that result from the tension between tradition and modernity are also the theme of The Uncomfortable Truth (2010) and NonIdentity (2011).
The disruptions, problems and losses that result from the tension between tradition and modernity are also the theme of The Uncomfortable Truth (2010) and NonIdentity (2011).
image: "Alice" | from series of stamps produced by Nathalie Mba Bikoro | commercially in circulation via the Royal Mail
1st class postal stamps | edition of 10 | circulation 2012-13 worldwide
sample letter with stamp in circulation worldwide 2012-13