image: family Bikoro photograph 1959 | courtesy of Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Where it all began..
"When Nathalie was a little girl growing on the rivers and lakes of Bitam, her first paintings were on water. She painted on water for hours with her fingers, with her toes, with her mouth and her words. She made the lines grow into ripples. She said she had to draw hard and blow the water very loud so that the lines could travel all the way to the other side of the river bank so that the creatures could hear her and message back. Sometimes she collected this water in a bucket and presented it to us in the family house and said that our ancestors in the forests sent their messages to us. She then took the bucket threw the water on the road and gardens and blessed the terrains. A little later not long before we left to Europe, Nathalie had started to paint using the earth soils and vegetations as her canvasses. She use to dig shallow holes and sew long leaves and branches through the earth like a basket, making a tissage of laced nature buried on the ground, burying her worries and pains then she would throw water or sing to it. Her canvasses became bigger when she started to invent and play games with her friends in the forests, making stories and talking to ghosts. Over 20 years later in her young adulthood, the lakes and rivers in Bitam have vanished because of deforestations and the roads are now covered with concrete but my daughter does not change. She uses her body as her canvas, she uses her voice to make dialogues, she collects to share stories form very far, and she plays her narratives of life suspended between innocence and tragedy. With my daughter I got to understand my own history and I am seeing who I am for the first time in my life."
written by Papa Mba Bikoro 2012
written by Papa Mba Bikoro 2012
In 1989, I was diagnosed with Leukeamia cancer in childhood in Gabon. At the time, there were still no adequate hospital treatment care for this type of illness. Gabon had difficult political periods, at times unstable with cases of kidnapping in suburbs. It was my grandfather who orchestrated the leave for me and my parents to get treatment in Holland for 4 years then continuing in France. It was a very long time, after 10 years of treatment and 15 years until fully remissioned, that I came back to Gabon. In my return my grandfather had Parkinsons and died within weeks. The family was fractured and united, living in unexpected poverty and at times living in deep lies and betrayals. It’s never easy to return and Cesaire said it most eloquently.
In 1994, I had extensive bone operations and reconstructions after being beaten up on a weekly basis by other children in French schools who had thought that the hospital corset that I was wearing for treatment made me look like an alien or robot and therefore gave them the license to hit me as hard as they could in order to see better of the truth they were looking for or simply to win their bets amongst each other. It made them closer together, for the first time the kids collaborated and did something together and agreed on one thing together. For the first time I learned how to be the excluded. I was too disciplined and afraid in keeping the promises of my mother that I was forbidden to hurt another human being just on the grounds that someone else could hurt you. My mother had to change me into 5 different schools and had to school me at home for 1 year. She was loving and deeply hurt that her own country would not allow the peace for her metisse child to grow. This was a very small village in the mountains. After 21 years, France remains a village.
In 1996, a French Catholic private school had told me that I could not practice religious studies because ‘I wasn’t worthy to be a child of God’. The sisters during morning mess consequently excluded me from any activities took me by the ear as an ‘example of the devil’, pushed me in a corner facing the wall and placed a donkey’s hat on my head as punishment, which 14 years later I found out in a Museum in Germany that these hats were used during 16th century Europe as a form of punishment and making public display and looting. The local priest in the village refused to ever offer me a baptisation because I was one of ‘them’. It took me 12 years to find out who was the ‘other’ he had meant. It caused my family lot of challenges to overcome and made me very insecure and left out of the community. Religion in Gabon and most of Africa is very important and highly practiced, and in Gabon there is sometimes a lot of prejudice for those not following. My creative activities were disregarded by teachers and was only encouraged from my late teens.
In 2004 was the first encounter of developing my practice into live art performances. I reflected a lot on my medical treatments, kemo therapy that I undertook which was without a doubt the biggest influence to the way I work now. Using the body to develop a particular language, an expression, a voice and an interactivity with others. This is the time I call the exorcism period where I had to balance these energies, processes and knowledge into feeding my work as a practitioner into a visual form that could be formulated for others to engage in or a space of questioning and discovery and release.
By 2012, the performance works, far from being enframed as a theatrical process, became all about political dialogue, responding to current environments and sharing stories and experiences of others in order not to solve problems but to develop them, develop communitas. It is only through this method that I am able to engage in material process and engage with it in a much clearer way and it now becomes much more accessible to audiences.
In 2009, my uncle and myself were kidnapped on the river Goue in central Gabon to cross from one village to another town. We were held in the village Ashouka where the villages were waiting to take us away to prepare our bodies which were going to be severely cut. Unfortunately through much corruption of ‘traditional’ performances, witchcraft and voodoo (typically old Greek practices exchanged with Africans during migratory trade exchanges), the people rely on oracles and ill treatments to make money for themselves. They wanted to cut off parts of our bodies (genitals and forehead) considered sacred so that they could be sold to a witch practitioner in South Africa which he would use to consult the futures of rich white South Africans today. My great grandfather died on this river in this way almost a century ago and every week a whole family is killed on the river for this reason as I was to discover after the event. We escaped simply because my uncle recognised the leader of the village and they went to school together as children. They let us go on a negotiated deal but we had to ram the wooden boat up the river for another 6 hours before we reached our destination. In 2010, a security officer checked our passports before crossing the border. The man just simply took my passport and burned it in front of me and said I could not go any further. They wanted to hold me in their barracks for the night they said. On this journey my uncles protected me and got some help so that we could all get out of there. The security men were drunk and dangerous and just needed a large sum of money for them to ignore us and let us through.
In 2009, on a journey from Libreville to Omboue, we passed a village where the inhabitants, of maybe 3-4 families, had been decapitated to death. Only the smell of corpses and the sound of flies took the space. It was possible that there was a conflict between two tribes that turned into tragedy. We found a little girl who was hidden and we had to take her to the nearest town. We left her for care in a family where the authorities were warned about what had happened on the grounds. She was cared for with another family. She did not speak. One year later, the same girl was reported missing. It’s likely that the same tribe who massacred her family came back for her wither to take her as a slave into their village, a prostitute and likely to be tortured to death into early teenagehood. She was never heard of or found again. Three years later after the massacre of the village, an investor had taken the land to create his own banana plantations and create a small auberge for passers by. These bananas are picked and hanged across the auberge like hanging bodies, a crude reminder of the memory and stench of the genocide only recently passed.
Visiting my grandfather in France during childhood was always a difficult playground. Every Christmas, as his joke, he would offer me and my cousin soap wrapped in tissue so that we would clean ourselves white. He was a hunter of deer and pork. He sat in his throne, a bent wooden kitchen chair on which he would lose his mind, body and life in 2011, surrounded by trophies of the dead heads of the animals he shot. He had three chickens he groomed during the year which he would kill every Christmas for dinner, cutting their heads off and their bodies running out of the garage into the garden chasing me. He smelled of welded metal and warm plucked chicken. He walks with a bent back and weighs like a black cloud and has feet with the heaviness of a secret guilt. Sometimes he has chicken feathers flying off his hands and feet. His breath was the sound of thunder. He had a fig tree with hidden snakes the colour of the branches and as silent as snow. My grandfather was a very lonely man and had wrapped his heart with ropes. He taught me how to grow a garden of fruit and vegetables. He was a great cook and fed me with sweet buns. It was a difficult playground but there was always laughter.
My grandmother was a fine lady full of love and stories of the war. She taught me how to grow a garden of herbs and flowers with names the sounds of fallen raindrops from a rainbow and the lightness and shine of snowflakes. She never saw any colours but she spoke by feeling and giving affections just as a dream should be. For my grandfather I was la petite Negresse who wasted expensive French soap at Christmas and was never as clean as a French should be, for my grandmother I remained simply la petite Nathalie.
In 1994, I was introduced to my new town doctor who would coordinate regular hospital medical checks every three months. Too early my doctor took interest in my case, so much so that my medical checks were every four weeks instead. My mother took me, got buried behind a curtain wall like a waterfall and I was alone with my doctor whom I had no courage to develop trust in and no courage to speak to him. His check was simple; he would put his white plastic glove on the left hand, then with his unprotected right hand he would put his index finger inside below my belly. He told me to be a brave girl and it would not hurt if I remain silent. I knew he was lying. This was my regular four week check for the next four years. This was normal routine. This was childhood. This was cancer treatment. He had no name, just Docteur, with crooked yellow teeth, tuna breath and he wore the soles of milk bottles on his eyes. It was only after four years that I realised that it should have been the white glove he should have been using. It was only after six years that I realised he never checked the rest of the body, broken many times. It was only 10 years later that I realised that it was no place for him down there and that he should have used no hands at all. He should have never been there. I knew he was lying but I didn’t stop it. I didn’t have the courage to trust him, no courage to speak to him, no courage to tell the truth, no courageto run or to tell mummy, just cowardice for keeping the disgusting secret.
That body, damn body. Never the right colour and broken too many times. In 1993, my mother put me into a catholic private school. Still under treatment for Leukeamia, I went to school with a hard corset around my body. My bones were weak. Sometimes I would come with seringe casts on my right arm. I became a myth. The children so curious would rather deal with their confusions upon encountering me by testing me and beating me enough so that I would remain still on the ground and would get punished by teacher because my blood stained the floor. They would find their resolve in this way. This remained our only communication with each other. I was a special case. Born French, I was black for the first time in my life. I saw colours for the first time in my life. I knew what adults meant when they said we are ‘divided’. I learned how to hate and fear for the first time. I learned betrayal for the first time. Corridor floors stained with my blood, I was a painter for the first time.
One boy, Nicolas, was the first friend I had in the classroom. He took my hand when I fell. He hugged me when I was lonely. He played with me when I was crying. He stood comfortably in the corner with me. One time he wanted to go to the bathroom but the teacher would not let him. He wet his pants. It smelled like eggs. The teacher went to open his pants but the zipper was stuck. I stood away and I laughed at him, just like the other kids. I made fun of him. It was the first time I betrayed my best friend, my only friend. It was the first time I laughed in school. It was the first time I left innocence and joined cruelty. The next morning, Nicolas took my hand when I fell, he hugged me when I was lonely, he played with me when I was crying and he continued this for the next 3 years.
During morning mess before classroom lessons, all kids recited their prayer in the school church. The headmaster, the priests and the nuns. It was the first time I met with faith, everyone recites words, eyes closed, that never connected with the day to come. A man, Jesus, stripped naked on a cross hanging like a chicken. A father, God never present, hidden behind white clouds and without identity, possibly could be Santa Claus. I looked, I listened, I mimicked and I performed. I followed because I was afraid. The nuns saw everything. In the middle of the sacred recitals, the nun took me by the ear, threw me in the corner and placed the donkey’s hat on my head. Then the priest said that God has chosen, ‘you will not arrive in heaven’. Hell is a white empty corner, hell is blindfold. Hell is the donkey’s hat for the next two years. Three years later, I was the witness to my best friend’s communion. She was nine years old. She said she will go to heaven for doing it. The passage to heaven was a bowl of water dropped onto her head. You had to get wet to prepare to go to heaven. I laughed. The laughter travelled in the echoes of the church. The laughter was accompanied by others. The priest then turned to me. He shot daggers into my eyes and said I will go to hell. I did not belong here he said. The last year before I left France, the father of a classmate of mine had died of cancer. He left his wife, 12 year old son and 6 year old daughter. Everyone went to his funeral at church. My mother forbid me to go. I felt so guilty to not be there and it was the first time I hated my mother. It was 10 years later that I heard the same priest was convicted for peodophelia. It was eleven years in the future before I came back into the church. It was 13 years later that I realised that my parents were shuned out of church community life by the priest. It was 14 years later that I found my Dad reading the Bible. It was 16 years later that I understood faith. It was 18 years later that I realised I was already with God.
It was 7 years after the end of my cancer treatment that I came back home with my father to our village Okok near Bitam, North of Gabon. Nothing had changed. The only thing that had changed were their eyes. For the first time in my life I became ‘white’. What a strange feeling to have lived as an ‘other’ all my life then come back home to feel like ‘another’ again. Home is both foreign and rooted. My hair was different, my accent was different, my thinking was different, my smell was different, my talking was different, my expression was different. The only things that had remained the same after the great separation was the dancing, the laughter, the composure. I learned my name again Auguezomo Mba. I heard my little name again Ebe. For the first time in 24 years I had brothers and sisters. I crunched peanuts again with my grandmother. The old lakes and rivers of before had dried up, so I now showered in a large black bucket with soap that looked a lot like grandfather’s. The bucket was cracked and full of stains from dead animals caught in the forests to eat. The aunts used it for the kitchen. The water always bleached red. I had a dream that I had mis-carried in it.
When I came back to Europe, for the first time I was ‘African’. I had been to my father’s home, I had sang with the sounds of the rainforests, I had stepped into elephant poo for the first time, I had my food stolen by a forest monkey for the first time, I had learned how to hunt animals, I had seen big things I had only imagined small, had unlearned what I was searching, had learned how to speak my name, I had laughed with my brothers and sisters, I had crossed the rivers of infested pirates and crocodiles and for the first time in 9 years I wore colours. The Deutsch wax was my new ‘black’. I wanted to remember and take the smell of my grandmother. I wanted to not forget her and my sisters.
In 2011, I came to Belo Horizonte in Brazil. I came as a foreigner, but for the first time I had ‘roots’. For the third time I had ‘family’.
When I presented my artworks publicly, for the first time I was ‘female’. When I had my godchildren Uche, Omar, Farrell and Alaina, for the first time I was ‘mother’. When I had my first child, I was called an artist who had ruined her career.
When my children grow, they will know what it is like to be female, male, white, black, home, foreigner, African, European, French, Polish, mother and father much much better than I will do. Because in hope, our children will have crossed all borders and find themselves together at the same place. Born on one planet, born without colour, without divisions. Born in celebrations of shared experiences. Their imaginations will be bigger. They will have understood it much much better than us all.
For everything to remain the same, everything must change.
In 1994, I had extensive bone operations and reconstructions after being beaten up on a weekly basis by other children in French schools who had thought that the hospital corset that I was wearing for treatment made me look like an alien or robot and therefore gave them the license to hit me as hard as they could in order to see better of the truth they were looking for or simply to win their bets amongst each other. It made them closer together, for the first time the kids collaborated and did something together and agreed on one thing together. For the first time I learned how to be the excluded. I was too disciplined and afraid in keeping the promises of my mother that I was forbidden to hurt another human being just on the grounds that someone else could hurt you. My mother had to change me into 5 different schools and had to school me at home for 1 year. She was loving and deeply hurt that her own country would not allow the peace for her metisse child to grow. This was a very small village in the mountains. After 21 years, France remains a village.
In 1996, a French Catholic private school had told me that I could not practice religious studies because ‘I wasn’t worthy to be a child of God’. The sisters during morning mess consequently excluded me from any activities took me by the ear as an ‘example of the devil’, pushed me in a corner facing the wall and placed a donkey’s hat on my head as punishment, which 14 years later I found out in a Museum in Germany that these hats were used during 16th century Europe as a form of punishment and making public display and looting. The local priest in the village refused to ever offer me a baptisation because I was one of ‘them’. It took me 12 years to find out who was the ‘other’ he had meant. It caused my family lot of challenges to overcome and made me very insecure and left out of the community. Religion in Gabon and most of Africa is very important and highly practiced, and in Gabon there is sometimes a lot of prejudice for those not following. My creative activities were disregarded by teachers and was only encouraged from my late teens.
In 2004 was the first encounter of developing my practice into live art performances. I reflected a lot on my medical treatments, kemo therapy that I undertook which was without a doubt the biggest influence to the way I work now. Using the body to develop a particular language, an expression, a voice and an interactivity with others. This is the time I call the exorcism period where I had to balance these energies, processes and knowledge into feeding my work as a practitioner into a visual form that could be formulated for others to engage in or a space of questioning and discovery and release.
By 2012, the performance works, far from being enframed as a theatrical process, became all about political dialogue, responding to current environments and sharing stories and experiences of others in order not to solve problems but to develop them, develop communitas. It is only through this method that I am able to engage in material process and engage with it in a much clearer way and it now becomes much more accessible to audiences.
In 2009, my uncle and myself were kidnapped on the river Goue in central Gabon to cross from one village to another town. We were held in the village Ashouka where the villages were waiting to take us away to prepare our bodies which were going to be severely cut. Unfortunately through much corruption of ‘traditional’ performances, witchcraft and voodoo (typically old Greek practices exchanged with Africans during migratory trade exchanges), the people rely on oracles and ill treatments to make money for themselves. They wanted to cut off parts of our bodies (genitals and forehead) considered sacred so that they could be sold to a witch practitioner in South Africa which he would use to consult the futures of rich white South Africans today. My great grandfather died on this river in this way almost a century ago and every week a whole family is killed on the river for this reason as I was to discover after the event. We escaped simply because my uncle recognised the leader of the village and they went to school together as children. They let us go on a negotiated deal but we had to ram the wooden boat up the river for another 6 hours before we reached our destination. In 2010, a security officer checked our passports before crossing the border. The man just simply took my passport and burned it in front of me and said I could not go any further. They wanted to hold me in their barracks for the night they said. On this journey my uncles protected me and got some help so that we could all get out of there. The security men were drunk and dangerous and just needed a large sum of money for them to ignore us and let us through.
In 2009, on a journey from Libreville to Omboue, we passed a village where the inhabitants, of maybe 3-4 families, had been decapitated to death. Only the smell of corpses and the sound of flies took the space. It was possible that there was a conflict between two tribes that turned into tragedy. We found a little girl who was hidden and we had to take her to the nearest town. We left her for care in a family where the authorities were warned about what had happened on the grounds. She was cared for with another family. She did not speak. One year later, the same girl was reported missing. It’s likely that the same tribe who massacred her family came back for her wither to take her as a slave into their village, a prostitute and likely to be tortured to death into early teenagehood. She was never heard of or found again. Three years later after the massacre of the village, an investor had taken the land to create his own banana plantations and create a small auberge for passers by. These bananas are picked and hanged across the auberge like hanging bodies, a crude reminder of the memory and stench of the genocide only recently passed.
Visiting my grandfather in France during childhood was always a difficult playground. Every Christmas, as his joke, he would offer me and my cousin soap wrapped in tissue so that we would clean ourselves white. He was a hunter of deer and pork. He sat in his throne, a bent wooden kitchen chair on which he would lose his mind, body and life in 2011, surrounded by trophies of the dead heads of the animals he shot. He had three chickens he groomed during the year which he would kill every Christmas for dinner, cutting their heads off and their bodies running out of the garage into the garden chasing me. He smelled of welded metal and warm plucked chicken. He walks with a bent back and weighs like a black cloud and has feet with the heaviness of a secret guilt. Sometimes he has chicken feathers flying off his hands and feet. His breath was the sound of thunder. He had a fig tree with hidden snakes the colour of the branches and as silent as snow. My grandfather was a very lonely man and had wrapped his heart with ropes. He taught me how to grow a garden of fruit and vegetables. He was a great cook and fed me with sweet buns. It was a difficult playground but there was always laughter.
My grandmother was a fine lady full of love and stories of the war. She taught me how to grow a garden of herbs and flowers with names the sounds of fallen raindrops from a rainbow and the lightness and shine of snowflakes. She never saw any colours but she spoke by feeling and giving affections just as a dream should be. For my grandfather I was la petite Negresse who wasted expensive French soap at Christmas and was never as clean as a French should be, for my grandmother I remained simply la petite Nathalie.
In 1994, I was introduced to my new town doctor who would coordinate regular hospital medical checks every three months. Too early my doctor took interest in my case, so much so that my medical checks were every four weeks instead. My mother took me, got buried behind a curtain wall like a waterfall and I was alone with my doctor whom I had no courage to develop trust in and no courage to speak to him. His check was simple; he would put his white plastic glove on the left hand, then with his unprotected right hand he would put his index finger inside below my belly. He told me to be a brave girl and it would not hurt if I remain silent. I knew he was lying. This was my regular four week check for the next four years. This was normal routine. This was childhood. This was cancer treatment. He had no name, just Docteur, with crooked yellow teeth, tuna breath and he wore the soles of milk bottles on his eyes. It was only after four years that I realised that it should have been the white glove he should have been using. It was only after six years that I realised he never checked the rest of the body, broken many times. It was only 10 years later that I realised that it was no place for him down there and that he should have used no hands at all. He should have never been there. I knew he was lying but I didn’t stop it. I didn’t have the courage to trust him, no courage to speak to him, no courage to tell the truth, no courageto run or to tell mummy, just cowardice for keeping the disgusting secret.
That body, damn body. Never the right colour and broken too many times. In 1993, my mother put me into a catholic private school. Still under treatment for Leukeamia, I went to school with a hard corset around my body. My bones were weak. Sometimes I would come with seringe casts on my right arm. I became a myth. The children so curious would rather deal with their confusions upon encountering me by testing me and beating me enough so that I would remain still on the ground and would get punished by teacher because my blood stained the floor. They would find their resolve in this way. This remained our only communication with each other. I was a special case. Born French, I was black for the first time in my life. I saw colours for the first time in my life. I knew what adults meant when they said we are ‘divided’. I learned how to hate and fear for the first time. I learned betrayal for the first time. Corridor floors stained with my blood, I was a painter for the first time.
One boy, Nicolas, was the first friend I had in the classroom. He took my hand when I fell. He hugged me when I was lonely. He played with me when I was crying. He stood comfortably in the corner with me. One time he wanted to go to the bathroom but the teacher would not let him. He wet his pants. It smelled like eggs. The teacher went to open his pants but the zipper was stuck. I stood away and I laughed at him, just like the other kids. I made fun of him. It was the first time I betrayed my best friend, my only friend. It was the first time I laughed in school. It was the first time I left innocence and joined cruelty. The next morning, Nicolas took my hand when I fell, he hugged me when I was lonely, he played with me when I was crying and he continued this for the next 3 years.
During morning mess before classroom lessons, all kids recited their prayer in the school church. The headmaster, the priests and the nuns. It was the first time I met with faith, everyone recites words, eyes closed, that never connected with the day to come. A man, Jesus, stripped naked on a cross hanging like a chicken. A father, God never present, hidden behind white clouds and without identity, possibly could be Santa Claus. I looked, I listened, I mimicked and I performed. I followed because I was afraid. The nuns saw everything. In the middle of the sacred recitals, the nun took me by the ear, threw me in the corner and placed the donkey’s hat on my head. Then the priest said that God has chosen, ‘you will not arrive in heaven’. Hell is a white empty corner, hell is blindfold. Hell is the donkey’s hat for the next two years. Three years later, I was the witness to my best friend’s communion. She was nine years old. She said she will go to heaven for doing it. The passage to heaven was a bowl of water dropped onto her head. You had to get wet to prepare to go to heaven. I laughed. The laughter travelled in the echoes of the church. The laughter was accompanied by others. The priest then turned to me. He shot daggers into my eyes and said I will go to hell. I did not belong here he said. The last year before I left France, the father of a classmate of mine had died of cancer. He left his wife, 12 year old son and 6 year old daughter. Everyone went to his funeral at church. My mother forbid me to go. I felt so guilty to not be there and it was the first time I hated my mother. It was 10 years later that I heard the same priest was convicted for peodophelia. It was eleven years in the future before I came back into the church. It was 13 years later that I realised that my parents were shuned out of church community life by the priest. It was 14 years later that I found my Dad reading the Bible. It was 16 years later that I understood faith. It was 18 years later that I realised I was already with God.
It was 7 years after the end of my cancer treatment that I came back home with my father to our village Okok near Bitam, North of Gabon. Nothing had changed. The only thing that had changed were their eyes. For the first time in my life I became ‘white’. What a strange feeling to have lived as an ‘other’ all my life then come back home to feel like ‘another’ again. Home is both foreign and rooted. My hair was different, my accent was different, my thinking was different, my smell was different, my talking was different, my expression was different. The only things that had remained the same after the great separation was the dancing, the laughter, the composure. I learned my name again Auguezomo Mba. I heard my little name again Ebe. For the first time in 24 years I had brothers and sisters. I crunched peanuts again with my grandmother. The old lakes and rivers of before had dried up, so I now showered in a large black bucket with soap that looked a lot like grandfather’s. The bucket was cracked and full of stains from dead animals caught in the forests to eat. The aunts used it for the kitchen. The water always bleached red. I had a dream that I had mis-carried in it.
When I came back to Europe, for the first time I was ‘African’. I had been to my father’s home, I had sang with the sounds of the rainforests, I had stepped into elephant poo for the first time, I had my food stolen by a forest monkey for the first time, I had learned how to hunt animals, I had seen big things I had only imagined small, had unlearned what I was searching, had learned how to speak my name, I had laughed with my brothers and sisters, I had crossed the rivers of infested pirates and crocodiles and for the first time in 9 years I wore colours. The Deutsch wax was my new ‘black’. I wanted to remember and take the smell of my grandmother. I wanted to not forget her and my sisters.
In 2011, I came to Belo Horizonte in Brazil. I came as a foreigner, but for the first time I had ‘roots’. For the third time I had ‘family’.
When I presented my artworks publicly, for the first time I was ‘female’. When I had my godchildren Uche, Omar, Farrell and Alaina, for the first time I was ‘mother’. When I had my first child, I was called an artist who had ruined her career.
When my children grow, they will know what it is like to be female, male, white, black, home, foreigner, African, European, French, Polish, mother and father much much better than I will do. Because in hope, our children will have crossed all borders and find themselves together at the same place. Born on one planet, born without colour, without divisions. Born in celebrations of shared experiences. Their imaginations will be bigger. They will have understood it much much better than us all.
For everything to remain the same, everything must change.