INTERWEAVING

2021-2022

Interweaving exploress Ndop cloth indigo tradition and symbolism while drawing connections to European denim (indigo dyed) culture from the 19th century.

“At Senegal’s Dak’Art 2022, the Biennale of  Contemporary African Art — one of the longest running biennales on the continent — Mpoka  presented her artistic research in dialogue with Oslo-based queer textile artist Damien  Ajavon. Together, their collaborative installation Espace-Temps (2022) for the Off-Satellite program, curated by Senegalese textile artist Aïssa Dione, takes the form of an artisanal  workshop tucked into a corner of Galerie Atiss  Dakar.

Mpoka explores the material and cultural histories of Ndop cloth — an indigo resist dyed textile with such deep cultural significance  that it was recently classified as a Cameroonian  national heritage—while tracing connections to nineteenth-century European denim. In Interweaving, a five-metre textile piece  with a repeating pattern of rectangles is poised  in a sewing machine on an artisan’s bench in  the centre of the tableau vivant. 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-Félicien 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 also that of nobility, the supernatural, and the  ancestors.6 Signifying wealth, abundance,  and fertility, and asserting royal status in the  Grasslands kingdoms, Ndop textiles—much  like family photographs—are a significant part  of family heritage. 

Reflecting on family and cultural heritage  while subtly interrogating the imbrication of  racial capitalism in the material histories of  trade, Mpoka’s 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’s discarded textiles, which have  their own diasporic stories to tell. Like Walter  Benjamin’s ragpicker, she collects second-hand  denim from shops in the Douala Market, close  to her uncle’s 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 (bundles); in  Ghana, they are called obroni wawu (dead white  men’s clothes). In Espace-Temps, Mpoka weaves  the refuse—of photography and fabrics—into  haptic assemblages that critically engage the  transnational trajectories of the garment industry while reimagining the possibilities of Black  futurity across the diaspora. 

Responding to the movement of diasporic  knowledge, exchange networks, and colonial  entanglements, Mpoka’s 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 Nîmes). 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 “botanical conflict,” Mpoka’s  haptic engagements with ancestral craft knowledge invoke the political histories and anticolonial struggles focused around soil.”

Gwynne Fulton, Esse Magazine Issue 107