“Talking about identity implies also talking about the process of moulding us as individual human beings and in relation to society. This is kind of the idea behind Identità Sospese (Suspended Identities). It is a truncated part of history, so now the pieces are put back together like a jigsaw puzzle.” These are the opening thoughts of the documentary Identità Sospese (Suspended Identities), the title of Victor Fotso Nyie’s exhibition bearing the same name, part of the solo-collective exhibition SEDIMENTS. After Memory, curated by Johanne Affricot and Eric Otieno Sumba for SPAZIO GRIOT, held from 30 June to 4 September 2022 at the Mattatoio in Rome.
Through his work, Victor Fotso Nyie, a Cameroonian artist living in Italy, leads us into a layered narrative that runs along the past-present timeline, interrupting it. The sculptural objects created by the artist are conceived and experienced in his innermost self, often made in his own image and likeness. They step outside the narrative and exposition hierarchy of the Western ethnographic museum, proposing a return to the more intimate and familiar self, with a style that is both hyperrealist and surrealist at the same time, and an artistic methodology that breaks down a fabricated otherness and deploys various processes: reworking, re-appropriation, restitution.
Matter, as reflected in Fotso Nyie’s words, is thus modelled with various meanings and symbolism, revealing both the important sculptural tradition of Cameroon and its aesthetic value, combined with Italian ceramic techniques that can be found in the Faenza and Ravenna areas.
The figurative forms elaborated by the artist are sometimes ironic, at other times poetic and reflective, often alienated, and are twins retrieved from the museum of statuettes belonging to their community; a little girl sleeping on the ground, on the earth, while clutching an object, perhaps a doll; but also bricks, which metaphorically reinforce the sense of reconstruction.
Starting from his personal history, infused with multiple geographies, Fotso Nyie evokes the possibilities that can be implemented to recognise and recapture a still suspended space-time, raising the value of restitution to the desire to collectively recover connections and epistemological references severed by European imperialism.
