AKUZURU
Born in 1956 in Trinidad
Lives and works in Trinidad
Akuzuru is the pen name of this artist from Trinidad.
It designates a person who has enough strength and sharing wealth to have influence on others.
She first studied fashion design in England. Then, she went to Nigeria where she lived for 7 years and where she got acquainted with the traditional textile art of western Africa.
She now lives in Trinidad, and since her return, she develops an original concept, a spatial and experimental work of sculptural performance called The Maguayapas.
The generic title Maguayapas. is the contraction of several words :
Ma stands for mummy and mask the central importance of the mask in the Trinidadian culture is well-known.
Gua stands for Guayaguayare. It is the name of an Amerindian site on the east coast of Trinidad.
Guayap stands for “gathering” (meeting, getting together…)
The Maguayapas associate performance, installation, spatial interactivity, and ban all frontiers between artistic practices.
The Maguayapas first appeared to the general public in 1999, during a residency at the Goethe Institute, the German cultural center of Lagos in Nigeria.
Since then, Akuzuru’s artistic carrier is linked to the Maguayapas.
- 2001 – National Museum of Trinidad
- 2002 – Bag Factory artists studio in Johannesburg
- 2003 – Project-co in Trinidad
- 2006 – Little Carib Theater in Trinidad
- 2006 – Belmont Theater workshop in Trinidad
- 2006 – Galvanize project in Trinidad
- 2007 – Colloquium “Voyage au Noir – Marcher sur nos
- morts” in Martinique (Fond Saint-Jacques)
In Fond Saint-Jacques, Maguayapa was a disturbing performance, strongly emotional, inspired by the trauma caused during the times of slavery, especially regarding women, brutally assaulted, raped and deprived of their dignity and identity.
Sarah Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, symbolises these women and Akuzuru honoured her in 2002 in Johannesburg in a work called Sarah Baartman Revisits : A Tribute.
The artist’s stance underlines the duty of memory, the search for gratitude, the necessary harmony between man and nature and the need for a greater spirituality.
The eighth incarnation of Maguayapas was a non-human shape : it looked like a giant bug, that was moving slowly and challenging the general public, with a huge bag on its back, filled with bottles carrying messages for ancestors and due to be thrown at sea. Slowly and painfully, the insect walked into a hut, symbol of a new matrix where it would re-generate.
Contact: aica-sc@orange.fr
Graphisme: dinographx - dinographx@gmail.com Création du Site: Detlev Schüller