🔗 Share this article

Following in excess of 50 editions navigating the international Black diaspora, this signifies a last dispatch. The tenure was deeply fulfilling, and immense gratitude offered to all the engaged audience.

Exploring the Cultural Week

Attending the displays, artworks and acts of Accra Cultural Week, one sees how exceptional art feeds and builds a country’s history and character. The centrepiece was without doubt Serge Attukwei Clottey’s stunning [Dis]Appearing Rituals: An Open Lab of Now for Tomorrow, which put his pioneering afrogallonism for all to see: a approach that transforms yellow jerrycans into illusory art pieces, mosaics of yellow, brass and gold. The display was created as a homage to the strength of Jamestown, a historical area of Accra.

This area – mainly home to the Ga ethnic group, a seafaring people – is additionally where a great number of freed slaves came back from Brazil and established themselves in the 1830s. Referred to as the Tabom community, they carried with them Brazilian tongue and traditions.

Throughout Jamestown, one observes a mix of building designs. You'll find Fort Vicentia, with its distinct European-style construction and door arches. Another landmark is the iconic Jamestown Lighthouse, erected in the 1800s and eventually featuring its signature banded facade.

Traditions of Mourning

Also striking about Jamestown is the ever-present presence of funeral posters. Wherever you look, be it covering buildings or on big signboards, there are announcements and terms of farewell. In Jamestown, as throughout Ghana, memorial services are large-scale communal events.

In Clottey’s spectacular show, all of the sights, sounds and religious textures of Jamestown are present – notably in the immersive Jamestown nshonaa installation. In this space, you’re soothed by the audio of ocean surf with granules at your feet, while shacks, nets and representations of canoes pay homage to its vibrant, generational seafaring tradition. Yet standing in this exhibition space, one cannot help but think of the heaps of textile waste that mar the charm and tranquillity of the region.

In Addition to the Main Event

Accra Cultural Week also features a great deal more. Inside an incomplete building at the campus, artist Reginald Sylvester II exhibited On the Other Side of Languish, an emotionally powerful, stripped-back show that displayed three-dimensional works and paintings produced in concert with welders.

And then there is the Yaa Asantewaa Art prize for Ghanaian women creators. It included the debut presentation of a recent laureate, whose work utilizes historical documents to produce a artistic representation of life in the nation's recent history. The event also crowned a latest champion, whose multidisciplinary work is intensely focused on the weaving practices of women in the Volta region.

An Enduring Presence

Although the diaspora has increasingly been drawn home to west Africa during the winter months, a growing cohort are thinking about journeying some months earlier to engage with the area's cultural season. Between this festival and regional art fairs, what is evident are art scenes that are not merely new or “upcoming” but have forged an whole world that is permanent.

In the end, the journey offers a image of Accra that resembles a manifesto for environmental protection and the keeping alive of heritage. It is a compelling tribute to resilience in all its forms.