Cameroon: Elephants With Wings

Max Mba Kop - Proud To Be (2015)

“In Cameroon – recalls Luciano Benetton, the creator of Imago Mundi - two Africas coexist, not without contradictions: ancestral Africa, marked by a centuries-old history of conflict and inequality, and the Africa of the future, young, active and full of energy, that is facing the ambiguities of the world and globalized culture. On the cultural side, thanks to a strong literary tradition, Cameroon has focused on education and bilingualism (French/English) as decisive elements to offer a prospect of change to its young people. Cameroonian artists, in turn, are engaged in effectively overcoming the rhetoric of hospitality and dialogue without borders that animates the world of art, at a time when people themselves continue to be burdened by barriers and social inequalities.”

Louis Patrice Minkam Diffo (Kemplo) - The Crossing (2015)

“In this collection – highlights the curator Enrico Mascelloni - there are also some reconciled landscapes or the description of a mythical heavenly past, but much less so than in other projects for Imago Mundi concerning African countries. Most Cameroonian artists have little desire to relax. Their works are in constant tension. Reality is approached through short circuits through expressionist alterations, through an aggressive hyper-realism. A country like Cameroon has shown that despite the levels of technical inequality and more generally of talent that we could expect (and which do exist), ours is a large choral fresco composed of tiny works exploring all aspects of reality, following it wherever it hides. One hundred and forty different views, so many different languages, often polar opposites, nonetheless offer a glimpse of the world that made them possible.”

Joseph Delord Nyah - The Price Of Truth (2015)

The curator makes particular reference to a work by Kolo for Imago Mundi: “The halt. Two young Africans in the desert, dreaming Europe” And he explains: “Precisely, Europe as a dream and the desert as a nightmare, African daily life as something to flee from and the realization of that dream. The above-mentioned theme, at least in contemporary Cameroon, is, however, an exception. The pride of Cameroonian artists is such that their only dream can be reconciliation with their country, loved in a visceral way and yet subjected, in many works, to a hard radiography, although not always as a direct denunciation, but delving into the anguish and expectations of everyday life, and, as such, even more profound.”

Francis Ngonzick Ndiba (Franco Ndiba) - Portrait Of Ferdinand Oyono (2015)

“All generations of artists – notes the art critic Marilyn Douala-Bell Schaub - from experts to beginners, through emerging talents, took up the challenge of the miniature, the call of the Benetton Foundation, because everyone, directly or indirectly, has been trained to take on challenges, to express themselves in an art that has the problem of a concise narrative in a small layout, in contrast with the local customs made of big speeches on large formats.”

Brain Cheghe - Thinking About The Future (2015)



The title of the Imago Mundi collection is “Elephants with Wings”. Benetton illustrates this choice with the episode of little Max, “a young 150-kilo pachyderm, which the courageous American pilot Gary Roberts rescued and transported in his Cessna to save it from poachers on the border between Cameroon and Chad in 2013. The images of the baby elephant in the cabin, with its trunk on the shoulders of the pilot, quickly went viral on the web: a symbol of hope for the coexistence of nature and modernity. Today, Cameroon itself is soaring towards the future with the conviction that the horizons of its progress are not illusory.”