KLIDJABADJABA: Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia

While awaiting the fetish priest who will orchestrate the efficacy of the place – his loincloth lies at the entrance, a promise of his imminent return – Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia amuses himself. At the center of his playground, a re-enchanted exhibition space, he invents a palaver tree for himself. Azé zé (The Sorcerer's Vases), a place of sacrifice and exchange, a place of immemorial stories and aborted debate, a place of great conversations, first and foremost with oneself, governs the social bond established between man and matter, the primary object of artistic fascination.

Among other spectators, parliamentarians, and notables, the whole village is invited, even in spirit. Ceramics, resin, electrical cables, wood, copper, iron, fiberglass – everything the street offers, whether in Paris, Lomé, or Lagos – are all materials summoned in equal measure. Between them all, collisions occur, transformations are activated, and metamorphoses are prepared.

Originally from Lomé (Togo) and retrospectively imbued, since his arrival in France (2014), with the traditional Mina culture that watched him grow from afar, Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia tirelessly inquires into all the subtle matter that makes up existence. Consequently, he conditions himself to a close collaboration with matter in all its states: he makes its energy a soulmate in dialogue, he confronts its embodied substance as a persistent reality with which it is vital to learn to compose, and finally, he uses it as a medium to communicate with the invisible.

In a face-to-face encounter that is as much a warrior ballet as an animist trance, the artist wanders in favor of the matter, which reacts or continues to work on its own. As an intercessor of a dichotomy between doing and letting go, Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia, alternately a devoted shaper and a relentless alchemist, is merely the adjuvant of everything that occurs, the element and the disruptor of action working upon itself, the spectator who welcomes, powerless yet always favorable, as well as the grateful activator of the miracle.

Thus Klidjabadjaba – an untranslatable yet irrefutable term – rests on the compossibility of works – of materials and men: their capacity to occupy the same space, to cohabit, to coexist. Like the lived experience and feelings of the artist himself, Klidjabadjaba is a feeling between two worlds, made of stability and vertigo, a phenomenon of vibration, both dissipation and concentration, and finally, a confident wait in the face of this moment of the unknown, on the threshold of a first solo exhibition.

Zoé Monti