A gathering at Koyo Kouoh’s home outside Basel led to the founding of the Afro-Basel Collective, where artists shared ideas, food, and music. Koyo proposed an exhibition on the Basler Mission, highlighting missionary-era photography by artists in Nigeria, South Africa, and Ghana as an overlooked resource. Koyo founded RAW Material Company in Dakar in 2008 and operated transnationally as a curator and writer. Her practice combined historical research, diasporic awareness, and attention to small details, generating substantive curatorial projects and influencing collaborators across European and African institutions.
ONE SUMMER, Koyo Kouoh invited me to the home outside Basel that she shared with her saxophonist husband, Philippe Mall. Arriving with my then-partner, the artist Alexandra Bachzetsis, we met Theo Eshetu, Godfried Donkor, Tracey Rose, and other artists for two days of talking, cooking, and dancing to Nigerian and Ghanaian highlife music by the pool. It was then that we all decided to found the Afro-Basel Collective:
Soon, Koyo wrote to me proposing an exhibition that would examine the history of the Basler Mission: a Swiss missionary group whose "revival of evangelical churches in Africa," she explained, had generated "an interesting body of work-in photography-by artists in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana." It was "a fundus," she continued, that "no artist . . . ever thought of working with." She signed off with the words: "This is the beginning of an idea that could become a project. Think about it."
The beginning of an idea that could become a project might have been the operating principle for the Cameroonian-born, Swiss-raised Koyo. Her transnational mentality, her propensity for historical research, and her global diasporic awareness influenced me, like so many others,in a decisive manner. Koyo had a way of thinking that began with a seemingly small detail and lingered on it until a more substantive proposal took shape-yet always "in minor keys," to paraphrase the title of the Venice Biennale she conceived before her untimely passing
Collection
[
|
...
]