PEOPLE WITH NO COUNTRY is pleased to announce the publication of our eighth book:
I HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR DOING THIS...How does one understand material or the sources or what inspires what? What possibilities lie within the established image? Made while the artist was in Mali during the 2008 Bamako Biennial, the collection of ‘photographs’ in the book “…Patterns Shapes &Spirit Topography Sidibe” takes to heart the high repute of the Malian Photographer, Malick Sidibe and consequently the freedom one may have with the popular, established image as material or content. Each ‘photograph’ in the book is a work of intentional, digital collage that appropriates the proliferate nature of the found images themselves—i.e. the repeated props and backgrounds, the photographs as standard and brand—to arrive at what may seem entirely different.
The digital processes rendered on each image are not meant to be perfect: in many of the images, there’s material resistance in the application of digital intervention so that you see the artist hand poking Sidibé the brand, accentuating certain things unseen—not out of disrespect, rather the very contrary.
We have decided to make a book out of the series in order to, among other things, reinstate the artist claim that the series was done as part of the inexplicable processes in how things come about and not, as has been the accusation, ‘disrespect’ of the the well-celebrated photographer, Malick Sidibé.
Nor do these images ‘plagiarize’ the found images.
From the private point of view of the artist’s own encounter with the recognizable ‘material’, which Sidibe’s work presents, Isoje explores the found images as if coming upon a treasure box of memory. Her handling of the master photographer’s work is as if a wishful, even needy desire for relations, which may not even want her. In the found images, Isoje relives the aesthetic and cultural markings that haunt her both as an African herself and as one whose own reality was as if liminal — as if of an incongruous wish being willfully performed.
Long established as bonafide Contemporary African Photography, through PSSTS (Patterns Shapes &Spirit Topography Sidibe), the original photographs become a portal into a new kind of ‘othered’ spaces where the outsider finds herself looking in looking out, being inside of memory, because it includes her, and outside of it. Because perhaps that is not even the question.
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57 photocollages from the 2008/2012 series based on the shapes of things seen and unseen in found, online photographs of the Malian Photographer, Malick Sidibe
By Isoje Chou
Printed in pigment ink on acid-free 40lb text paper.
Binding: hard cover
Size: 8x10
Printed in studio 2021
Publication year : 2021
Release Date: September 2021
ISBN 978-1-7751613-8-7
Printed in 2021 by PEOPLE WITH NO COUNTRY