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I have been galvanised to archive the intersection of Cameroonian identity and queer identity, to challenge the dominant narrative (held in both the UK and Africa) that the two do not occur naturally, regularly, and beautifully.
Since 2022, I have been recording interviews between myself and various Cameroonian people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, both native and of the Cameroonian diaspora. I have collected over 26 hours of rich audio material detailing personal lived experiences through inspirational words, traumatic memories and humorous insights.
For this commission, I took two of these interviews and turned them into embroidered animated short films. I used the embroidery style of Toghu cloth, which is the unofficial national textile of Cameroon. It originated from the North West Grasslands region of Cameroon is made of black velvet, which is richly embroidered with red, gold, and white chain stitch. However, I used pink thread instead, as an immediate visual cue for queerness, defiantly embroidering queerness into the fabric of Cameroon. You can view the two animations below:
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Kialy Tihngang
Kialy Tihngang is a Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist and visual activist working in textiles, sculpture, moving image, costume and animation. She interrogates personal themes of Blackness and queerness through her practice, which is concerned with designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures. She is particularly interested in the colonial misrepresentation and extraction of African cultures, drawing from her own experiences as a British-born Cameroonian.
Tihngang graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s Textile Design programme in 2021, winning its Newbery Medal for best graduating project with her body of work, ‘Useless Machines’: a series of moving interlocking laser cut wooden panels, wrapped in waste-fabrics and hand-stitched, and a moving image piece advertising them. It forms a darkly comic response to electronic waste dumping, a neocolonialist practice that increasingly affects African countries.
‘Useless Machines’ was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and QUAD (Derby)’s ‘Play During The Pandemic’, as well as being shortlisted in ARTS THREAD x Gucci Global Design Graduate Show and Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre’s The Next Thing Moving Image Award.
In 2023, Tihngang will create new textiles, sculpture, and moving image work for solo exhibitions 'Lean Six Sigma' at Quench (Margate) and 'Fetissoes' at God’s House Tower (Southampton), and various group shows.
Not Sarah
Not Sarah is a Brighton-based electronic musician, producer, and vocalist with experience in creating music for feature films such as ‘Girl’, 2022, directed by Glasgow-based Adura Onashile.
Not Sarah scored ‘Toghu’ (2022), my performance about queer Cameroonian identity commissioned by Coventry Pride. Her track sampled Cameroonian flute players from 1908, and hyperpop elements to represent queer youth culture. Her vocals & production brought the performance to life incredibly. Not Sarah, who shares my Cameroonian heritage, and I aimed to collaboratively craft a new aural tradition for Cameroon which includes and celebrates queer folx.
She also produced music for 'interior life abstract thought' (2023), my moving image piece commissioned by Moving Parts Arts (Newcastle), and ‘Automated Living’ (2022), my moving image work commissioned by CULTVR (Cardiff).
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