What artists are doing now. Beya Gille Gacha in Paris
An inspiration and mutual solidarity project for the creative industries
At the focus of the What Artists Are Doing Now project is the creative person, their thoughts on this peculiar time, and their visions of the future and art. Arterritory.com began this series as a pandemic initiative with the aim of showing and affirming that neither life nor creative energy are coming to a stop during this crisis. We have invited artists from all over the world to send us a short video or photo story illustrating what they are doing, what they are thinking, and how they are feeling during this time of crisis.
Although we are immensely happy that in many places around the world museums and galleries are once again opening their doors to visitors, all of our lives have significantly changed and, most likely, will never be quite like they were before. Today, the importance of art in the lives of virtually everyone has doubtlessly intensified, for artists are visionaries who can inspire those around them as they simultaneously do their part in providing solutions to global problems.
From her studio in Paris, Franco - Cameroonian artist Beya Gille Gacha answers a short questionnaire by Arterritory.com:
Are you working on any projects right now in your studio? If so, could you briefly describe them?
I am working on several project currently, but the most meaningful project for me actually is finalizing an installation with drawings! From the start of the confinement, with the fear of illness and death for those we cherish, I started a series of drawings called Prayers. It is about making portraits of loved ones confined and dispersed around the world. I use medicinal plants and herbs to trace their features. The herbs I use to create the drawings are chosen instinctively, based on my feelings towards the person, and my perception of what they need, making each piece a unique cure bespoke to the individual. More than drawings, they are ritual, magical acts, prayers for protection.
What is your recipe for survival in these difficult and challenging times??
Reading, watching documentaries, creating... For me, nourishing our imagination with what enriches us is key in giving strength to our mental body and not letting it surrender to fear, sadness, gloom... Ah, and laughter! TO LAUGH ! Make it breathe!
What is something that we all (each of us, personally) could do to make the world a better place when this crisis comes to an end? It is clear that the world will no longer be the same again, but at the same time...there is a kind of magic in every new beginning.
Continue to work on our empathy and our relationship to what surrounds us… Masks and gloves are already being thrown out in nature and in the streets, and I see many people already forgetting the simplest barrier gestures... some will have remained the same. I think to focus on those who try to rise, so I would say: let's keep flowering; maybe the perfumes one day will intoxicate the most blocked noses!
The art world and the culture sector are some of the most affected. What is the main lesson the art world should learn from all this? How do you imagine the post-pandemic art scene?
First, I think we will have to seriously rethink the way artists are paid.
And as to how I imagine as a post-pandemic art scene? If I can dream a little, I would say an art scene that is more committed and connected to the world. I appreciate art for art, but there is a vital need to create and organise more exhibitions and events with a meaning, an impact.
***
Beya Gille Gacha is one of the over 400 artists that will take part in the exhibition “When the Globe is Home” (curated by Claudio Scorretti and Irina Ungureanu), which was expected to open at Gallerie delle Prigioni, Imago Mundi’s cultural centre in Treviso (Italy) last March, but had to be postponed due to the outbreak of Coronavirus. The title of the exhibition has been revealed to be a prophetic one, considering that now we are all experiencing a situation where our home has become our globe. Based on this, Imago Mundi (the contemporary art project promoted by Luciano Benetton) has launched a digital project that is taking place now on its social media accounts (Facebook @ImagoMundiArt; Instagram @Imago_Mundi_Art), asking its great artistic community (over 26,000 artists from all over the world, from Lithuania to Libya and Hawaii, from Fiji to Nepal and Canada) how they are living in this particular time.
***
Beya Gille Gacha was born in 1990 in Paris, from a Cameroonian mother and a French father.
As an adolescent, she chose to go to a school of applied arts, where she discovered plastic arts. Beya Gille Gacha participated in her first exhibition called Afrikanska Penslar in Stockholm in 2009. At the same time, she decided to follow her passion for art history and studied at the Écoledu Louvre (EDL), Paris.
Unable to find a balance between theoretical studies and plastic creations, Beya Gille Gacha interrupted her studies after two years and created in 2013 an association conceived as an artistic collective: NÉFE. In 2009 a change occurred for Beya. Following a trip to Cameroon, to her motherland, the Grassland, she discovered beading workshops in the NGO her aunt had founded, and it is in this way that she started research focused on the production of beaded sculptures. She drew her inspiration from local ‘passport masks’ to create her artworks, sculptures and installations, always addressing social and community themes. She travelled several times to Cameroon between 2010 and 2016, for volunteer missions especially, where she gave plastic art classes to children and helped the management of the NGO. Beya Gille Gacha also organized exhibitions in France and presented her beaded sculptures for the first time in late 2016. She re-interprets beading in a contemporary and personal way, mixing rules of African and Western classicisms. Using beads as the ‘skin’ of her sculptures is a statement for Beya: in the Bamileke tradition, beading furniture is a way to show material wealth and value, just like covering it in gold or ivory; in her process, she covers people with beads to show their wealth as human beings, defending the fact that each human being has a value.
Beya Gille Gacha also works with short films, photography and installations, linking them in different ways to her beaded sculptures.
