Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
Colobane is a name that carries freight, and the title knows it. To anyone who has read Sembène, or simply walked a Dakar market, the word conjures trade, hustle, the improbable turning-up of treasure among cast-off things, and Idun-Tawiah plants his diamonds there deliberately. The picture itself, though, is all warmth: late gold light, and a car rapide filling most of the frame, its bodywork a riot of hand-painted folk flowers, stripes of red and green, the cheerful signwriting of West African public transport.
At the left a young man in an olive waistcoat, white shirt and a knotted brown tie throws his head back laughing, one hand on his hip. Leaning out from the bus window, a woman meets him mid-laugh, a fat gold earring catching the sun, her hand curled up to hold his fingers against her chin. A blurred passenger in yellow crowds the foreground right, and that smear of a body does something wonderful, reminding us this is a real vehicle about to leave, that the tenderness is happening in traffic, on a schedule, against departure.
One thinks, inevitably, of every train-window and bus-window farewell ever photographed, and Idun-Tawiah is happy to let the association run. But he tips the cliché toward joy rather than loss. The two of them are laughing too hard for grief; the diamonds, if there are any, are exactly this, an ordinary radiant minute at the side of a painted bus. The genius of the staging is that it feels found, borrowed from a life that both did and did not happen.