Afriboy's Crucial Notebook. Part One.

Artist’s notebooks are revealing objects: they are vital documents for understanding process and the productive mind of the artist. Of the five notebooks in the public domain, Daler 3404, so named after the book’s art supplier and stock number, is the most significant. (The book appears to have been shipped to Orokie from Heffer's Bookshop in Cambridge, England). It contains large A4 drawings and relates closely to a turning point in Orokie Okoth’s life. 

At the close of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, Orokie’s artistic star was rising. His work had been published for the first time and he had been asked to prepare an exhibition for the 2006 International Lesbian and Gay Association Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The Conference request presented two immediate problems: the cost of sending work from his European home to Geneva; a very short deadline. Finally, Orokie submitted a digital exhibition focusing on male, same-sex love in Africa and the need to advance AIDS awareness in Africa. He carried on with his personal plans – to return home in April, to spend his day of birth with his mother, in his motherland. He was uncertain whether to begin the journey, however, as a dream had warned him of imminent danger. That turned out to be a true dream from the Gate of Horn. Orokie was attacked on his way home, a panga blade was buried into his skull, and he was hospitalised. The terrible attack caused memory loss and damage to his vision. For a year and a half, he vanished. Daler 3404 is a visual account of what occurred in that missing time. The book does not deal with facts, the chronology of events leading up to his near death, but with his state of being, a state imagined hermetically through angels, mythology, and a sealed code (Orokieglyphs). His intention was to create "vitimages" that would nourish him as he sought healing.

Daler 3404 occurs in three places on the internet: on Afriboy, in Artists’ Sketchbooks Online, and in fragments within a YouTube video. The book displayed in Artists’ Sketchbooks Online (in 2009) refers back to Afriboy, Orokie’s online website. Two sources, one book. The YouTube video, published in December 2007, is a tribute to Orokie’s art and spans his early digital cartoon work through to his later work, and most curiously contains three images that clearly belong to Daler 3404 (2007). That two of these images are not available on Afriboy, the supposedly official Orokie website, raises an additional, disturbing question. To what extent is Afriboy an accurate representation of Orokie's art?



(On Afriboy in Daler 3404 and in the Lethe River Gallery)


(Not in Daler 3404 on Afriboy or elsewhere) 


(Not in Daler 3404 on Afriboy or elsewhere)

These three images are datable by their style and use of fine art watercolour and an elaborate approach that Orokie was developing before his journey home in 2006. This indicates two intriguing facts: firstly, the author of the video must have had private access to Daler 3404, to digital images sent by Orokie; secondly, Daler 3404, as it appears on the internet, is incomplete, as it lacks the images shown in the video. In other words, the notebook on the internet is not Orokie’s account, but someone else’s. Daler 3404, as it exists, is the equivalent of a Selected Poems - though it is offered as a complete version. A psychic history has been re-written and possibly misrepresented.

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