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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