November 2006
The tourist photo as evidence of contemporary history.
I am in Cameroon with the tourist status, it says on my visa. I am invited to watch this country that I frequent. I know the landscape before me is a drawing of history.
Tourism with his desire to travel is a Western form and contemporary, that a commitment of self, which could amount to a kind of "performance" within the reach of everyone, more precisely, a performative experience physical, sensory and spiritual hope. It is a form unmarked cons of the report to another, operating here and there in search of all comforts. Material comfort that justice in terms of stars at the hotel and the comfort that reinforces its own intellectual history and comfort on a way of understanding the world: the practical collusion between history and geography. Tourism is also, by the growing mass of tourists, a new vector ideological, and perhaps a new form of media.
Cultural tourism is one that we would go to meet each other, between culture, great architecture with its standing or lying by the time and volcanoes, and in the small market town the "souk "With its spices and elsewhere that this would return the nostrils with the delights of ignorance.
It turns out that my perfume smells burnt elsewhere.
I Market Congo Congo ex Quarter, burned to the interests of a certain French policy in Africa (the denial of political independence, UPC: Union Populations of Cameroon) by French soldiers and Cameroon, and by local militias delegated the dirty work around the year 1960.
Hundreds of dead probably burn or suffocation, killed by machine guns for those who tried to leave the neighborhood, died in the wells for those who wanted to escape the flames and bullets. It is a place in our history, unquestionably, the French presence with his direct responsibility in fact a place in the history of France. My desire for general knowledge and my passion for my history now compels me to investigate the extent that nobody taught me so critical of contemporary history.
History is blank for me images, I am a freedom-responsibility in building a memory today is the image of my presence "tourist" that gives the house the monument status.
With the exception of the picture "the issue of tourism ..." framed by me, the others were taken by Patrick Wokmeni. Patrick is a resident of the district where I live, today is a friend he has always been close to the arts district. I introduced him to photography in 2003, each of my coming, he "shot up" the neighborhood. For this work, we developed a simple protocol: I walk or I ask, I tell you the places where the photos interest me, you like frames you want.
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