While I was there, the World Bank showed up with a huge truck and a stack of enormous boxes, because several of his works had been commissioned to be displayed in World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, so he is clearly of much more reknown than his humble studio and demeanor suggest.
We did a simple flash piece. It’s more straightforward than I had anticipated, but I am realizing that hoping to achieve a deep level of conceptual synthesis with an artist from another country in such a short span of time was a bit… well… hopeful. I still have almost three weeks left, so we’ll see, but I made an interesting realization regardless.
Tei said he started using trash as his material because he was painting, and wanted to sculpt, and that refuse was an affordable and easy to manipulate medium. When development groups discovered his stuff, they saw the recycle art as a statement, and soon began to commission “societal” pieces like the one we made into a flash animation, now in an airplane bound for the U.S.
Tomorrow I will leave Accra for the institute itself in the village of Kokrobitey, so will probably be without web for a while.