Village Matters, City Works: Ideas, Technologies, and Dialogues in the Work of HervÉ Youmbi

Rural and urban spaces in Africa, art historians are increasingly finding, are bound to one another by webs of complex relationships, resulting in a blurring of boundaries long held to be structurally fundamental by the scholarly community. Among contemporary artists, such relationships and the blurring in which they result are a matter of growing interest. Hervé Youmbi is a case in point. His ongoing series Visages de masques highlights problems inherent in discourses that draw stark distinctions between rural and urban environments, associating the former with tradition and conservativism and the latter with modernity and innovation, while allowing for little crossover between these categories. Involving extensive collaboration between the artist, who lives and works in Douala, with ritual specialists, sculptors, beaders, and dancers based in the rural Grassfields of Cameroon, presented in village initiatory contexts and international white cube settings alike, Visages embodies the porosity of rural–urban relations.