YaPhoto Festival 2019

YaPhoto is born from the desire to encourage the emergence of new aesthetics around the contemporary image in Cameroon and more particularly in the city of Yaoundé. YaPhoto strives to promote the creativity of the Cameroonian art scene by exposing emerging photographers and video artists.

Conscious of the stakes of the image and the transformations prescribed by the digital, the festival questions the aesthetic and cultural mutations of our societies in uenced by the new forms of the image and its diffusion.
YaPhoto is also conceived as a platform from which professionals and amateurs are invited to rethink the status of the image and its exploitation in all its aspects.

YaPhoto Festival aims to sustain and support the visibility of this scene nationally and internationally. The rst two pilot editions «What we see» (2016) and «Figuring the Present» (2017) curated by Christine Eyene have given impetus to an inventory of artistic photography in Cameroon.

This 3rd edition is placed under the theme of Remanences and is dedicated to Bisi Silva (1962-2019), committed curator who has constantly carried photography in Africa to new horizons.

«Remanences» question the relevance of the image as a tool of investigation of the world’s mutations. This new edition marks a desire to look at current photographic practices and to renew the perception of the image. Remanence, literally, evokes the phenomenon by which a visual imprint remains, even after its disappearance, in our retina and in our memory. By extension, this concept can also be associated with places when the vestiges and stigmas of the past survive.

Remanences is part of a visual persistence based on a deep questioning of the history of images, related to the absence of visual history speci c to Cameroon. Photography has this reminding power sometimes specular. Are our eyes not lost in mythologies?

Text by Curator Yves Chatap.

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