nOllywOOd collages

Nollywood collages

Since 2013

Francois started to collect and use Nollywood posters for its collages in 2013. Most of his collages consist in the isolation and repetition of a single figure. For the artist, this “cloning” process is inspired by the numerous Nollywood posters that were pasted on the streets of Monrovia, but this is also a way for him to put some order in an ocean of movies that constitutes Nollywood movie industry.

“When I arrived in Monrovia in 2013, my first cultural choc was when discovering Benson street and its numerous DVD retailers. Each shop had thousands of movies from Nigeria and at its entrance a few posters showing a mix of action, royal and juju movies.

I was walking in front of the DVD shops, looking at the density and diversity of Nollywood iconography, and it seemed that I was walking on the shore with the infinite of the ocean in front of me. There were new movies and new posters every day as if they were brought by the tide. At the beginning I was fascinated and scared at the same time, I was walking on the shore but was not ready to board yet. That was mostly because most people warned me about Nollywood, “it is poor quality and it is vehiculating the worst stereotypes about Africa”. Indeed, this statement is not completely wrong and what I had in front of me was different from the African culture you see in museums and art fairs. These DVD shops were small museums of a different type, each of them showing thousands of “artworks” coming from countless legends and tales.

Each poster, made to attract the gaze of potential buyers is the quintessence of what the movie has to offer. Nollywood does not rely on synopsis or teasers for its promotion. Nollywood marketing fully relies on the few images a poster has to offer, and these images have to be explicit, vivid and appealing, and this is what makes Nollywood posters so attractive to me. “

Ojukwu the warlord 3&4, Ø 200 cm, Makoko, Nigeria, 2015

collage, nollywood, nigeria, makoko