EL WARCHA FI GHANA - CHALE WOTE FESTIVAL 2018
The El Warcha team are heading to Accra, Ghana, to participate in the Chale Wote Street Art Festival. We will be working with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of James Town to build an installation in the public space with local materials.
15 to 27 August 2018
Blog - Text: Valentina Zagaria; Photos: Nao Maltese
The project was funded by the Rambourg Foundation and the Cité de l’Architecture de Paris.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 1
Having all landed in Accra at various hours of the night, the Warcha team was fresh enough to start the day at 11am. We were brought a Ghanaian breakfast favourite – fried egg sandwiched in toast bread and black tea – to our rooms, but felt in need of coffee, so ventured out for a wonder around James Town, and ended up ocean side.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 2
9am start. Woke up after a bumpy night, with the street music, call to prayer and charismatic preachers competing for the title of loudest hotel room guest. Malaria pills swallowed, we kicked off the day by heading on a market research trip. The aim was to get a sense of costs and of what material was out there that we might want to play around with for building our installation for Chale Wote.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAYS 3 & 4
We then visited the slave castle. We were about twenty people on the guided tour, apart from us most of the visitors were Ghanaian (in Elmina there were American and Nigerian visitors as well). The guide explained how the slave trade was run here, how people were kept for months in dungeons in almost total darkness with very little ventilation, like sardines, forced to eat, sleep and defecate in the same squeezed spot, the floor we were walking on was formed as a result of layers of those inhumane conditions.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 5
First official day of the Chale Wote festival. Nao and Valentina went to fetch the artist and press badges in the morning at Brazil House – the festival headquarters, from which a procession of artists will take off this afternoon to launch the festival. The curators were finishing setting up art works along the walls, since as from today the building will hold the Shika Shika Art Fair. We have stocked all of our bamboo in Ussher Fort, which neighbours Old Kingsway, the space where we will be working. Badges and bamboo in hand, we were ready for our first day of work.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 6
Eidkum Mabrouk! This morning there were a lot of cows being led around the maze of small streets that make up James Town to be sacrificed, especially around Zongo Lane, where the Muslim community reside. On our way to Old Kingsway at 10am we passed by men and women impeccably dressed in white – the colour of festivities, whether it be the Ga Homowo or the Muslim Eid – heading to visit family to wish them happy Eid. We resorted to joyous, albeit somewhat nostalgic for the boys, rounds of phone calls to families and friends in Tunisia throughout the day.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 7
Today the El Warcha team was scheduled to participate in a panel discussion at the National Theatre at 1pm. We didn’t have much time to work in the morning, so, with heavy hearts, we focused on finding a potential new space for our installation. After almost daily negotiations with both local “landlords” and the festival organisers (who would have rather have us work in Ussher Fort – a solution which didn’t suit us because it is not in the public space), the festival warned us that we will have to move our installation out on Friday lunch time after all. The reason for this is that Old Kingsway will be used for concerts over the weekend, and the festival organisers couldn’t negotiate for us to stay because these concerts are not directly organised by them.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 8
Only one day left to get our installation built: the pressure is on! Ben and Aziz, who had worked until midnight last night, were back in Old Kingsway by 9am. One hour later they had already managed to get another structure standing, and were joined by the rest of the team. We now have three structures in the space – one is completely finished, while the other two still need work to create seating at the bottom and to integrate the wiring for the LED lights. Seeing the three structures standing is impressive, and we can already imagine all the different possibilities for positioning them in relation to one another so as to create different kinds of shapes and spaces.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 9
El Warcha fi telvsa! TV time for Ben and Mohammed, who woke up at 6:00am, ready to head to the Citi TV headquarters, only to find once we got there that we would be on-air at 9:30am. Valentina went to fetch breakfast – egg and bread and Nescafé poured into transparent sachets for takeaway purposes – as Nao filmed the guys getting their make-up done for the big screen.
EL WARCHA FI GHANA - DAY 10
Let the festival weekend begin! Last night we left Old Kingsway feeling tired but happy after a week of hard work. The installation, though, didn’t seem like it had reached its full potential yet: we all wished we could have had a couple more days to try different positions for the structures and for the LED lights, and to continue building on what we had found. At this stage though we just had until 2pm – when the festival was to officially kick off.
