Phyllis Galembo - Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria

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Phyllis Galembo (American, b. 1952), Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria, 2005, Ilfochrome, Ruth C. Wallerstein Endowment Fund purchase, 2009.1

Intrigued by ritualistic costumes and masks from a young age, photographer Phyllis Galembo devoted much of her life to exploring traditional celebratory garb from West Africa to the Caribbean.1 Her 2005 Ilfochrome print Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria demonstrates her fascination, mesmerizing with its large-scale, thoroughly detailed qualities. But what truly captures attention in the photograph is the effort put into distinguishing human subjects from the masks and costumes they wear. The blending of human and costume suggests juxtaposition between human and object, animate and inanimate, an individual identity and the notion of culture. By capturing the transformative quality of costumes, their function in the community, and their role in connecting individuals to their culture and their ancestry Phyllis Galembo demonstrates the powerful effects of culture on identity and conversely, the individual’s projection of their identity onto a culture’s history, tradition, lessons, and values.

Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria depicts participants of the Ekpo Masquerade, a performance serving to preserve health and virtue in communities of Calabar, Nigeria.2 Ekpo describes one of many all-male secret societies that function in Nigeria and participate in costumed masquerades.3 Historically, secret societies worked alongside government, creating and enforcing laws, judging disputes, maintaining peace and discipline, and unifying the tribe.4 The secret society’s legal, social, economic, and political powers decreased with the introduction of modern governmental practices,5 but they continue to play a vital role in customary events, such as the Ekpo Masquerade. The masks worn by the subjects in Phyllis Galembo’s photograph are typical to the celebratory event.6 They are painted black and contain threatening features because the masks traditionally functioned to intimidate and maintain social order within the community.7 It was believed that the immense power emitting from the masks transformed the wearer into the spirit or ancestor their costume embodied, socially and legally empowering them. Because masks possessed supernatural strength, the wearer followed specific procedures to protect against the costume’s forces and capabilities.8 Although the belief has since waned, tradition asks wearers to visibly transform their identity into the spiritual beings they portray9 in order to both enhance the performance and authenticate the celebration.10 As a result, participants of the masquerade act fiercely and threateningly once they bear the masks,11 altering their own identity. They go so far as to distort their voice to further cover up their authentic selves.12 Due to imposing roles of the masks’ wearers, Galembo recounts how they acted aggressively and were difficult to approach by the photographer, “the imaginable violence associated with the Ekpo… masks is extended to their human guardians [the wearers], intoxicated and driven by the masks’ power.”13 Replacing the individual’s face is that of the spirit or ancestor embodied by the mask. Because the face is how we identify individuals, through its obstruction the identity of the wearer becomes obstructed as well, causing the replacement of the wearer’s identity with that of the spiritual being’s. This raises the question, are Galembo’s subjects in Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria the participants of the Ekpo Masquerade or the embodied ancestors and spirits themselves? Although we may doubt the supernatural powers of the masks, they ultimately possess the ability to project culture onto the individual, consequently transforming their identity, as depicted in both the portrait of the participants and of their embodied spirits and ancestors in Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria.

Even though culture can shape an individual’s identity, the individual can impart their qualities and attributes onto culture as well. Initially exploring American Halloween practices, Phyllis Galembo ventured to villages across the Caribbean and West Africa taking portraits of participants in masquerades, traditional ceremonies, and customary rituals.14 Her subjects’ elaborate masks and costumes play a vital role in the oral, performative, musical and visual practices of the cultures she photographs.15 Often, such practices remain the only conduit for passing down a culture’s history, tradition, lessons, and values,16 with masks and costumes helping facilitate the transmission. Wearers commonly make their own costumes. They either work extensively or create costumes and masks spontaneously, sometimes even with the aim of being photographed by Galembo.17 In both cases, participants place their personal touch on the costumes they make,18 demonstrating the role of the individual in transmitting culture. By participating in customary events like the Ekpo Masquerade, individuals take part in guiding and teaching the community, conveying their personal interpretation onto the content they pass along. Like the members’ fabrication of costumes based on their specific understanding of beliefs, with each passing of values, participants provide their own interpretation of beliefs, projecting themselves onto the culture they are passing down. Upon carefully observing Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria, anthropomorphic elements slowly reveal themselves through the disguises of the subjects. For example, the limbs of the sitters blend into their costumes, demonstrating their concealed, yet definitive presence behind the celebratory garb. The masks engross the majority of the figures’ faces and bodies, revealing fragments of their torsos, legs, and arms. Though heavily hidden, the identities of the wearers are present both in the personal touches of the subjects’ hand-made costumes and in their interpretation of spirits and ancestors, using their individual identities to similarly shape the culture.

Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria reveals not only the influential powers of culture and the identity of the individual, but also the culture’s role in connecting individuals to their ancestors. The masks play a vital role in maintaining continuity between present day and the origins of a culture. By holding onto traditional costumes, cultures demonstrate the importance they place upon the transmission of values and beliefs.19 However, modernity also reflects itself in the masks. Many costumes nowadays employ synthetic materials in their construction, which includes more modern techniques like weaving, embroidery, collages, and quilting.20 The blending of modern and ancient techniques demonstrates the masks’ interconnection between modernity and ancestry.

In addition to connecting those in the present with the past, the celebratory practices performed by the community connect individuals into a greater whole, as demonstrated by Galembo’s photograph Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria. The flatness of space in the image generated by the subjects’ proximity to one another, evokes intimacy and connectedness in the print. Galembo arranges the figures to compactly fit within the frame; the lack of space around them forces the subjects into more direct confrontation with one another. Galembo centers the print on the entwinement of the subjects’ masks, the only point of the subjects’ contact in spite of the compact space that they stand in. Through their traditional masks and costumes the figures are tied together although they stand apart. Bearing masks that conceal the individuals’ distinctive appearances and obscure their eyes transform the sitters’ differences into commonalities. By emphasizing the masks through their immense scale and striking red color in contrast to the constricted composition of earthy tones, Galembo stresses that the conduit of transformation from “individual” to “member of a community” is the mask. As a result of the flatness and arrangement of the print, Galembo displays how masks, a community’s tradition, connect individuals in Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria.

Phyllis Galembo emphasizes the bond between her subjects by encapsulating the process of de-individuation and uniformity the sitters undergo by wearing their customary garb in Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria. The mask represents tradition, rituals, customs; it recollects ancestry and lineage; it evokes acts of story telling and teachings of spirituality. However, the individual imparts his or her identity onto the mask, as the individual remains present behind the customary garb. In Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria, Phyllis Galembo demonstrates the projection of culture onto identity and the projection of identity onto culture, showing culture’s power in positioning the individual within their community and the greater whole.

Daria Modrzanska

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1"Phyllis Galembo: Masquerade," Cultural Politics 7, no. 2 (2011): 239-48, doi: 10.2752/175174311X12861940861860.

2Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "African art," 2015, http://school.eb.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/levels/high/article/384738#.

3Phyllis Galembo, Maske, (London: Chris Boot, 2010).

4Ibid.

5Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "Efik," 2015, http://school.eb.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/levels/high/article/32062.

6Ibid., Phyllis Galembo, Maske.

7Ibid., Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "African art."

8Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "Mask," 2015, http://school.eb.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/levels/high/article/105987.

9“West African Masquerade: Photographs by Phyllis Galembo,” (Madison, WI: Chazen Museum of Art, n.d.,) Museum exhibit label.

10Ibid., Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "Mask."

11Ibid., Phyllis Galembo, Maske.

12Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v., "African dance," 2015, http://school.eb.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/levels/high/article/384736#57099.toc.

13Ibid., Phyllis Galembo, Maske.

14Ibid.

15Phyllis Galembo, and Norma Rosen, Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia, (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1993).

16Ibid.

17Ibid., Phyllis Galembo, Maske.

18Ibid., "Phyllis Galembo: Masquerade," Cultural Politics.

19Ibid., Phyllis Galembo, Maske.

20Ibid.

Catalogue
Phyllis Galembo - Creek Town Youth Group, Ekpo Masquerade, Calabar, Nigeria