Arbre à palabres (Bonambappe)

L'arbre à palabres de Bonambappe
Artist	Frédéric Keiff
Year	2007
Type	Sculpture
Dimensions	5 m(200 in)
Location	Jardin du tombeau des Rois Bell, Bonanjo Douala, Cameroon
	4°02′38″N9°41′14″E / 4.043768°N 9.687152°E Coordinates: 4°02′38″N9°41′14″E / 4.043768°N 9.687152°E
Owner	Municipality of Douala

Last updated March 10, 2019

L'arbre à palabres is a permanent sculpture located in Douala (Cameroon). Created by the architecte Frédéric Keiff in 2007, it looks like a palaver tree, whose trunk and branches are made of painted iron rods, while attached fragments of colored glass represent leaves.

Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving and modelling, in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been an almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded or cast.

Douala is the largest city in Cameroon and its economic capital. It is also the capital of Cameroon's Littoral Region. Home to Central Africa's largest port and its major international airport, Douala International Airport (DLA), it is the commercial and economic capital of Cameroon and the entire CEMAC region comprising Gabon, Congo, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic and Cameroon. Consequently, it handles most of the country's major exports, such as oil, cocoa and coffee, timber, metals and fruits. As from 2018, the city and its surrounding area had an estimated population of 1,338,082. The city sits on the estuary of Wouri River and its climate is tropical.

Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the Bight of Biafra, part of the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Although Cameroon is not an ECOWAS member state, it geographically and historically is in West Africa with the Southern Cameroons which now form her Northwest and Southwest Regions having a strong West African history. The country is sometimes identified as West African and other times as Central African due to its strategic position at the crossroads between West and Central Africa.

The artwork

The Arbre à Palabre by Frédéric Keiff is a palaver tree whose trunk and branches are made of painted iron rods, while attached fragments of colored glass represent leaves. The installation is more than 5 meters tall with a canopy circumference of 7 meters, and it is equipped with wooden slabs embedded in the trunk, serving as benches. It is a passageway installation.

Frédéric Keiff, born in 1973 in Metz, France is an architect and artist who lives and works in Strasbourg (France).

Iron is a chemical element with symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is by mass the most common element on Earth, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust. Its abundance in rocky planets like Earth is due to its abundant production by fusion in high-mass stars, where it is the last element to be produced with release of energy before the violent collapse of a supernova, which scatters the iron into space.

Glass is a non-crystalline, amorphous solid that is often transparent and has widespread practical, technological, and decorative usage in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optoelectronics. The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of manufactured glass are "silicate glasses" based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide, or quartz), the primary constituent of sand. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, which is familiar from use as window glass and in glass bottles. Of the many silica-based glasses that exist, ordinary glazing and container glass is formed from a specific type called soda-lime glass, composed of approximately 75% silicon dioxide (SiO₂), sodium oxide (Na₂O) from sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃), calcium oxide (CaO), also called lime, and several minor additives.

Initially conceived to substitute the former palaver tree of Douala, a huge baobab located in the district of Bonaberi, which fell down in 1993, the symbolic meaning of the installation forced some changes in the process. Traditionally, around the palaver tree, the chief of the village and the council members (the so-called notables) meet and seat in order to take the most important political and social decisions concerning the community, and it is there that tradition values were orally transmitted through generations.

This artwork became the subject of a long discussion between the chief of the village and the notables, who finally decided to forbid a foreign artist to place his artwork next to the rest of the former palaver tree. However, it was important that Keiff’s installation was positioned in a public space, easily accessible to inhabitants in order to guarantee that the contemporary palaver tree would keep on holding its symbolic function as a meeting, discussion, and sharing point. The superior chief of Douala, the Prince René Duala Manga Bell, offered one of his properties in Bonanjo for repositioning the Arbre à Palabre that was inaugurated for SUD 2007 and officially donated to the city of Douala.

The park where the Arbre à Palabre is located belongs to the Bell family, even if the installation itself is in the public domain. This area is surrounded by three historical monuments of Douala: to the North, the Vault of kings Bell, where today the same René Douala Manga Bell lies; to the South, the Espace doual'art (funding agency of the project) from which one can clearly see the Palace of the Kings Bell, commonly known as “La Pagode”, built in 1905 by German colonizers for the king Auguste Manga Ndoumbe; and, finally, to the West, the Old law court building.

doual'art is a non profit cultural organisation and art centre founded in 1991 in Douala, Cameroon and focussed on new urban practices of African cities.

The Palace of the Kings Bell situated in Douala is a building constructed in 1905 by the Germans for King Auguste Manga Ndumbe. The building is also known as La Pagode; this name comes from the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who remained in Douala in 1916-17, who calls it such in his famous novel Voyage au bout de la nuit.

The former Palace of Justice of Douala situated in Douala is a building originally constructed between 1930-31 under the French Mandate.

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Arbre à palabres (Bonambappe)

Contents

The artwork

See also

Bibliography

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References

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