Ebenezer Akakpo and

Eneida Sánches

An Experience in Exploration

Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Harding

This is part of the importance of the Indigo Arts Alliance. It is a place that acknowledges, and in fact emerges from, the traumas of our global history—the traumas of the plunder of land and people, of the inequities that live inside the quotidian structures of our cities, our countries, our institutions, our lives. And because Indigo knows these things are true, it is not afraid to look at them. It is not afraid to hear and see the stories that others sometimes fear. But just as important, if not more so, the artists of Indigo come from the places and people who have survived the trauma, who are in this very moment as we speak, surviving the trauma—even as it kills them. Yes, you read that right. We die every day. And we still live.  

And what makes that possible? The gathering. The gathering of artists from all the hidden and excluded corners. But not just the artists, but the ancestors of the artists—their histories, with all their wounds and their wisdom. With all their tenderness and genius and rage. With their abundant and anguished joy. If an arts institution has no room for the ancestors of Black and Brown people—the bones that lie under the Atlantic Ocean; the bones buried as coffles and marches made their way across the land; the bones now breaking and buried from jails and prisons and buildings with no sign outside but screams inside. If an arts institution has no room for the fullness of humanity in the modern world, it will not be useful to those now gathering. If an institution cannot acknowledge the whole history of all of us together, and if that acknowledgment does not shake the institution at its foundations, it cannot make room.

Black and Brown artists come with their families. Invited or not. They come with ghosts. And there will be feasting. And welcome. And laughter. And wailing. And music. And dead silence. And people will dance. And the bones will dance. And the numbers have no end. And only places who acknowledge that this is the history we share—that we must make a future from the wisdom of bones—are ready.

As visually different as their works may appear, Ebenezer and Eneida are both employing symbolic languages grounded in African and diasporic philosophical understandings. Both artists were raised in cultural contexts where African religious and cultural symbolism abound—Ebenezer in Ghana, West Africa, and Eneida in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil: places that hold ancient and important understandings of the world. Places with insights and compassions from which all the world might benefit and grow and transform. With different processes and in different forms, the jeweler/designer and the printmaker/metalsmith are exploring ways to demonstrate the interconnections among human stories and communicate fundamental and shared human experiences through codes and concepts of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic experience.

In the mentorship, Eneida focused on trying to help Ebenezer detach his creative process from the idea of developing a specific product as the end result. A computational designer, Ebenezer likes to do work that solves problems, work that has a specific and useful finality. Instead, Eneida encouraged her mentee to simply focus on the experience of creating, to allow himself to develop another kind of relationship with his work: not “wanting something” from it, but just exploring where it might go when he was not thinking about results. It was a liberating approach for Ebenezer.

When he first immigrated to the United States at the beginning of his career, Ebenezer’s goal was developing a line of jewelry for the high-end luxury market. During a period of study in Italy, he noticed the ubiquity of certain symbols, like hearts, for example, as key design elements in the work of the Italian jewelers whose stores and workshops he visited. The heart-shape is similar to the Akoma symbol for patience and tolerance in Adinkra iconography and the connection planted a seed in Ebenezer’s mind about possible uses of that extensive African conceptual resource in his own work.  

Later, as a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Ebenezer visited the Cooper Hewitt Museum for an exhibit on sustainable design that left a strong impression on him as both an artist and designer. In a lecture associated with the exhibit, he learned that companies designing for the global luxury market target only 10% of the world’s population. Ebenezer wondered about the other 90%. Walking out of the Cooper Hewitt that day, he began to question his desire to focus his work on high-end luxury products: “That was where I started thinking—how else can I use design to solve problems?”  

He settled on a project to create small-scale, portable water filtration systems that can be easily used in rural communities in his home country, Ghana. The Adinkra-based jewelry designs emerged as a way to get local villagers excited about the water filtration project but Ebenezer quickly recognized the broader global appeal of the concepts and values represented by the Adinkra symbols.

The iconography that is the signature of Ebenezer’s work are representations of centuries-old West African values, first codified by the Bono people of modern day Ghana and Ivory Coast and shared widely among other Akan groups. There are dozens of signs in the Adinkra classification, each associated with an idea central to Akan ethical and cosmological systems, often expressed in a proverb. Concepts like Agreement, Endurance, and Sankofa (wisdom in learning from the past) are represented by specific ideogrammatic forms. Ebenezer explores these symbols in different sizes and iterations, colorings, positions, and products—focusing on the connection between the image and the concept it expresses.   

During the Indigo residency, he was able to digitally shift and scale the Adinkra symbols to get a sense of how they would look as ten foot tall structures: a single pattern, repeated and spaced out on the screen as if reverberations or slices, so that the shapes look almost terrestrial, like large natural formations of earth, or giant ocean waves. Or like vertebrae; a spine. Ebenezer would bring to the studio big 3D printed models of some of the symbols and Eneida would play with them, wiggling them and holding them up to her ear or her arm, or have Ebenezer shine light through the spaces in the designs so that shadows fell on Eneida’s clothes or on the walls. The point was simply to play and it was this freedom that Ebenezer said he particularly enjoyed: the experience of exploration without concern for output.

The process of untethering her own creative work from specific, desired ends is something Eneida also went through, in the early 2000s, after almost a decade as a ritual metalsmith, creating ceremonial implements for Candomblé temples and the personal altars of devotees. “When I was creating the ferramentas, the orixa tools, it was very much my target to have specific orders and to sell them.” Her crowns, brass and silver-plated mirrors, double-headed axes, and other symbolic objects were commissioned by some of the oldest Afro-Brazilian ritual communities in the country. It was a work Eneida felt called to, and that she enjoyed. But after a while, she tired of it. It was repetitive and she wanted to do something else. At the time, she thought she would move completely away from work related to the African spiritual forces, the orixás, and she instead decided to study French and German philosophers and the filmmakers Wim Wenders and Glauber Rocha. One film in particular, Rocha’s Terra em Transe, [“Entranced Earth”] struck her powerfully. The film is a masterpiece of Brazilian cinema: a non-linear, dis-synchronous allegory of political deception and the loss of naivete. It is also a film whose structure imitates trance.

The trope of trance in the film supported Eneida in thinking about liminality, communication, and materials in new ways. Trance is an elemental experience in many African and Afro-Atlantic religions, and ultimately, it is a poetic-artistic means of communication between different planes of experience. Critic Solange Farkas writes that Eneida was moving away from the specificity of the symbolism of the ferramentas and toward “a less literal representation of Candomblé…” Her encounter with Glauber Rocha encouraged Eneida toward greater fluidity, and even dilution, in her use of Afro-Brazilian symbolism. In that process, Eneida’s work has become increasingly an experience of translation, of moving across dimensions and through displacements. She talks about master artists like trumpeter Miles Davis and samba singer Clementina de Jesus through whom we can understand what happens, artistically, in trance states. Eneida sees the liminal intensity of artists—when they are operating from a certain orientation, from profound engagement with their own creativity and with the lifeforce in their work—as enabling them to transmit understandings, insights, visions, images…bringing what they see, what they experience to a plane where it can be shared.

For Eneida, one of the most valuable aspects of the residency at Indigo was the opportunity to strengthen her capacity to talk about her work, to champion her own artistry and to interact with curators, museum directors, collectors, and other arts administrators from a position of confidence in the value of her work. “This is so important for us as Black people,” she said. “[As] an artist who is in mid-career, or even beyond mid-career, I should respect and defend my work, and I should care for my work.” Eneida credits Marcia Minter’s depth of professional experience in the world of art and design and the interactions and conversations into which she invited Eneida; these served as practical instruction and models for the visiting artist. These rich interactions add multivalent layers to the mentoring, the sharing, the growing that the residencies provide.

Perhaps it is especially fitting that artists from the breadth of the diasporas of Africa and the Indigenous Americas can find a common space in the physical and aural environs created by the Indigo Arts Alliance to be together. Not under the auspices of vetting and exclusionary structures, where the insights of Black and Brown people are almost automatically denied and the wisdoms never assumed. But instead, just spending time: riffing off of one another, creating, imagining, seeing relatives and friends in one another’s hands and faces—not running from the hard histories but sharing all those stories, the things we have learned across these many centuries of modernity (and before) about how to survive a hard place and make it beautiful.