Oreste Zevola
A sweet malady

There are places in which the word "distant" has a relative value. The long
hours of flight separating you from the place in which you usually live are
grossly multiplied, because the life and the rules in which you believed up
until then change and crumble, leading you into a new dimension in which
everything seems to coincide and blend naturally. It is easy to work in
Africa, because the things that you draw are close to what you are
experiencing: the fantastic creature that lives in the river is a sister of
the creature appearing on the canvas. People you meet smile glowingly and
ask you why, in that sort of place, you fell from the sky, and why haven't
you lived here for ever.
This brief text written at the end of my first stay in Central Africa is a
succinct expression of the impact that the African continent had on me.
Of course, Africa is not this alone. There are also poverty, illness and
injustice, and we are dismayed to see that even this new millennium has
begun on a planet inhabited by some people who live, and other people who
try to live.
However, what I later discovered was that once you have experienced those
simple and extraordinary sensations, you cannot forget them. That sweet
malady, a yearning for Africa, was not invented by tour operators. It is
something real, and many of the Europeans that I met in that continent
confirmed this. I wanted to return to Africa, above all to establish that
intense flux between those lands and my hand, a flux that surged through me
even just a few hours from the start of my first journey.
In May 2004, with the valuable assistance of Alliance Française, I began a
project that would end in March 2005. The subject was the capital of the
Central African Republic, Bangui, and everyday life there.
This entailed two journeys to the city, and a shorter trip to the
Dzanga-Sangha rainforest, a tropical paradise. These journeys gave rise to
an exhibition and a publication which - as a tribute to the originality and
unusual characteristics of life in Central Africa - are named after the sign
of a "cave banguissoise": Tue moi ce soir.
The image of this location, along with the others that make up the series,
were suggested by that flux that, starting from everyday gestures and
combined with the legends that are still strongly present in normal life,
led me through a city that lives the paradox of a real identity that has to
come to terms with - and is inevitably contaminated by - the flattering and
very different contact with distant, inaccessible countries.
The characteristics of this far-off but contemporary world are the
coexistence of old and new, and of poverty and consumerism. This
civilisation takes the symbols of the consumerism to which it is denied
access, and redevelops them in an original way, as if "stealing" words,
objects and icons of a distant Europe. The sweet malady of Africa has
naturally evolved into drawings and painting, possibly a way of treating the
disease while waiting for a new and fascinating journey.

Oreste Zevola, Naples 25/05/2005