Nos géographies intimes: Hervé Yamguen

On the occasion of his second solo exhibition at AFIKARIS gallery, Hervé Yamguen presents Nos géographies intimes (Our Intimate Geographies), a body of drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures and wooden masks that continues a central line of enquiry in his practice: the visible and invisible forces that shape the ways in which we inhabit the world.

The exhibition emerges from a simple, almost universal question: what are we made of? For Hervé Yamguen, a human being can never be reduced to outward appearance. Each of us carries within us landscapes, voices, memories, wounds, inheritances, encounters and dreams. The places we have passed through continue to live within us, just as family histories, personal experiences and collective upheavals silently shape the way we perceive the world. Identity therefore appears as a shifting cartography, composed of layers in which the intimate and the wider world are constantly intertwined.

As the artist writes in his poem La fenêtre de mes rêves (The Window of My Dreams):

“Words raise

Before us

A great mirror

Where faces, memories,

And landscapes drift by.”

Here, language becomes a territory. It reveals the invisible landscapes that inhabit us and opens a space where memory, imagination and sensory experience converge. It is within this inner geography that the artist’s work takes root.

The figures that inhabit Hervé Yamguen’s works embody this understanding of being. Bodies, faces, silhouettes, trees, birds and vegetal forms merge into one another without ever fully becoming one. Rather than offering a fixed representation of identity, these metamorphoses reveal a world in constant transformation. Informed by African cosmologies, animist thought and the philosophy of Ubuntu — “I am because you are” — his work asserts that existence is always shaped through relationship. Humanity never appears as separate from the living world, but as one of its many expressions, carried by the memories of those who came before us as much as by the presences that surround us.

Although the bird continues to appear subtly throughout certain works, it is no longer the exhibition’s central subject. It nevertheless remains a figure of the creator: the one who, having endured the turbulence of the world, retains the ability to transform experience into song, to transmit, imagine and re-enchant what seemed lost. This idea of movement and transmission extends into the very materials of the works. The wooden masks enter into dialogue with bronze sculptures created through the lost-wax casting technique in Foumban, bringing ancestral craftsmanship into conversation with a distinctly contemporary artistic language. Drawings give rise to volumes; volumes extend the paintings. Each medium becomes a translation of the same breath. Nothing is fixed: forms move from one state to another, just as memories travel across generations.

The exhibition also marks an important shift in the artist’s practice. The introspection it explores never constitutes a withdrawal into the self. These intimate geographies are traversed by the fractures of the present: political violence, ecological upheaval, social transformations and individual vulnerabilities settle within them like layers of lived experience. What happens in the world becomes part of who we are; what inhabits us, in turn, shapes the way we act upon it.

Through this exhibition, Yamguen invites a form of attentiveness. Becoming aware of our intimate geographies means recognising what moves through us, while also acknowledging our belonging to a wider community of life. The series Conscience agro-poétique(Agro-poetic Consciousness) extends this reflection by calling for a renewed awareness of the interdependencies that connect humans, animals, plants and the cosmos. Against an era built upon separation and domination, the artist imagines a more hospitable way of inhabiting the world, one in which art contributes to reinventing our relationship with the living.

“It is from the window

Of my dreams

And from all that reaches me

As I walk

The paths of our struggling breaths

That I welcome and draw

Signs and trees

Into the notebook of our intimate geographies.”

These “struggling breaths” belong to our time. Yet Hervé Yamguen’s work never gives way to disenchantment. On the contrary, it affirms the power of imagination as a space of resistance and transformation. It reminds us that each of us carries within ourselves the ability to cultivate another relationship with the world.

Nos géographies intimes thus becomes a space of resonance, where the works offer not only forms to contemplate, but experiences to inhabit. They invite each person to recognise the territories that shape them, to embrace their complexity, and perhaps, in the artist’s own words, to “hold one’s heart’s beauty in one’s hands”, so that “kindness may make its star shine amidst the furious waves of fleeting time.”