Alternate histories of the Abebuu Adekai

Abebuu adekai constitute a widespread leitmotif in African art. These coffin-sarcophagi are used for funerals primarily by the Ga people, who live in Accra in southern Ghana, although their use has spread to Ewe, Asante, Adangbe, and Fanti as well. Manufactured in Teshie and Nungua (Accra), with some new workshops emerging in Togo, they began to be used on a large scale in the early 1960s, soon after Ghana became independent. Fantasy coffins rapidly achieved popularity abroad after they began to be presented as ready-made artworks at international exhibitions and caught the interest of the mass media. The questions are: What role does the global market play in redefining the status of these objects and their makers? What is the significance of the way in which they are perceived by the Western imagination? In order to unravel this issue, I have had to address a series of questions regarding the history of the history of the abebuu adekai and the practices that affect their artistic environment. The very concept of contemporary African art is tightly related to the history of its promotion. Exhibitions, publications, magazines, and institutions have been launched to change popular perceptions of Africa, to make its richness, liveliness, and contemporariness both perceptible and visible, to allow its protagonists to be integrated in the global market. Yet, seldom has the art history of Africanists taken into consideration the simultaneous historical, productional, semantic, and circulatory universes of African objects to the extent that such universes can be easily and coherently imagined. There is little knowledge about the reception and travel of African works within their consuming cultures, and even less about the way such objects traverse the differentiated terrains of possession and control. Several stages of fieldwork have allowed me to examine the re-creation of fantasy coffins and their creators within various social spheres, both in Africa and in the "West," where they circulate not only as a works of art. I did not observe a single object as if it were locked in a glass showcase. On the contrary, I studied the multiple and related spaces that they repeatedly occupy with an eye to the effects produced on them by these interactions.