Bal d’Afrique, which was inspired by someone else’s memories, was created with the intention of preserving and celebrating diasporic connections
Byredo and artist Dozie Kanu collaborate
«BYREDO Bal d’Afrique is one of my first fragrances. At the time of its formulation, I was obsessed with translating memories into scents. At the same time, I felt safe enough to include an imaginary component. My father lived and traveled in Africa for fifteen years. I read his diaries, the way he traveled, the different people he met. It was a way for me to get closer to him, and his diaries gave life to my imagination of the experience of arriving in Africa. Bal d’Afrique reflects all that; it is an imaginary journey, but also a full celebration of how I see African culture and its influence».
With these words Ben Gorham, founder, and creative director of BYREDO, describes Bal d’Afrique, a perfume with a base of cedarwood and vetiver and notes of violet and cyclamen, which is an olfactory translation, through Ben Gorham’s sensibility, of the sensations, memories, and emotions of his father’s travels in Africa.
An intimate fragrance that becomes universal, portraying the olfactory suggestions of a continent characterized by an immeasurable diversity of people, creativity, culture, art, and customs.
Celebrating memories at BYREDO since 2006
The association between memories and scents is precisely what BYREDO, as a Maison, aims for: the brand name itself is a crisis of the words By and Redolessence. Each fragrance represents a memory, starting from the memories and story of its founder Ben Gorham.
Of an Indian mother and Canadian father, Ben Gorham founded BYREDO in 2006 after a career as an international basketball player. He creates his perfumes from the smells and sensations of certain episodes in his life, such as the fragrance Encens Chembur, inspired by the scent he smelled in Chembur, a small island outside Mumbai, where he often went as a child, or as in the case of Bal d’Afrique,
It is precisely to celebrate these memories that BYREDO proposes a retrospective of its most beloved scents.
In this sense, BYREDO Bal d’Afrique 2023 wants to give new keys to one of the brand’s iconic fragrances: no longer only through the private tale of a continent seen from the eyes of a son who rediscovers the relationship with his father, but also through collaborations with international artists who tell their own stories, becoming part of a choral narrative.
Dozie Kanu’s Exhibition of Bal d’Afrique at Salone del Mobile
Among the artists called upon to reinterpret Bal d’Afrique for the 2023 retrospective is Dozie Kanu, an artist born in Houston to a Nigerian family who currently lives and works in Portugal.
Last April, during the Salone del Mobile week, Dozie Kanu transformed Ben Gorham’s olfactory imagery into installations and artworks, turning ineffable memories into matter.
In the exhibition, on view until last April 23, Dozie Kanu translated a story of personal feelings into a space for reflection, where the stories of individuals could write a collective story. With archival and non-archival works, the artist invited reflection on the concept of individual and collective memory.
Indeed, through his art practice, he seeks the relationship with his roots and his homeland.
Bal d’Afrique, BYREDO: a reflection on history and identity
Fundamental to this exploration are the eyes, stories, and memories of the people closest to him. In this way he himself and his works become a bridge to connect past, present and future. As he said, «it seems more authentic to me to try to see the continent through the eyes of others, recognizing and valuing the lives of the people who were and are there». «When I do an exhibition, I sort of disappear and something else takes over. I often say it’s my ancestors or the people who came before me working through me. In a sense I’m not aware anymore».
The Bal d’Afrique by Dozie Kanu transformed Ben Gorham’s intangible memories into a collective search and reflection on history and identity.
«This should not just be a kind of ephemeral energy, but a lifelong energy. It is not something to be savored for a moment and then forgotten. My aim is always to create a feeling that can stay with you for a long time». The purpose of Dozie Kanu is precisely to produce, through his works, a type of art that leaves its mark, just like a perfume.
The Saman Archive
For the exhibition, Dozie Kanu also wanted his works to dialogue with some negatives from the saman archive, founded in 2015 by artist and writer Adjoa Armah.
«Dozie, presenting Bal d’Afrique at the Salone del Mobile along with photographs from the saman archive, will bring collective memory into physical form. For many of us, memories of others are the only way to know something dear to us: a person, a place, a time. This is how Bal d’Afrique, a perfume inspired by someone else’s memories, was born». With these words Ben Gorham expresses the deep meaning of his fragrance, whose olfactory notes are inspired by history, travels, and memories of loved ones, especially those we didn’t get to know.
Scents that lead to the rediscovery of the past, to relate to the present. Individual stories that intertwine with collective history, expanding their meaning and significance.
In fact, the saman archive was created following its founder’s first trip to her homeland, Ghana. During this trip, Adjoa Armah began collecting negatives up to the 1960s, telling the story of a life she might have lived.
For the Akan people the word saman means photographic negative.
As Adjoa Armah herself affirmed, «for Bal d’Afrique, we selected from the archive that speaks to the celebratory associations of the grand ball and the aesthetic or transcendent experience, from nightclubs to traditional festivals, to the most authentic spiritual moments in southern Ghana. This selection is also a tribute to the small moments deemed worth remembering through photographic documentation, from studio photographs to days at the beach, to families at their Sunday’s Best».
As for the perfume, «the idea of Bal d’Afrique is like the essence that remains. It is not limited to the continent. It is a persistent memory that can find space anywhere».
Dozie Danu’s artworks
Dozie Kanu’s Bal d’Afrique was a collective tale of stories, emotions and feelings, a meditation on the concept of identity through the reformulation of themes of space and time.
These were the themes revealed in Foremothers (2019), an installation made of aluminum, steel, a drill rod and a Gabonese artifact, displayed as a pendulum evoking abacomancy (sand divination).
This artifact is attributed with the latent potential to move through the sand, to indicate boundaries other than those defined, and trajectories not yet traced. Individual objects and materials lose their primary functionality to give rise to new meanings, a new reading, a new story.
Also on display in the exhibition were three diptychs of photographs by Dozie: Shack, Sílvia, Azoia de Cima Olive Fields Outside My Window Heard from the Wind and, as the last, Dozitron (2022). These diptychs, composed of two identical images, invited visitors to reflect on the concept of time and space.
In Kanu’s words: «There is a kind of investigation that arises when you put two identical images next to each other, and I like that. There are people who have come to me and said they have seen different things in the images, but they are the same. It is an interesting illusion or confusion that I am creating. There is something else that you should see, but it is invisible».
Dozie Kanu work and the influence of cinema
Influenced by the language of film, which characterized his early works, Dozie, just as on the notes of a perfume, has created a space where time is no longer linear, but composed of the suggestions that visitors establish with his works, which mix objects and materials from Western culture, with objects from African tradition, in a new language that defines other times and other boundaries, past histories that are intertwined with present ones.
The works of art were thereby charged with a new dimension that transcended the individual objects, acquiring overall a new spiritual dimension.
«And I think that the more space there is around the object, the more the spiritual element can take over. I want to create a moment when people forget that they have made the decision to approach the work of art«, Dozie Kanu affirms.
Even more significant in this sense was the dialogue with the saman negatives. A journey – dialogue in search of roots, through the creation of a new personal spiritual language.
Dozie Kanu’s Bal d’Afrique pavilion, therefore, not only revived Ben Gorham’s olfactory suggestions through the artist’s eyes, but also transformed an intimate and private narrative into a choral and collective one.
BYREDO
BYREDO is the luxury perfume Maison founded in 2006 by Ben Gorham, who decided to blend Scandinavian aesthetics with ethnic influences due to his Indian origins.
Dozie Kanu
Born in 1993 in Houston, Texas, he lives and works in Portugal.
He studied between New York and Lisbon, Portugal, and has had solo exhibitions in London, New York, Zurich and Milan during the Salone del Mobile, among others.
Adjoa Armah
Adjoa Armah is an artist, educator, writer, and editor. She founded the saman archive, an archive of photographic negatives collected across Ghana.
Mariangela Peci
