At the heart of the eighth edition of the PhotoVogue Festival, creative duo Togo Yeye is enraptured. Electrified and ablaze, the conceptual productions of Delali Ayivi and Malaika Nabilatou, are breaking visual boundaries in the city of Lomé. Founded on a dream of Togolese creative collaborative practices and communal artistic expression, Togo Yeye is engaging and enchanting the West African unwavering disposition. By re-contextualizing Togolese traditions, folktales, and histories within contemporary culture and imagery, they are composing photography bodies of work anchored in the proclamations of the youth and rhythms of the Atlantic.
Selected by Puig, a global premium beauty player, and PhotoVogue out of 5000 applicants for the “What is Beauty?” Global Open Call, Delali Ayivi and Malaika Nabilatou have produced “By the Grace of Us”, a photography project grounded in Puig’s values of contagious Enthusiasm, Restless Curiosity, and Fairness and Respect. “By the Grace of Us” is a sonorous and entrancing repository of Togolese beauty and its contemplations. A re-imagination of the mundane and the sacred. A search for the sublime in Lomé, traced across the red blue painted walls, green sandy shores, long cascading weaves, and black brown gazes. Referencing religious paintings and classical togolese portraits, the symphonic subjects in the images are radiant and divine. They are hyper-romanticized manifestations of the passing Togolese youth, and their relationship with contemporary Togo, its hidden alcoves, stained concrete, yellow fish, and white doves. The simple and quotidian, laden with depth and valor.
Immersed in the Togo Yeye creative vision and practice, “By the Grace of Us” is a masterful embodiment of community and sincerity. Born from conversation and made for Togo, each image is a synthesis of collective thought and contributed innovation. From the groundbreaking Togolese hairdresser, Patron Aimé, to models and muses such as Darleine, Claudia, Maryline, Rose, Prudent, and dance duo Les Ewces, Delali Ayivi and Malaika Nabilatou are not solely interested in the final image but in the sustainable process of building an artistic community. All in an effort to produce Black art that is transcendent and everlasting, a bursting of timeless ideas and expression.
With the support of Puig, Togo Yeye has expanded its community, provided space for deliberate teamwork, and invested in the creative voices of the youth. They have developed an esteemed and imaginative documentation of the paradisiacal in Togo, providing a platform for the contributing artists, muses, dancers, and visionaries within the PhotoVogue exhibition space. “By the Grace of Us” is one of the many projects guided by the Togo Yeye dream. A Utopian dream of Togolese local and international threads of artistic declarations. A mapping of African and diasporic aesthetic endeavors made “for us by us”. The establishment of a West African creative industry honed by integrity, transparency, and love. “By the Grace of Us” is a visual amalgamation of the Togo Yeye vision, a cohesion of poetic pondering and aesthetic grandeur. From two black boys and one pointed finger, to an indigo stained skirt and pink blushed peer, “By the Grace of Us” is black beauty and its assertions.