| OLU OGUIBE | TEXTS ONLINE | MANY THOUSAND GONE | copywright © Oguibe 2000
Many Thousand Gone is an immediate installation piece comprising of 101 ink wash drawings on watercolor paper, each drawing measuring 19 x 24 inches. Depending on the number of rows in which it is displayed, the piece occupies between 10 - 17 meters of wall space and may not be abbreviated. It was first shown as part of the exhibition Resistancias, curated by Antonio Zaya for Koldo Mitxelena Cultural Centre, San Sabastian, Basque Country in 2000. This piece which is made up of 101 representations of African faces, is my response to the scourge of AIDS, the plague which is now silently claiming thousands of lives in Africa. It is believed that at present 1 in every 10 Africans has the AIDS illness and may die from it. An estimated 10 million are expected to die by 2010. This statistic means that by the end of the decade the continent would have lost far more souls to the disease than it did to slavery, colonialism, and all its recent wars combined. Because there is no methodical response to this plague, most African countries having very inadequate basic healthcare infrastructures and hardly any drug manufacturing capabilities whatsoever, an entire generation of children are being born who carry the virus for aids and may pass it on to their own children if a remedy is not found. Many Thousand Gone is therefore in remembrance of the thousands who have died in Africa from this dreadful plague, and the many thousands who are still bound to die, each face and each drawing representing someone, perhaps many more, who has succumbed: old and young, highly educated and illiterate, rural and urban, women and men. The number 101 represents infinity, the everpresence of death and devastation until there is closure to the scourge. The title is taken from an African American spiritual from the period of slavery, performed by Bob Dylan at The Gaslight Cafe, New York 1962. |