his work is the first edition of La Méthodologie de la nouvelle écriture africaine “bété” by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. It won’t interest anyone already fluent in bété. It will hold even less interest for those who don’t intend to learn this language. If there is anyone, however, who finds that the facsimile of a Toyota agenda containing the so-called “methodology” makes for a great book, he/she will hereby assuredly be thrilled. This book is as beautiful and as strange in its way as the stones on which Frédéric received the revelation of his universal aphabet. Even more so when you think that, as soon as you’ve finished reading, he has convinced you that Toyota actually means something in “bété”.
Mark Alizart (Paris)
onestar press book:
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
La méthodologie de la nouvelle écriture africaine
Published 2003
uy this book now. Jonas Mekas has opened his personal archives and it is an unbelievable treat.
n 1998, Franck Scurti, always quick to react to insignifi cant events, ripped up an advertisement from Libération that shows a leaf from a tree and drew on it with a black marker. Initially this gesture evokes the use of advertising in Pop painting and the dissimulation of certain Pop artists behind the cold image of advertising. Wanted! But what are we looking for? Franck Scurti works with accidents and fracture; each of his actions can lead him, by a system of leaps or the association of ideas, toward new projects. Thus, six months later, he reused this spontaneous gesture to create a poster and a handout, “The city is not a tree,” sent anonymously to all the galleries and institutions in Paris, over four months, by a team of four people. Wanted takes as its fi eld of investigation the public space and becomes a parasite with the help of a recurring motif over a given period. It is a project involving uprooting, a metaphor of identity in the image of this leaf fallen from a tree whose veins evoke a thumbprint. 
old on to your head gear: Toguo’s Institute of Visual Arts is about to morph from two cinderblock structures in small Cameroonian towns (Bandjoun, M’Balmayo) into one relatively grandiose structure in Douala, a port city of 2 million people on the Gulf of Guinea. In its new home the Institute of Visual Arts will display work not only by African artists but also by such luminaries as Damien Hirst, Martha Rosler, Marcel Dzama, Claude Lévêque, Tania Bruguera… It will offer workshops, lecture series, theatre/performance/music, and an art library to the public. Perhaps the Institute’s groundbreaking move is the largess of the French government, you think? Private European philanthropy? A Cameroonian big man bitten by the art bug? Nope. The Institute of Visual Arts is the brainchild of Bartélémy Toguo, 36 years old, a self-made artist and a local guy made good. 
