Back to index of Nerve 8 - Spring 2006

Jump Ship Rat present their first exhibition of 2006

By Ben Parry

ARTicle 14
Débrouilles-toi, toi-même! Figure it out yourself! by Romuald Hazoumé

This May the Horseshoe Gallery at Liverpool World Museum will be transformed with ARTicle 14, a combination of found-object installation, video, sound and vast panoramic photographs.

ARTicle 14, Débrouilles-toi, toi-même! marked Beninese artist, Romuald Hazoumé’s first solo exhibition in the UK at the October Gallery London. Jump Ship Rat has commissioned two new major works specially designed to build ARTicle 14 into the Museum’s temporary exhibitions space. Hazoumé will be coming to Liverpool to recreate an African market scene, a new installation of found and collected objects from around Liverpool, made during a residency at Metal House with the participation of the Kensington and Toxteth communities.
The hypothetical fourteenth article in many African constitutions is débrouilles-toi, toi-même, which has come to mean ‘you have to look after yourself, because no-one else will’. In the case of Benin it is a reference to how government officials are parasitic - taking the state budget for personal means and giving nothing back to the people, leaving them to fight for their own survival.

The exhibition explores the socio-economic issues affecting West African societies and more specifically the individual life of the street trader who must continually reinvent survival strategies and negotiate ever changing urban territories. The localised trade of globalised products is central to Hazoumé’s work which contextualises the historical trade between Africa and Europe amid the harsh political and social realities of contemporary capitalist exchange.