Object of the Week
My Embroidered Boubou and Pretty Radio, a black and white photograph by El Hadj Tijani Adigun Sitou
September 24, 2014
Object Of The Week- From the DePauw University Art Collection
By: Hayden DeBruler ‘17
My Embroidered Boubou and Pretty Radio, a black and white photograph by El Hadj Tijani Adigun Sitou, seeks to create as many contrasts as he has names. The photograph in question depicts a man sitting within, what is implied to be, four cramped walls. He stares directly at the viewer with a stoic annoyance, “I’m here to tell you,” he commands, “about what you think you’re seeing.” His boom box perched, with a relaxed grip, on one knee, his hand, claimed by experience, on the other—modernity versus the craftsman. His glasses operate with the same clash of time and technology when juxtaposed to the ethnic regalia he sports. The image seeks to defy linear existence—Kurt Vonnegut’s Tramalfadorian realized, an alien who tells us that we conceive of time incorrectly, that he, “sees all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.”* His existence is pure, unconfined despite his physical presence within the room, the frame. His boom box spews a mantra that seeks only to define a perspective which needs to be created, “Tramalfadorians see humans as great millipedes—with babies legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,”* a flurry of existence, radio static, the shadows we keep of ourselves.
*Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut. Random House, 1969.
Hayden DeBruler is from Greenville, South Carolina. DePauw Class of 2017, Creative Writing and Art History Major. She is a volunteer with the Peeler Art Center Galleries.