LOCATION: Outdoor exhibition MAP
Naam Na La (2021-) is a photographic series exploring the theme of love in a visual dialogue between portraiture and landscape. Created in Senegal by French Cameroonian photographer Charlotte Yonga, as part of a residency hosted by Fondation Blachère, these images take the viewer on a poetic, almost dreamlike, journey of care and tenderness through depictions of human relationships with one another and with nature.
In Wolof (a Senegalese language), ‘Naam Na La’ translates as ‘I have the nostalgia of you’ – which would be commonly expressed as ‘I miss you’ or ‘I long for you’.
The artist says: ‘These words resonated with the concept of Love as it moved me and as I unconsciously wanted to reveal it. Love experienced in its sense of vastness and eternity, as well as in its shortcomings and flaws. Love potentially uncertain, murky, ambivalent, persisting in bodies and gestures, and in the settings and colors radiating through its emptiness and fullness…
Views of the ocean and vegetation punctuate the narrative like breaths of oxygen, metaphorizing hope, fertility, and infinity.’
Presented as part of Landskrona Foto Festival 2024, this photographic display is directly connected to the exhibition ‘Where to Land the Eye’ curated by Christine Eyene at Landskrona Konsthal. It is an invitation for the eye to wander across geographies – from Sweden to Senegal – and experience how photography enables us to encounter different social contexts, and create links between proximity and distance, here and there, through feelings that we all have in common, such as love.
Born in 1985 in Paris, Charlotte Yonga is a French-Cameroonian artist who lives and works between Barcelona (Spain) and Paris (France). Through her creative process, which integrates photography, video, and drawing, Yonga invites us to explore fragments inspired by reality, scenes of intimate lives, and alterity or ‘otherness’ through which she reveals complex truths. In a subtle back-and-forth between fantasy and reality, she encrypts the obvious and blurs boundaries, revealing at times ambivalent meanings that challenge the limits of our collective and individual perceptions.
