Europeans carried these little portable leather-padded wooden desks when they went to Africa. These were the laptops of the day. On them, they "wrote Africa" in letters home, journals, and reports that now form the archives in Europe of Africa.
While generating material on these desks, they also collected things. Some of the first masks that went into production to service collecting Europeans were made in the Niger Delta. They were wooden and covered in leather.
I thought it would be interesting to collapse the technology of mask-making to tell and share specific regional oral archives with the technology of portable desks used to write a continent. These masks are made in Europe of old Edwardian portable desks I thought they could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them. In performance, they could unlock other archives. The coil rope that the leather masks were used with I have replaced with wicker because, in our context, an African head and rope relate visually to lynching. These heads can join with African diasporan bodies and enable us to reach back as they enabled our ancestors. This is a mahogany desk so the tree will have grown in a tropical climate and shipped in much the same way as we were. All parts of this desk are a reconfiguration of the original.
What is powerful about the basketry in this work is that it is designed not to contain things, but it is a basket as a possible space through which multiple possible performances can flow.
Basket as mask is a postcolonial attempt to reclaim storytelling from the colonisers, using the colonisers' desks and contemporary sustainable black maul willow.
