I spent roughly 2 months living in Kenya. To make writing about this more manageable I’ll split it into 2 parts. I’ll first just focus on my last 3 weeks at the Karen Village Art residency and return to my full experience later. Check out the project I worked on here. Below is a video of the experience.
I did not plan to come here.
As noted in a previous journal entry a year ago here the first residency of my adventure was to take place in October in Lome, Togo located in West Africa. This was cancelled 3 weeks before it was going to start. It’s hard to describe my devastation here. Of all 4 planned residencies I was most excited about this one. Some of my ancestry is in that region, and I got accepted a year ago so it seemed so solid. While it was insured money was still lost. It was the one that encouraged me to apply to all of the others and blow my life up. Perhaps that was it’s sole purpose for me.
Something that is interesting was I booked my flights while in DC. Booking NYC>Egypt>Kenya was effortless. Booking Kenya>Nigeria>Togo was impossible. I tried to buy it for 2 days and there kept being errors on every site that I tried before it finally went through. This was likely a warning.
Anyway. My trip is cancelled so I had 3 weeks to adapt. Needed to find somewhere that would accept me on a more casual basis in Kenya since I could no longer afford to travel elsewhere. Reached out to Karen Village and they accepted me thankfully.
It’s located in the Karen neighborhood in west Nairobi. The village itself is composed of Art studios, living quarters, a soccer field, a church (Very lit), and assorted businesses like restaurants (Had a daily kings breakfast at one and another was the first time in my entire life actually enjoying Ethiopian food), video production studios, offices, 2 small bars, small grocery stores and a gym (which plays music too loud all day long).
One of my favorite things about being here was working in close proximity to such experienced Black artist and their apprentices. Painters, sculptors, metal workers, editors and glass artist. Most of my time was spent working in some spare space in glass artist Tonney Mugo’s studio.
Tonney was kind enough to teach me a bit about his glass craft. I’ve always preferred correctable medias. Pencils have erasers, Clay can be remolded, and digital art has an undo button. Glass is unforgiving. You have one chance for a right cut. The pressure is kind of thrilling though. Despite all the literal blood I gave to the glass I deeply enjoyed it. Check out the process video for the glass piece below.
Pechakucha Talk
My second day there I was asked to give a PechaKucha talk in 5 days. This sort of derailed the art project I was working on as I shifted my focus to that for the week, but it was an exciting opportunity. I’d been thinking earlier in the day if I would be able to present my work in some capacity there. We presented in KV’s Gallery that is currently under construction. Up until this time it was my impromtu skating dirt floor skating rink. It was a surprise that so many of my fellow speakers were animators. Was amazing to be around so much talent and skill. You can check out the full talk here. Photo below makes me look more engaging than I was.
Arbitrary memorable moments included Exploring Nairobi National Park with 2 of KV’s resident artist, the village cats, testing out glass art, getting my mind changed about Matura and experiencing the “Real Kenya”, East Africans music history lesson with a local jazz musician, 200 Kenyan Kids singing and dancing, tour and history of the area, pool games, many personal discoveries, movie night (Has anyone else seen “The Art of Making it?”)and meeting a fellow second gen Haitian.
Nairobi National Park deserves more detail. It was such an excellent day and highly exhausting day. 2 other artist and I drove around the park getting within 5 feet of lions and having a true feast of a picnic in the wilderness. Outtings with creatives are amazing because you can talk in great detail about something stunning and ordinary you see without being seen as weird or boring. Top notch male bonding. I got sick again though. That makes 2 out of 2 safaris I’ve fallen ill during. More on the extreme first time on the next Kenya entry.
