Villa Karo offers live music and theatre on it’s stage at Lissa Gbassa every first Saturday of the month. On the 5th of May three groups performed there: Chin-system and toba -rhythms specialist Sossa Erevard also known as ”Le vrai Schou”, a marionette troupe Thakamou Culture Arts that is organizing the Teni-Tedji marionette festival tour and finally Julie Dossou’s gogohoun and salsa performance.
Thakamou Culture Arts and Teni-Tedji are also holding a marionette workshop for children in Villa Karo in a few weeks. To find more about Teni-Tedji, log in to Facebook and click here.
One more month before it’s time for the last scholarship holders to leave Villa Karo’s residency and return to Finland. It’s been a good year with, as usual, many moments of happiness and times of being lost in translation, cultural faux-pas’ and moments of mutual understanding in Villa Karo. But it’s not the end of the year yet! Here’s what’s happening in the times to come.
This year’s second last sholarship holder translator, researcher Simo Määttä will reach Grand-Popo by the time I post this writing. He’ll be working at the residency for five weeks with a research project before coming back to Finland. Beninese painter Yves Midahuen, the last scholarship holder of this year, will arrive in Villa Karo on the 4th of May and stay there for four weeks. At the end of his stay he’ll put on an exhibition in Villa Karo’s Lissa Gbassa for the month of June. It’ll be this springs third and final exhibition in Villa Karo.
Fisher men by Yves Midahuen
Teni-Tedji, a marionette group, will be holding a workshop in Villa Karo for the children of Grand-Popo on the first weekend of May. We shall get back to you about this with pictures.
Villa Karo’s own multitalented board member Anna Ovaska and curator Tintti Timonen will be working on a new museum exhibition in Villa Karo’s museum during the month of May. The exhibition will open in September of this year to the people of Grand-Popo, scholarship holders and passing tourists. At the same time Anna will be laying down the foundations of Villa Karo’s upcoming first virtual exhibition. Yes, you heard me right! You’ll get to see what Villa Karo’s collections and the new exhibition has to offer even if you aren’t able to go and see by yourself! At the same time, hopefully, VK’s homepage’s appearance and content will be finally updated. The project is trarting now and will be finished by the end of the year.
But not all upcoming events are taking place in Benin. The 2nd of June Villa Karo will take part in a festival that will take place at Narinkkatori, in Helsinki. The other organisers are Walter ry, radio SPIN FM, 09 Helsinki Human Rights, Namika, Funk on ry and FIDA among others. We’ll have there our former scholarship holder Camilla Heidenberg performing and holding a workshop with her husband Georges Agbazahou. Also five artists affiliated with VK will take part in charity event with five graffiti painters. A big plate of street culture and sports with a flavouring of Villa Karo will be offered to you on Narinkkatori that day.
During the months of summer, although it’s quiet in VK, we’ll have a big piece of the centre’s heart here in Finland with us as VK’s director Kwassi has kindly agreed to lend us here our chère Georgette and cher Richard from VK. They will come here in July to meet friends and acquaint and learn from their Finnish colleagues in August. Welcome Georgette and Riku!
It's unbelievable how good quality these old time plastic boxes are. This one's cover still stays on and everything.
This used to be my snack box when I started at the Maternelle of the Ecole de Jeanne d’Arc, in Marseille, as a three-year-old, sometime in September 1986. I know this because the teachers gave each of us kids a special sign before we learned to write and read our names. The sign helped us to recognize our own things among the belongings of 40 or 50 other children. My sign was still visible on the cover of this box up until a few years ago when it finally faded out with time and constant washing.
Over 25 years ago my mother filled this box every morning with apple wedges, a voileipä and Petit Ecolier -cookies that I would eat at snack time with my fellow kindergarden pupils in the school’s yard under a platanus and the Mediterranean sun (Mom, I’ve never thanked you for the snacks, so thank you!). By then I wasn’t called Miikka but Mica (and my family name most certainly wasn’t Pörsti but Poersht or something like that) and I was the only child with blue eyes and parents that spoke to him in a strange language.
By now, Mica is gone and I often wonder what ever happened to him. He and his friends couldn’t come to live with me in Finland a few years later when we turned ten and our family moved back. Although the colour of Mica’s eyes were OK and typical here, he felt just a bit too weird and different to stay with his perhaps slight French accent and different mental scenery. Everything he he knew was from a different world and somehow many, many people didn’t want to hear from it at all. Many kids said it wasn’t true that he hadn’t grown up here and for some reason coming from abroad created aggressive reactions in some people – both adults and children.
In Finland he was simply too much of a stranger – as at that time, in order to be different here, it sufficed that somebody didn‘t know the rules of ice hockey or who Rölli was. Sorry for the exaggeration, but I’m sure you get my point. Today, I often wonder about those who came in or out after Mica and are stranger than him: actual, not hidden immigrants and others who are so easily hated for what they just are by birth or as the outcome of sad circumstances.
But I think Mica just went on hiding. I often have the feeling that he comes back to say hi when I sleep or I‘m tired. He’s always ten and he still counts in French and reads Tintins in the language Hergé wrote them in. He tells me what we used to do when we were kids and how Rémi B. and all the other people we knew are doing back in Marseille, back in time.
This morning, I put my lunch into my red box, as I often do, before going to work. Call me unecological, but as a former missionary kid I thank God for plastic as I don’t know who else to thank for this material that outlasts memories, tears, hellos and goodbyes. Call me sentimental, but for a person whose childhood’s scenes and cast has been wiped off and rewritten so many times as mine, a simple, durable plastic lunch box may become a priceless, personal artifact.
Roots, memories, personal feelings, identity and the public recognition of these elements are crucial in order to survive for all of us, perhaps especially for minority groups – be they hidden, unrecognized, public, strange, difficult to grasp or unpleasant in the eyes of others. None of us can choose where we are born and what we are as a person. Some of us can’t even choose where we grow up, live, how we are treated and what we become.
I wish you all a very happy week on this national Sami people’s day because the celebration of a minority should be a real party for us all. And I hope for the many silent, screaming, weird, singing, disappointed, fanatic or mumbling voices we’ve heard during the past couple of weeks in Finland prior to the presidential election to be taken in account by all of us in the future – not just the voices we recognize, understand, like or approve. There is a message and a desire for a better world behind every statement, no matter how we label the person making it – be he or she fanatic, gay, straight, conservative, demonic, immigrant, humane, patriotic, ignorant or liberal. PS. Samis? Who are they? Find out here. Voileipä? What’s that? Oh, that’s a sandwich in Finnish, although we usually don’t put another slice of bread on top of the other as a cover as, i.e., the French and the Beninese do.
For a decade now, I had witnessed almost all the Vodou ceremonies regarding annual commemoration of Vodoo festival that takes place every tenth of January. Those who had migrated to Benin and witnessed this event in the past should count themselves lucky. Lucky because they had received blessings from number of Vodou spirits present during the ceremonies.
As a preacher, I admire those who are driven by curiosity to deepen their knowledge and discover more about Vodou and I am ready to dish out some secrets holding aloft our religion in exchange for a transparent bottled liquid, not trying to sell my religion but transparent oblige as in other religions.
This year’s celebration was stuffed with colorful activities enrolled in different performances involving all Fetish priests and Priestesses followed by adepts of Heviosso, Mamiwata, Tron-Kpetodeka Zangbeto, Sakpate, Age-vodou etc who converged at Gbecon, Grand-Popo to demonstrate their fidelity and attachment to Vodou religion. A great multitude defied the heat, struggled to witness a five hour procession through sandy couloirs between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mono River. All started with the sacrifice of a goat to all the vodou spirits by a famous fetish priest from Gbecon.
A beautiful scene that attracted the attention of the crowd for a while was a fleet of canoes that transported beautifully dressed Mami Wata adepts across the river from Hève. The men aboard responded rhythmically, with their bodies and paddles to chants from adepts, unified their movements and ferried all to their destination; “PLACE DE VODOU”.
Kokouhoun Adept in Trance
Interesting performances during the procession were so mysterious that visitors, new to such occasions bombarded me with questions to which I was unable to answer publicly. More questions without answers rained lot of doubts in the minds of numerous visitors who adventured for the first time to Grand-Popo and Ouidah. The departure of the supreme head of Benin’s Vodou religion DAGNRON GUEDENGUE signified the end of 10th January vodou day celebration. People got dispersed into their respective communities for a big feast mostly organized by Chief Fetish Priests for adepts and friends.
Villa Karo hosted a group of important Vodou personalities who took refuge in Lissa-Gbassa to avoid being drowned by admirers. A delicious dakoin served with barracuda accompanied by some centiliters of unidentified transparent hot stuff proclaimed the end of an interesting afternoon.
Heviosso Chief Fetish Priest
NB: I am creating a special platform for Questions and Answers for vodou in the near future. A Bientôt
