Maison Gbegbe

A project of Sename Koffi Agbodjinou, Messanh Amedegnato, and Mathilde ter Heijne

A center for preservation and exchanges around traditional cultures, the »Maison Gbegbe« aims to become an international platform for deepening the conversation, enabling the research and realizing the restitution of African cultural heritage, and becoming a site for the invention of a disruptive museum concept. This laboratory is a place to lay the foundations for the invention of a new relationship between Africa and Europe which is both scientific and aesthetic but at the same time resolutely innovative and fruitfully rooted in regional African religious and cultural heritage. A temporary show- and assembling space has been constructed and inaugurated in 2021 on the plot of land which had been donated in 2017 as the future building site of Maison Gbegbe. The community-based, and participatory Maison Gbegbe initiative is supported by a regional organization of traditional knowledge keepers and healers, as well as researchers and artists from different geographical, scientific, and cultural backgrounds reflecting the complex (pre- and post-) colonial entangled narratives that such a project will crystallize. How can we decolonize the principle of the museum, and think in harmony with the diversity of the different cultures and cosmologies of our world? Through ongoing collaborative processes between international collaborators reflections need to take place about how to reduce thereotyping and prevailing prejudices, and trust needs to be actively built between participants of the project at a national or international level. Maison Gbegbe is to create, study and offer a new relationship to ‘objects’, ‘subjects’ and knowledge, maybe it should become a place of ecology. The initial spark for Maison Gbegbe came in 2018, when Finnish journalist and writer Matti-Juhani Karila decided to return his entire collection of Mami Wata objects to its context of origin and transferred it to the Villa Karo museum in Grand-Popo, Benin. The permanent exhibition “Mami Wata’s Return” opened in March 2019 at Villa Karo’s Petit Musée. The following year, a Mami Wata was given over to the UCTT for reactivation and sacred safekeeping. It was in this context that the idea of Maison Gbegbe was born. Afá was consulted to determine if and how the project should proceed. Shortly thereafter, with help from canton chief Gê Fio Foli Kponve Alofa, the district of Agouégan granted the UCTT two plots of land for the organization’s headquarters and to build a public venue where stories could be told and (sacred) West African objects could be received.

Maison Gbegbe is located in Agouegan, Aného, Togo. In 2022 the pre-configuration team consisting of Rossila Goussanou, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Anani Sanouvi was brought together to research the architectural, socio-political, spiritual, and artistic prerequisites of such a space.