Art project links people together

“Adopted” is an art project that links solitary Europeans with large families in various African countries. It started as a game based on clichés but has developed into a living cultural exchange between people on both continents.

The German artist Gudrun F. Widlok’s “Adopted” project started when the postman happened one day to deliver a brochure about sponsoring children. She was feeling rather downhearted and she glued a photo of herself among the pictures of hopeful children. This gave her an idea: Why not look for people in Southern countries who might want to care about a solitary, melancholic, European city-dweller like herself?

Fictional notion

Originally she saw it as a fictional notion for confronting and questioning European attitudes to adoption; but also regarding Southern countries – or that part of the world that we wrongly and irrelevantly term the “Third World”. On the initiative of numerous visitors to the exhibition the idea has developed into a genuine cultural exchange between North and South.

Standing on three legs

“Adopted” currently stands on three legs: an exhibition, communication between the African families and their adopted Europeans as well as a film documenting three of these encounters.

The centre of the exhibition is the procurement office where people can register their interest in either being “adopted” or in acting as an “adoptive family”. There are 100 photographs of Europeans who want an African family as well as a painting in which an African family is holding up a picture of their new, European family member.

Willing to open their homes

In July the exhibition was shown at the Goethe Institute in Accra, Ghana. The opening was attended by Ghanaians of all ages who are generously willing to open their homes to European strangers. Adjoa Tetteh was one of them. “I am studying German here at the Goethe Institute and that is why I came here today. Do you want a family? She took hold of my arm. Perhaps you also have a sister who would like one?”

On the limit

The entire project balances on the limit between fiction and authenticity. I met up with Gudrun F. Widlok behind the exhibition room at a shady open-air café where she told me about the first exhibition. “I am interested in art as a way of creating new reality. Often this succeeds. People get involved and an alternative world is born. With the first exhibition in Berlin I thought that it would suffice merely to present the idea. But the visitors insisted on my making the idea real, carrying on. Ghana has been really special. When we presented the project here there was complete chaos at our table. Everyone wanted catalogues and people were laughing and making a great deal of noise. In Burkina Faso things were quieter; there was not the same party mood as here in Ghana.”

Working with clichés

I ask her whether the exhibition merely communicates another cliché – that of the poor but happy, extended African family. “Certainly, but this is a conscious choice. I work with clichés. And it is not true that all Europeans are solitary either. But the trend is interesting: that many people in the West feel lost and depressed. Having travelled in various African countries I think that I am right in concluding that people here spend more time with their families and are often curious about their fellow humans.

Filming the participants’ experiences

Gudrun is careful to point out that not all the contacts lead on to visits in the real world, even if three of the “adoptions” have already manifested visits. Gudrun has followed and filmed the participants’ experiences. “Even though we told the families that we were filming, no one seemed specially interested in what would happen to the film. No one seemed to think that there was anything strange about our turning up with a camera, sound recording equipment and a film team every morning.”

Portia Mansu, a fifteen year-old from one of the families laughs loudly. “I didn’t think much about it. I just thought that they might be making a family film. I saw the film team as part of our family too.

Email access

She speaks warmly about the European man who came and lived with her family for five weeks. “I call him big brother. But he had to go back to his country to work. I have now got an email address so that we can write to each other.”

When the film has been edited sometime next year it will be shown on TV and at festivals in various parts of the world; and naturally in Accra. Portia just shrugs her shoulders: “The film? Mm, we shall see, but I hope that my big brother comes back next year.”

Besides Germany and Ghana, the exhibition has been shown in Spain, Austria, Italy, the USA and Burkina Faso; though not yet in Sweden.

Kajsa Hallberg Adu