Kialy Tihngang - Artist

I have been galvanised to archive the intersection of Cameroonian identity and queer identity, to challenge the dominant narrative (held in both the UK and Africa) that the two do not occur naturally, regularly, and beautifully.

Since 2022, I have been recording interviews between myself and various Cameroonian people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, both native and of the Cameroonian diaspora. I have collected over 26 hours of rich audio material detailing personal lived experiences through inspirational words, traumatic memories and humorous insights.

For this commission, I took two of these interviews and turned them into embroidered animated short films. I used the embroidery style of Toghu cloth, which is the unofficial national textile of Cameroon. It originated from the North West Grasslands region of Cameroon is made of black velvet, which is richly embroidered with red, gold, and white chain stitch. However, I used pink thread instead, as an immediate visual cue for queerness, defiantly embroidering queerness into the fabric of Cameroon. You can view one of the two animations below: