Serge Attukwei Clottey: Ghana's real-life 'Yellow Brick Road' leads to a different sort of fairy tale

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There’s a real-life yellow brick road forming in Ghana, and it shares at least one thing in common with the fictional path it’s named for.

Much like Dorothy in the story “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” who must follow a magical yellow route to find a way back to Kansas, Serge Attukwei Clottey — the artist behind Ghana’s “Yellow Brick Road” — is motivated by a longing for home.

“As an artist, I’m interested in migration,” Clottey said on the CNN original series Nomad. “Not as in human, but migration as in objects.”

The objects used to create Clottey’s work carry a special significance in Ghanaian culture. The “Yellow Brick Road” is composed of deconstructed “gallons,” or yellow plastic jerrycans that were originally containers for imported cooking oil. They are widely repurposed to carry water amid the country’s ongoing water shortage, and got their name during a particularly bad time for water access: the tenure of president John Kufuor, who was in power from 2001 to 2009. That’s when they became known as “Kufuor gallons,” or simply “gallons.”

As a child, Serge Attukwei Clottey used “gallons,” or yellow plastic jerrycans to collect water for his household in Ghana. Now, the containers are central to his art. Credit: Nii Odzenma/Courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957

They are still a common sight in Ghana, where 1 in 10 people has to travel up to 30 minutes to collect water, according to UNICEF. A powerful emblem of the struggles of everyday life, they have also become a symbol of African art, since Clottey put them at the center of his “Afrogallonism” movement.

Gallons of ‘bricks’

Clottey grew up using the containers to fetch water for his house before moving in with his uncle, who had a running tap. But the gallons, which actually have a capacity of 20 to 25 liters, or about 6 US gallons, then took on a different meaning for the Accra-born artist.

“I found them as available materials that I can work with for a long time. So I put them together like a wall and then…

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Source : cnn