William Adjété Wilson and Yves Apollinaire Pede stand here as two essential voices in the visual retelling of Atlantic history. Wilson’s monumental project The Black Ocean — an 18‑panel textile fresco tracing five centuries of connections between Africa, Europe, and the Americas — provides the conceptual and narrative foundation for this work. His research into the Gulf of Benin, once known as the Slave Coast, revealed the complex web of alliances, trade systems, and human destinies shaped by the Atlantic world: African rulers and intermediaries, European merchants, enslaved people, maroons, intellectual elites, and later African‑American movements for civil rights.

Drawing from this historical arc, Yves Apollinaire Pede translates Wilson’s narrative into the traditional appliqué technique of Abomey, historically used to record the deeds of the kings of Danxomè. In The Middle Passage, Pede deploys vivid colors and symbolic forms to depict a fortified trading post, chained captives, a ship crossing stylized waters, and fragmented bodies that evoke the violence and dehumanization of the triangular trade. At the center stands the “Pillar of Forgetting”, referencing the ritual imposed on captives in Ouidah before embarkation — a motif central to Wilson’s Black Ocean research.

By bringing Wilson’s historical vision into the material language of Abomey appliqués, Pede creates a powerful dialogue between two generations of artists. The work becomes both a memorial and a contemporary act of transmission, offering an African perspective on the Middle Passage and its enduring resonance across three continents.

Provenance:

Former collection of Professor Gert Chesi, founder of the Museum der Völker (Tyrol, Austria). Acquired between 2010 and 2015, then deaccessioned by the museum.