Sebastian Loerscher’s Nigerian-drawn diary is part of a series of drawings he has made during his travels. For example, he recently published a book about his trip to India, Making friends in Bangalore. In 2017, Sebastian was invited to the Aké Arts & Book Festival in Lagos. There, he met many interesting people, including some from northern Nigeria, who persuaded him to leave the busy city and visit their homeland.
During his six months in Nigeria, Sebastian travelled a lot, north and south, by train and by minibus; sketching on the road during two-days train trips. His drawings this time are not portraits as such, they are mostly colors that transmit the emotions of the moment, with silhouettes drawn over the color. People drawn in gray pencil look transparent, you can see streets, cars, and houses right through them. The drawings have no text, unlike Sebastian’s other graphic art projects. His initial idea was to publish the drawings accompanied by poems, which he wrote about each moment after returning to Berlin. The Nigerian trip opened up this new side of him as an artist.
The Nigerian travelogue is entitled Ballad for empty billboards. There is only one drawing of them: Nigerian roads full of the skeletons of billboards, which are only used for elections. They are usually empty, or hold a random telephone number on a big white screen. Such a waste! And it's actually a symbol of the country’s current situation: a country with a lot of potential—it has natural resources and many talented people who grew up with big dreams, prepared to go straight forward to a better future, but nobody has the money to even put up an advertisement. It was also a personal moment in the life of the artist, like starting from zero, “Life was so busy all around me, but I felt so empty inside...,” remembers Sebastian, comparing his own feeling to the billboards.
I chose a few drawings and asked Sebastian about their background. The one that attracted me most was a gray pencil sketch of barefoot men called “Evening prayer”. It was drawn inside a mosque in northern Nigeria. It's a very quick and emotional drawing, Sebastian had ten minutes to sketch it, and you know how it is when Muslim people pray: they move all the time—they stand up, they raise their hands, they bend down, they sit up on their knees and bend down again. So you really see the motion in this drawing and it feels so honest, so realistic and surrealistic at the same time. As you don't see a religious building beautifully decorated inside, you only see humble air conditioners hanging from nowhere, and you get the idea of how hot it must be in such a very small space with so many people.
My other favorite is also from Zaria, and is called Jushi. It's a street view of the village, with typical mud houses. The empty streets look even more empty thanks to the transparent silhouettes of a women and a ghost figure in movement at the front left. What you don't see on the drawing, says Sebastian, is the forty children who were standing behind him quietly, observing him working. That´s why it looks so empty. All Nigerian cities and villages are very populated, Sebastian says, life happens on the street, you are never alone, especially if you are a European and especially if you are doing something atypical, like drawing. Sebastian was quite surprised how silent the village children were in comparison to the people from Lagos, who were shouting all the time, their normal way of talking. Drawings from Lagos, the most populous city in Nigeria and the whole of the African continent, are immediately recognizable. The colors are intense and Sebastian usually portrays not people but buildings: skyscrapers with thousands of windows looking out at the world with thousands of eyes, clothes like eyelashes hanging out of the windows to dry or gather more dust.
Thinking about the noise and anxiety of a big city, strong and maybe aggressive emotions, I dared to choose one drawing that awakened those scary feelings in me, and asked Sebastian to comment on it. Actually, it is two drawings, called “Burning mountain, Ife.” There is also a story behind them. That day, Sebastian came to a small town to visit a friend who worked at the university. They went into the mountains for a hike. Suddenly, they saw that the grass on the mountain was burning. That´s what local people do– they burn old dry grass to control wildfires. That´s what they do in Russia too. But it was a very strong and scary situation, transmitted viscerally through intense dark green, brown, and black colors. The peaceful yellow color we saw on other drawings is to mark land, it's not the fire itself. Actually, we don't see the fire, what we see is smoke, a lot of smoke in the sky. I can easily imagine Sebastian sitting there in front of the burning fire, drawing the scenery. What is more difficult for me is to image the face of his friend.
The sketches made during this trip to Nigeria are very expressive. Even for the buildings, Sebastian drew first the color and then the outlines. Behind each expressive story, there is a background, which is an important part of the diary itself. I'm looking forward to seeing the book when it's finished, but as it also tells a personal story, and therefore must include the author more than in his other books, it might take longer to complete. Meanwhile, we can enjoy other stories by Sebastian on his website. I especially recommend the most recent project Schatten der Gesellschaft (Shadows of society) which is a collection of graphic stories homeless people shared with Sebastian. And for Russian readers, I highly recommend his four reportages from Novosibirsk, Siberia. For those who admire how the static art of drawing can transmit the feeling of the body in motion, I recommend The Swan Lake, drawings of the eponymous ballet. Thank you, Sebastian, for sharing your experiences with us!
