When the Chibok girls were kidnapped in 2014 by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, there was sorrow throughout the country as people were clamoring “bring back our girls” across the nation and even across the world. It has been so many years since that horror but the sting lingers as some of them remain missing.
In order to raise awareness and pay homage to the plight of these girls, the sculptor Prune Nourry took up a project with students of the Department of Fine and Applied Art of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife to create 108 sculpted heads to represent each of the girls. These clay portraits were heavily influenced by the ancient Ife terracotta heads.
Upon meeting with the families of the Chibok girls, Nourry was entrusted with portraits of the missing girls which she used as inspiration to create eight clay heads sculpted in the likeness of the high school girls.
It was from these eight original sculptures that the 108 heads were casted in clay sourced from Ile-Ife, by female potters from a potter’s community in the Yoruba town of Ilorin and students of the Department of Fined and Applied Art of the Obafemi Awolowo University. Each of the 108 clay heads were sculpted to look exactly like each of the girls on the 30th of September 2022, at the one-day workshop held at the University. Some of the mothers of the Chibok girls and girls who managed to escape captivity attended the workshop to honor and remember loved ones and friends.
The body of work titled Statues Also Breathe was unveiled on the 19th of November 2022 and is currently being exhibited in Art Twenty One gallery in Lagos. The body of work will be traveling around the world after its exhibition in Lagos to highlight the global struggle regarding girls’ education while also honoring those girls and serving as a reminder of the rich cultural history of Nigeria and its pool of talent. The sculptures will then return to the permanent collection of a museum in Africa after touring the world.
A documentary movie will notably be exhibited alongside the sculptures to ensure that everyone who participated in the creative process is included. Based on the conversations with the mothers of the eight models, the whole point of the project is to make sure the world does not forget the girls.
