Barbara Asei Dantoni

20 September 2022

Barbara Asei Dantoni is a French-Italian-Cameroonian artist living between France and Cameroon. Starting with academic training in drawing, painting and modelling when she was 10 years old, her career involves various awards, residencies and artistic projects. Whereas she has been questioning herself since childhood regarding her multicultural origins, she nourishes herself with the African handcrafts that populate her home and the loincloths of her seamstress mother to build a colourful imagination that serves as a refuge. Through painting on canvas, mixed media sculptural works and poems, Barbara questions her inner landscapes made up of symbols linked to her ancestors and her femininity. Her artistic project “Identités Imaginaires”, was born progressively in this intimate space, this in-between world between France and Cameroon. It materializes in 2020 to speak about the stories of exile, migration and the fragmented identities that constitute it, through the visual arts.