Source Photograph

Subject: King of Akropong with his chiefs

Date: 1888–1914

Archive: Basel Mission Archives (Switzerland)

Original Dimensions: 10.7 × 14.7 cm

In Assembly of the People, Rita Mawuena Benissan reimagines a late 19th to early 20th-century photograph of the King of Akropong gathered with his chiefs, a striking tableau of authority, community, and ceremony. Originally captured between 1888 and 1914 and housed in the Basel Mission Archives, the image presents a moment of collective power: figures arranged with intentionality, shaded by towering ceremonial umbrellas, surrounded by attendants and courtiers.

Where the archival image flattened this scene into monochrome and silence, Benissan restores its ceremonial richness through a layered process of AI-assisted digital recoloring and hand embroidery. The work pulses with a renewed palette—brilliant reds, deep blues, golden ochre, and radiant shades of brown—reanimating the textures of cloth, the gleam of regalia, and the intensity of the moment. The ceremonial umbrellas, stitched in vivid colour and dimension, take on renewed symbolic force: not simply decorative objects, but emblems of sovereignty, continuity, and collective memory.
Particularly powerful is Benissan’s revitalisation of skin tone, where once the figures’ faces were muted by colonial exposure techniques, they now emerge in rich, warm browns, full of nuance and presence. This act of chromatic restoration is also one of narrative repair: returning individuality and dignity to figures long anonymized by the archive.

In centering the entire assembly, rather than isolating the figure of the king, Benissan reframes the image as one of collective dignity—a portrait of leadership not as singular power, but as a shared structure upheld by court, kin, and cultural rhythm. Assembly of the People becomes not just a restoration of colour, but a restoration of presence, memory, and self-determined visibility.