Mo Ganji: Roloway Monkey | Roloway-Meerkatze | Cercopithecus roloway | No. 185/250 from work group 8/99

Mo Ganji brings into focus the Roloway monkey — a forest-dwelling primate native to the lowland rainforests of West Africa — by letting the single line move toward the animal’s inner core rather than its expressiveness or social dynamism. The line gathers the being into a reduced coherence, suspending gesture and individuality so that presence can emerge without explanation. In Ganji’s thinking, the line does not belong exclusively to the monkey; it remains open, acknowledging that every figure is also a conceptual frame temporarily imposed.

Cercopithecus roloway is listed as Critically Endangered (CR) on the IUCN Red List. Once distributed across parts of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the species has suffered extreme population declines. Today it is believed to survive only in a few highly fragmented forest remnants, and some assessments suggest it may already be close to extinction in the wild.

The principal threats include intensive hunting for bushmeat, widespread deforestation, and habitat fragmentation driven by logging and agricultural expansion. Because Roloway monkeys rely on intact forest canopies and live in cohesive social groups, disruption of habitat quickly undermines reproduction and survival. Weak enforcement and ongoing forest loss continue to place the species under severe pressure.

Ganji’s single line opens a space in which the monkey can be encountered beyond alertness or social presence. It allows attention to rest on a life once embedded in continuous forest, suggesting how disappearance often unfolds not as a sudden rupture, but as a thinning of connections until nothing remains to hold a being in place.