image: film still courtesy of Adams Sie
Selected Texts
"How To Conjugate? Apoptosis of Identity, Orphaned Tongues and
Drexciyan Moves in African Diasporic Narrative Futures"
Seismopolite Journal of Art & Politics
Issue 5 | May 2013
Published in English & Norwegian
To read full text click here
"I came from a dream, that the black people dreamed long ago, a presence sent by the ancestors.
I come to you as the myth, because that's what black people are.... myths"[1]
The following is an imaginative proposition on re-conjugating self-appropriations of forms-ideas between tradition and modernity, and on how discourses of identity representation could be dismantled by considering contemporary arts practice and research as an échelle for creative and philosophical debate. Taking contemporary African arts practice as my point of departure, I suggest the mythology of Drexciya as a tunnel for research to understand ways of deciphering philosophical concepts of self, encounter, nation and transformation. By re-evaluating Drexciya as a means to deconstruct narratives about the future and their influences on socio-political and community spaces across geo-scapes, the hope is to enable a return to the future.
In the summer of 2009 during the elections, the Gabonese military shot young peaceful demonstrators, most of them children. The elections signaled perhaps the hope for the first political change after 40 years of Gabon’s autocratic presidential bureaucracy, now continuing. The controlling party PDG (Gabonese Democratic Party) had taken over the leading national phone networks Zain as well as TV channels and transmissions, paralyzed the right of free press and certain online copyrights networks which could be used to mobilize the population (only six percent of the population have access to internet), ensuring that no information could travel out of the country. As a result, people were prevented from organizing and creating networks for democratic voices. They became afraid to talk to each other and to speak their minds, and whole communities disintegrated from town to town, from village to village. Forty years on and democracy continues to be fuelled by capitalism, autocratic bureaucracy and the colonial direction which the American television network CNN has called a dictatorship. My students, friends and family were shot dead over this summer. There were over 170 deaths in Port-Gentil alone, none were named. All were children, fathers and mothers. I lost my cousin. I started to wonder what those children and young minds were hoping for, what were they fighting for? What was the authority’s necessity to massacre in the name of which leader? Or which politics? Under which agreement? Forty years on and we are further away from democratic independence than we have ever been. The youth had started to dream, their eyes started to burn. They were dreaming of a better future, they dreamed because they believed in change. Lost ideologies and hopes from grandparents and ghosts from pan-africanism came back to pose them questions. Why does one of the richest countries in the continent regress to a primitive, neo-feudal ‘democracy’ that lacks political strengths and human right laws? Why is a population of less than one and a half million subjected to the poorest standards of living and human rights since independence in 1960? This home is a zone of non-visible conflict. For most it is a war that separates thinkings, communities, networks, the physical bodies, that actively erases and renounces our histories. We became ‘separated’ ethnically, socially and philosophically, isolating us and devoiding us of experience and dialogue. Having no access to our own histories through public institutions and education, our present and future defaced of our bodies and memory through political dislocations pioneered in collaboration between Gabonese and French political parties.
A travelling body politic
During those elections, I devised an experiment called the Squat Museum. It was a travelling socio-geopolitical transitional gallery space that went from neighborhood to neighborhood in Libreville and Bitam and village to village across the river in Omboué (with an old car and trailer and using a floating boat pirogue gallery) with a selection of critical creative interactive programmes generated for people as a way to develop zones of performativity that would lead to group activities amongst communities, as a way to self-sustainability in their environments. It was a space for creation, dialogue and converging forms and ideas. These were constructed through a series of contemporary performances, dialogues, sculptural re-enactments, re-interpreting the role of myth- and story-telling (Griot-ism) in quotidian life and song, the relations between people and foods in drawing, in games, video and photography. We travelled in a small van as a hub of creative experimentation – a gallery space that became a refuge for creative and critical thinking of everyday life, and how this could be transformed and transmitted as art.
What is the use of art in isolated environments without water, electricity, clean sewage systems, safe road infrastructures and open voices? Most participants who got involved were young people and women. It enabled them to empower themselves with creative tools for communication, taking confidence in their imaginations, and to think of alternative ways of seeing their own future; their present. This creative interrogation clarified how people dealt with their personal traumas and how they generated their own therapies for themselves and each other in a series of workshops. Community organizing thus provided democratic spaces for debating and negotiating meaning. These collective social actions also allowed a re-articulation of history through which hegemonic mythical configurations became demystified. The muteness with which the disempowering of lower classes had been met, made one realize the need to democratize history by making participation a travelling body politic: The body was on trial.
Becoming another
In 2011, this journey continued with a project titled Folds in Belo Horizonte´s favelas in Brazil as part of the Perpendicular programme Casa e Rua[2] curated by Wagner Rossi Campos. The project intended to break stereotypes and tensions between the richer and poorer communities who have remained divided, resulting in the launch for a space of creative encounter that would bring both communities to work together towards a common goal without fear of prejudices against each other. Over several days people from all sides came together in dialogue and created paper boats, some with dreams written in them about what they have come to do, what they have learned and what they hope for. At night, these paper boats were put into the lake with candles in them and created a lake of fire reflecting all the stars from above, the lights from the favela and the city. They all had one common dream; to become someone else to better their homes, to become an other.
This is my first point of reference, becoming another. Exiting the Enlightenment, diving into the Negative Dialectic for reconfiguring identity and the meaning of Nation. If change, becoming another, means that we must exit, we also have to reconfigure memory: this another can neither be fixed to the past, the present nor the future, it belongs in all times at once, and is synthesized. To discuss what memory really is we also need to look at the role of the image and the device of mythologizations as substituting itself for reality; and which, according to Horkheimer and Baudrillard, have eclipsed it. The disjunctures, difference and fusion between the imaginary, the symbolic and real have played a major part in our experience of life and mutated form of modern democracy. Meanwhile, what Achille Mbembe would explain as the occupation of our imaginations as a basis for the modality of semiocapitalism, has long been signaled as a pervasive set of systematic, transgressive logic of the real and the virtual, that has imploded into an apartheid of representation and economies.[3]
Afrofuturist invasions
In a burst of Afrofuturist invasion, dislocating existing fixed appropriations of identity and nation, Goddy Leye´s The Voice On The Moon (2005) reveals a man alighting on the moon. Neil Armstrong is frozen captured in the camera. In a stream of dance steps to the sound of Cameroonian music, the man (Goddy Leye) saunters towards the American astronaut and slowly merges with him, becoming one with his body in a short burst of Afrofuturist invasion. The transformation of one to the other in a rainbow of neighbor televised images of symbols with new flags, handshakes and dance steps from Earth already breaks the division of Hegelian slave-master narratives and considers the Fanon-ian philosophy of “violence” as creative organization and dialogue for self transformation. It also re-grammatizes the discourse of history and the position of nations since the years of African independence. Leye concludes that the practice of independence and freedom is a practice of creative transformation, a narration that speaks in the past, present and the future simultaneously. Every dancer, every narrator must be a time-traveler and recognize humanity as a whole to strengthen the values needed to build a nation.
Our image of ourselves has evolved through the language and mirror of the Other in its historical modalities of global (slave) trade (including language and art forms through hierarchies of monarchy powers), performance, anthropological encounters, photography, media and politics. At the end of 2011, the Quai Branly in Paris launched an exhibition called “L´invention du Sauvage” exploring two centuries of modern exoticism, cultural apartheids, transgression in representations of human bodies as art and human slavery. Foreigners from different countries became both subjects and objects of exoticism and Western modernity, taking part in a catalytic role for the performance of ‘Other’ and a mimesis of power.
Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory. In writing of his traumatic encounter with European racism in Black Skin White Masks, an analysis of cultural dispossession and racism, Frantz Fanon feels his corporeal self torn apart, to which broken fragments must be re-assembled by another alienated self. He experiences dislocation, shame, guilt and nausea. We understand through his personal analytic how cultural dispossession in histories (of colonialism and slavery) brings destructive mutilations of communal identities and social structures. Belonging to heritage is violently interrupted through depriving the past and the imagination of possibilities of existence. By comparison, it becomes evident that the exhibition in Quai Branly failed to open a discussion of contemporary modern slavery, as well as the way that we have tackled these issues and how ethnic groups (is ethnicity of any use today in a creolized world where nationhood is based on economical bias?) transform and deal with governmental laws and being in between cultures and spaces. The Quai Branly never mentions the state of the current (mis)union of the EU in challenged economical times and how these influence migrations and human rights laws around the world.
To continue reading full text click here
Issue 5 | May 2013
Published in English & Norwegian
To read full text click here
"I came from a dream, that the black people dreamed long ago, a presence sent by the ancestors.
I come to you as the myth, because that's what black people are.... myths"[1]
The following is an imaginative proposition on re-conjugating self-appropriations of forms-ideas between tradition and modernity, and on how discourses of identity representation could be dismantled by considering contemporary arts practice and research as an échelle for creative and philosophical debate. Taking contemporary African arts practice as my point of departure, I suggest the mythology of Drexciya as a tunnel for research to understand ways of deciphering philosophical concepts of self, encounter, nation and transformation. By re-evaluating Drexciya as a means to deconstruct narratives about the future and their influences on socio-political and community spaces across geo-scapes, the hope is to enable a return to the future.
In the summer of 2009 during the elections, the Gabonese military shot young peaceful demonstrators, most of them children. The elections signaled perhaps the hope for the first political change after 40 years of Gabon’s autocratic presidential bureaucracy, now continuing. The controlling party PDG (Gabonese Democratic Party) had taken over the leading national phone networks Zain as well as TV channels and transmissions, paralyzed the right of free press and certain online copyrights networks which could be used to mobilize the population (only six percent of the population have access to internet), ensuring that no information could travel out of the country. As a result, people were prevented from organizing and creating networks for democratic voices. They became afraid to talk to each other and to speak their minds, and whole communities disintegrated from town to town, from village to village. Forty years on and democracy continues to be fuelled by capitalism, autocratic bureaucracy and the colonial direction which the American television network CNN has called a dictatorship. My students, friends and family were shot dead over this summer. There were over 170 deaths in Port-Gentil alone, none were named. All were children, fathers and mothers. I lost my cousin. I started to wonder what those children and young minds were hoping for, what were they fighting for? What was the authority’s necessity to massacre in the name of which leader? Or which politics? Under which agreement? Forty years on and we are further away from democratic independence than we have ever been. The youth had started to dream, their eyes started to burn. They were dreaming of a better future, they dreamed because they believed in change. Lost ideologies and hopes from grandparents and ghosts from pan-africanism came back to pose them questions. Why does one of the richest countries in the continent regress to a primitive, neo-feudal ‘democracy’ that lacks political strengths and human right laws? Why is a population of less than one and a half million subjected to the poorest standards of living and human rights since independence in 1960? This home is a zone of non-visible conflict. For most it is a war that separates thinkings, communities, networks, the physical bodies, that actively erases and renounces our histories. We became ‘separated’ ethnically, socially and philosophically, isolating us and devoiding us of experience and dialogue. Having no access to our own histories through public institutions and education, our present and future defaced of our bodies and memory through political dislocations pioneered in collaboration between Gabonese and French political parties.
A travelling body politic
During those elections, I devised an experiment called the Squat Museum. It was a travelling socio-geopolitical transitional gallery space that went from neighborhood to neighborhood in Libreville and Bitam and village to village across the river in Omboué (with an old car and trailer and using a floating boat pirogue gallery) with a selection of critical creative interactive programmes generated for people as a way to develop zones of performativity that would lead to group activities amongst communities, as a way to self-sustainability in their environments. It was a space for creation, dialogue and converging forms and ideas. These were constructed through a series of contemporary performances, dialogues, sculptural re-enactments, re-interpreting the role of myth- and story-telling (Griot-ism) in quotidian life and song, the relations between people and foods in drawing, in games, video and photography. We travelled in a small van as a hub of creative experimentation – a gallery space that became a refuge for creative and critical thinking of everyday life, and how this could be transformed and transmitted as art.
What is the use of art in isolated environments without water, electricity, clean sewage systems, safe road infrastructures and open voices? Most participants who got involved were young people and women. It enabled them to empower themselves with creative tools for communication, taking confidence in their imaginations, and to think of alternative ways of seeing their own future; their present. This creative interrogation clarified how people dealt with their personal traumas and how they generated their own therapies for themselves and each other in a series of workshops. Community organizing thus provided democratic spaces for debating and negotiating meaning. These collective social actions also allowed a re-articulation of history through which hegemonic mythical configurations became demystified. The muteness with which the disempowering of lower classes had been met, made one realize the need to democratize history by making participation a travelling body politic: The body was on trial.
Becoming another
In 2011, this journey continued with a project titled Folds in Belo Horizonte´s favelas in Brazil as part of the Perpendicular programme Casa e Rua[2] curated by Wagner Rossi Campos. The project intended to break stereotypes and tensions between the richer and poorer communities who have remained divided, resulting in the launch for a space of creative encounter that would bring both communities to work together towards a common goal without fear of prejudices against each other. Over several days people from all sides came together in dialogue and created paper boats, some with dreams written in them about what they have come to do, what they have learned and what they hope for. At night, these paper boats were put into the lake with candles in them and created a lake of fire reflecting all the stars from above, the lights from the favela and the city. They all had one common dream; to become someone else to better their homes, to become an other.
This is my first point of reference, becoming another. Exiting the Enlightenment, diving into the Negative Dialectic for reconfiguring identity and the meaning of Nation. If change, becoming another, means that we must exit, we also have to reconfigure memory: this another can neither be fixed to the past, the present nor the future, it belongs in all times at once, and is synthesized. To discuss what memory really is we also need to look at the role of the image and the device of mythologizations as substituting itself for reality; and which, according to Horkheimer and Baudrillard, have eclipsed it. The disjunctures, difference and fusion between the imaginary, the symbolic and real have played a major part in our experience of life and mutated form of modern democracy. Meanwhile, what Achille Mbembe would explain as the occupation of our imaginations as a basis for the modality of semiocapitalism, has long been signaled as a pervasive set of systematic, transgressive logic of the real and the virtual, that has imploded into an apartheid of representation and economies.[3]
Afrofuturist invasions
In a burst of Afrofuturist invasion, dislocating existing fixed appropriations of identity and nation, Goddy Leye´s The Voice On The Moon (2005) reveals a man alighting on the moon. Neil Armstrong is frozen captured in the camera. In a stream of dance steps to the sound of Cameroonian music, the man (Goddy Leye) saunters towards the American astronaut and slowly merges with him, becoming one with his body in a short burst of Afrofuturist invasion. The transformation of one to the other in a rainbow of neighbor televised images of symbols with new flags, handshakes and dance steps from Earth already breaks the division of Hegelian slave-master narratives and considers the Fanon-ian philosophy of “violence” as creative organization and dialogue for self transformation. It also re-grammatizes the discourse of history and the position of nations since the years of African independence. Leye concludes that the practice of independence and freedom is a practice of creative transformation, a narration that speaks in the past, present and the future simultaneously. Every dancer, every narrator must be a time-traveler and recognize humanity as a whole to strengthen the values needed to build a nation.
Our image of ourselves has evolved through the language and mirror of the Other in its historical modalities of global (slave) trade (including language and art forms through hierarchies of monarchy powers), performance, anthropological encounters, photography, media and politics. At the end of 2011, the Quai Branly in Paris launched an exhibition called “L´invention du Sauvage” exploring two centuries of modern exoticism, cultural apartheids, transgression in representations of human bodies as art and human slavery. Foreigners from different countries became both subjects and objects of exoticism and Western modernity, taking part in a catalytic role for the performance of ‘Other’ and a mimesis of power.
Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory. In writing of his traumatic encounter with European racism in Black Skin White Masks, an analysis of cultural dispossession and racism, Frantz Fanon feels his corporeal self torn apart, to which broken fragments must be re-assembled by another alienated self. He experiences dislocation, shame, guilt and nausea. We understand through his personal analytic how cultural dispossession in histories (of colonialism and slavery) brings destructive mutilations of communal identities and social structures. Belonging to heritage is violently interrupted through depriving the past and the imagination of possibilities of existence. By comparison, it becomes evident that the exhibition in Quai Branly failed to open a discussion of contemporary modern slavery, as well as the way that we have tackled these issues and how ethnic groups (is ethnicity of any use today in a creolized world where nationhood is based on economical bias?) transform and deal with governmental laws and being in between cultures and spaces. The Quai Branly never mentions the state of the current (mis)union of the EU in challenged economical times and how these influence migrations and human rights laws around the world.
To continue reading full text click here
On Performance | Killing Friday: Forbidden Chimeras Between Tradition and Modernity
By Nathalie Mba Bikoro
(this sample is taken from the completed essay in the same title 2010)
ABSTRACT
A short introduction to exiting representations of suspended language and exploring the hierarchical body through influences of political governance in the community by looking at performance live art of Africa and its Diaspora. How have contemporary artists of today used mythologies between tradition and modernity to present new questions on national identity and re-appropriating new social movements in urban spaces.
"I came from a dream, that the black people dreamed long ago, a presence sent by the ancestors. I come to you as the myth, because that's what black people are.... myths". (Sun Rae)
Killing Friday illustrates the seed of how language in art practices are an important part in understanding our relations to each other and its vehicle of interpretation through the body in performance. Artists are re-interpreting and negotiating the modern Friday-isms (characterised in Robinson Crusoe as the well-serving companion) and use the language of memory to investigate not as such to illustrate the past but navigating the present and future. The transient moves between tradition (old and new) and modernity is part of the space of the myth-making. (2)
Becoming Pimpernels: Negotiations are Struggle
The displacement and migrations of people across continents after colonisation and during pre-trade slavery periods before the 15th centuries put into dispute the origins of cultures and their worth in the formations of new communities. During the same period that Nelson Mandela burned his Identity Pass back in 1952 in South Africa, New Yorkers, Eastern European artists and a multitude of others around the world responded to the turn of the post-modern and shared political gestures through what it came to be defined and logged as Fluxus performance within an array of new creations.
Right down to the 21st century, performance of Africa and its Diaspora has remained to a large public enframed in the ritual and the festival of the masquerade, celebrating the body, voice and ritual practices which for most have originated through centuries of exchange and cultural migrations to southern Europe and beyond. Today is a simple question that I am presenting, which has been thrown back and forth to me too many times; Where is contemporary performance of Africa? A question asked as if to say that performance is only now coming to the surface and catching up with the rest of the world, which is no surprise when our nations have been presented as the Third World and inaccessible. History´s purpose has always been to serve political appearances and selected an international perspective lacking in depth and sublimating meaning. Perhaps our performances presented to the world as festivals of colour and exoticism has never very much reconciled to contemporary practices or deserved theoretical attention in thinking about contemporary performance within the institutional dialogues. The magic about performance art is that it can always return to the same question, what is it? And to ask this question, is also to ask who are we now?
The Middle Passage, history beginning with slavery, forced disposed communities and nations to depart into a history no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through profound discontinuity. A history no longer their own (Caruth). An unconscious frame of cultural identity and memory was formed by our contemporaries. However, we have continuously reinvented and re-adapted our histories through our mythisisations. Oscillating between tradition and modernity that informs of black and white diasporic visual arts in recent decades. The artists reassembled a body to be mourned from the fragments of the past to produce a radical revision of our representations of historical process, national culture and the construction of subjectivities.
Post-modernity escaped an end point and re-opened it to the other, revealing concealed narratives and complex readings that rupture the time-space enframing. Stuart Hall comments that in postmodernism, the individual feels dispersed and fragmented. However in the position of black practitioners, still struggling for political agency as the autorial and historical subjects whose being denied, the body becomes centred rather than dispersed. Paradoxically the fragmentation comes to be the representative modern experience.
New subjective and artistic positions were to be wrought from what Edward Said advocated as a ´counter-practice of interference´ in the institutional representations of hegemonic culture to ´restore the non-sequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity as fundamental components of meaning in representation´, through which the aesthetic could be reconnected to an ongoing political and social praxis.
In the example of Frantz Fanon´s cultural dispossession and racism by his own immediate objectifying gaze of the Other, his corporeal self (his body-relation to the world) fractured apart. Its fragments to be re-assembled by another self into an alienating racial epidermal schema. He experiences shame, dislocation, self-contempt, nausea. This cultural dispossession in histories experienced by Fanon and other generations sets in motion catastrophic mutilation of communal identities and social structures. Where belonging to place, language, culture and history is violently interrupted, the self has no ground from which to speak and hence to narrate itself with others in the world. Dispossession can be a deprivation of the past but also of the will to imagine new possibilities of existence: a withdrawal into the speechless. Loss of the power of self-narration is central to the traumatic experience since language is not simply an abstract tool of communication; its origins are corporeal and the means by which the body speaks its rhythms. To shatter the body is also to fragment the power of speech and affects hereby the communal collective dimension.
For Ricoeur, memory is a womb or a matrix of history. If the means of our contemporary experience is to re-adapt speech and re-assemble community connections and values, what are some of the features of this assembling that are re-occuring in contemporary performance artists of Africa? (3-4) As Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth, our narratives are not to be found in dwelling nostalgically in a pre-colonial past (a recipe for political and cultural inertia) far for the space for action.
It is our role, as storytellers, to mobilise our imaginations to conjugate cultural memory with the realities of the present towards a new national dialogue, or which Fanon states as consciousness. Refusing to be a ´prisoner´ or a fixed entity in history in favour of endlessly creating ourselves.
´ The birth of such a self is never a simply coming into being, but always also a release from being possessed.´ (Houston Baker).
Determined not to be possessed by the prescriptive identities and conditions imposed by the language of dominance, self-determining identifications were to be constructed across a diversity of cultural positions, both inside and outside the national culture, which in part entailed a reconsideration of the signs and meanings of cultural roots. Challenging the conception of representations. The unmapped body (issues of perception and gaze on the flesh) becomes a centrifugal plateaux for unrecorded histories (hidden narratives) and the unclassifieds (impact of technologies within surveillance and policing and their impact on community, nation and racial difference).
For the new generation it is no longer simply a question of constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant one but of testing the limitations of this model through a critical self-reflexivity and through ´interruptive´ strategies of disarticulating and rearticulating the language of hegemony to expose the aporias and contradictions of its master narratives. The rejection of a totalising narrative means the possibility of social change is prefigured in collective dialogues.
The discourses of our histories are an operation of search, selection and interpretation which are orphaned (Ricoeur) from an original author. Like any representation is no more than the surrogate of an absent referent that cannot be recalled to full presence. The archive is therefore open to the abuse of institutional concealment, disavowal or wilfull amnesia, to a blurring of the boundaries between histiography and mythography and hence a potential ideological weapon by which the place of power obliterates the experience of the marginal. For the diasporic artist to raid the archive and to relocate the remains (Piper) is then a subversive act in so far as it usurps the power of authority to control meaning.
Raiding the archives and making the myth reality; how representations affects the working environment of artists
In the case of my home country in Gabon, the difficulty is not envisioning a community without a voice but rather its possible suspensions.
In order to keep political control and power during the 2009 presidential elections, the leaders of the ruling party PDG (Gabonese Democratic Party) in 2009 suspended the use and access of digital and media communications . Ali Bongo´s monopoly of state media by suspending public services in addition to limited access to digital archives puts adrift and disorientates the nation, in turn inducing spaces of fear and violence, community fragmentations and disrupting creative flow.
In turn these disorientations of a rooted position (repair) destabilise the public arts infrastructures such as the national museum of Libreville which has no evidence of Gabon´s history being accessible to the local people other than a restricted online public platform. In 2009 the Virtual Museum was inaugurated as a kind of alternative to not having the collections of art present in the capital city. It was produced mostly for the Gabonese public however only less than 25% of the population may have access to online resources or use it sporadically and many schools and colleges do not have academic onlince sources. The deprivation of myth and the absence of storytelling and speech is deeply entrenched in the way people communicate and navigate in their environments. Once people lose the imagination and knowledge of their local cultures, there is a deprivation, a speech amnesia which hinders possible creative oscillations between tradition and modernity.
In Nigeria, a particular case of child witchcraft has become an alarming problem that is being part of a modern myth to initiate a very large monetary business. Since the production of a 1991 fictional film on child witchcraft called End Of The Wicked (), catholic churches and many iconic interpretators such as Helen Ukpabo (Liberty Church), erupted and saught to encourage vulnerable people (mostly more common in rural spaces) to become followers of these fictions and incure real harm and abuse on their own children (http://www.veoh.com/watch/v196340339cSNnb35?h1=Saving+Africa's+Witch+Children).
If performance in art practice is based on myth making and challenging suspect interpretations, engrained in generations of local beliefs, it makes it very challenging for these practioners, as in the case of Ato Malinda, to be part of a multi collective dialogue. Does this collective dialogue only remain in the borderlines of artistic institutions? Does a work remain art if not shared by the people it is given to? How do you break the spatial borders of interpretations without inducing further fears? Are these violent methods excercised by our own governments & institutions over our people limiting our imaginations and familial instincts towards each other?
Without retracing a history of definitions, evidently its most honest forms remain embedded in the conversation of bodies. When the question is can you make art after Auschwitz?, Adorno’s question on the ability of language after trauma, performance creates a space where materiality are being re-put into questions and its quotidian gestures of every day life are held into suspension for meditation or protest. There is no conquest to say to which country this theory belongs to of the phenomena of performativity; it belongs to all of us black and white and in-between. The clearest example we see (for the sake of keeping to the context) of small communities in West Africa on their first meetings with foreigners. Entering the myths of ´abduction of UFO’s.´ Whole villages would negotiate amongst one another, or against each other, to change their whole realities of their relationship to life. Such examples have been the case in Papa New Guinea where individuals agreed to live life without fabrics, change their diets, and even invent whole new languages and religions in order to camouflage and leave false traces to the European anthropologist researchers (or curators??) who in turn described these actions as the normal or savage way of life. Friday-ism is put into practice and must be taught, whereby there should only be one structure for life instead of an archipelago melange of micro-communities sharing spaces. When Toussaint L’Ouverture, the 1st Black Freedom fighter marched his people into battle in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) during 1791, it was not in the intention for revenge but the aim was to liberate displaced nations and races from total slaughter, by re-organising minds, the body and leading a people of both black and white to surrender and develop new spaces for new representation and peaceful negotiation.
So what does it mean to negotiate? Negotiation is a constant waltz of organising communities and making assemblages. Making gestures that may initiate a force, create a rootedness in which all generations organise, negotiate imaginations or possibilities and generate unbordered creative language.
By all accounts, performance art of Africa through many continents has embraced this energy of the political and the reconciliation of the body. For me it is a kind of breaking anthropological methods, contesting terrains, protesting against a foreign body that pushes for a unanimist body.
(African) artists and its diaspora (as much as any other international artist) offer propositions on a body in transit, in constant chimera. Of all colour, multiplicity, in political struggle, and languages. A continent whose skin and voice is beyond these political borders and across time and international terrains, the narratives are not easy; we share similar struggles and dialogues to our past and to our neighbours, the point is not to relive them, but to change them.
By Nathalie Mba Bikoro
(this sample is taken from the completed essay in the same title 2010)
ABSTRACT
A short introduction to exiting representations of suspended language and exploring the hierarchical body through influences of political governance in the community by looking at performance live art of Africa and its Diaspora. How have contemporary artists of today used mythologies between tradition and modernity to present new questions on national identity and re-appropriating new social movements in urban spaces.
"I came from a dream, that the black people dreamed long ago, a presence sent by the ancestors. I come to you as the myth, because that's what black people are.... myths". (Sun Rae)
Killing Friday illustrates the seed of how language in art practices are an important part in understanding our relations to each other and its vehicle of interpretation through the body in performance. Artists are re-interpreting and negotiating the modern Friday-isms (characterised in Robinson Crusoe as the well-serving companion) and use the language of memory to investigate not as such to illustrate the past but navigating the present and future. The transient moves between tradition (old and new) and modernity is part of the space of the myth-making. (2)
Becoming Pimpernels: Negotiations are Struggle
The displacement and migrations of people across continents after colonisation and during pre-trade slavery periods before the 15th centuries put into dispute the origins of cultures and their worth in the formations of new communities. During the same period that Nelson Mandela burned his Identity Pass back in 1952 in South Africa, New Yorkers, Eastern European artists and a multitude of others around the world responded to the turn of the post-modern and shared political gestures through what it came to be defined and logged as Fluxus performance within an array of new creations.
Right down to the 21st century, performance of Africa and its Diaspora has remained to a large public enframed in the ritual and the festival of the masquerade, celebrating the body, voice and ritual practices which for most have originated through centuries of exchange and cultural migrations to southern Europe and beyond. Today is a simple question that I am presenting, which has been thrown back and forth to me too many times; Where is contemporary performance of Africa? A question asked as if to say that performance is only now coming to the surface and catching up with the rest of the world, which is no surprise when our nations have been presented as the Third World and inaccessible. History´s purpose has always been to serve political appearances and selected an international perspective lacking in depth and sublimating meaning. Perhaps our performances presented to the world as festivals of colour and exoticism has never very much reconciled to contemporary practices or deserved theoretical attention in thinking about contemporary performance within the institutional dialogues. The magic about performance art is that it can always return to the same question, what is it? And to ask this question, is also to ask who are we now?
The Middle Passage, history beginning with slavery, forced disposed communities and nations to depart into a history no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through profound discontinuity. A history no longer their own (Caruth). An unconscious frame of cultural identity and memory was formed by our contemporaries. However, we have continuously reinvented and re-adapted our histories through our mythisisations. Oscillating between tradition and modernity that informs of black and white diasporic visual arts in recent decades. The artists reassembled a body to be mourned from the fragments of the past to produce a radical revision of our representations of historical process, national culture and the construction of subjectivities.
Post-modernity escaped an end point and re-opened it to the other, revealing concealed narratives and complex readings that rupture the time-space enframing. Stuart Hall comments that in postmodernism, the individual feels dispersed and fragmented. However in the position of black practitioners, still struggling for political agency as the autorial and historical subjects whose being denied, the body becomes centred rather than dispersed. Paradoxically the fragmentation comes to be the representative modern experience.
New subjective and artistic positions were to be wrought from what Edward Said advocated as a ´counter-practice of interference´ in the institutional representations of hegemonic culture to ´restore the non-sequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity as fundamental components of meaning in representation´, through which the aesthetic could be reconnected to an ongoing political and social praxis.
In the example of Frantz Fanon´s cultural dispossession and racism by his own immediate objectifying gaze of the Other, his corporeal self (his body-relation to the world) fractured apart. Its fragments to be re-assembled by another self into an alienating racial epidermal schema. He experiences shame, dislocation, self-contempt, nausea. This cultural dispossession in histories experienced by Fanon and other generations sets in motion catastrophic mutilation of communal identities and social structures. Where belonging to place, language, culture and history is violently interrupted, the self has no ground from which to speak and hence to narrate itself with others in the world. Dispossession can be a deprivation of the past but also of the will to imagine new possibilities of existence: a withdrawal into the speechless. Loss of the power of self-narration is central to the traumatic experience since language is not simply an abstract tool of communication; its origins are corporeal and the means by which the body speaks its rhythms. To shatter the body is also to fragment the power of speech and affects hereby the communal collective dimension.
For Ricoeur, memory is a womb or a matrix of history. If the means of our contemporary experience is to re-adapt speech and re-assemble community connections and values, what are some of the features of this assembling that are re-occuring in contemporary performance artists of Africa? (3-4) As Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth, our narratives are not to be found in dwelling nostalgically in a pre-colonial past (a recipe for political and cultural inertia) far for the space for action.
It is our role, as storytellers, to mobilise our imaginations to conjugate cultural memory with the realities of the present towards a new national dialogue, or which Fanon states as consciousness. Refusing to be a ´prisoner´ or a fixed entity in history in favour of endlessly creating ourselves.
´ The birth of such a self is never a simply coming into being, but always also a release from being possessed.´ (Houston Baker).
Determined not to be possessed by the prescriptive identities and conditions imposed by the language of dominance, self-determining identifications were to be constructed across a diversity of cultural positions, both inside and outside the national culture, which in part entailed a reconsideration of the signs and meanings of cultural roots. Challenging the conception of representations. The unmapped body (issues of perception and gaze on the flesh) becomes a centrifugal plateaux for unrecorded histories (hidden narratives) and the unclassifieds (impact of technologies within surveillance and policing and their impact on community, nation and racial difference).
For the new generation it is no longer simply a question of constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant one but of testing the limitations of this model through a critical self-reflexivity and through ´interruptive´ strategies of disarticulating and rearticulating the language of hegemony to expose the aporias and contradictions of its master narratives. The rejection of a totalising narrative means the possibility of social change is prefigured in collective dialogues.
The discourses of our histories are an operation of search, selection and interpretation which are orphaned (Ricoeur) from an original author. Like any representation is no more than the surrogate of an absent referent that cannot be recalled to full presence. The archive is therefore open to the abuse of institutional concealment, disavowal or wilfull amnesia, to a blurring of the boundaries between histiography and mythography and hence a potential ideological weapon by which the place of power obliterates the experience of the marginal. For the diasporic artist to raid the archive and to relocate the remains (Piper) is then a subversive act in so far as it usurps the power of authority to control meaning.
Raiding the archives and making the myth reality; how representations affects the working environment of artists
In the case of my home country in Gabon, the difficulty is not envisioning a community without a voice but rather its possible suspensions.
In order to keep political control and power during the 2009 presidential elections, the leaders of the ruling party PDG (Gabonese Democratic Party) in 2009 suspended the use and access of digital and media communications . Ali Bongo´s monopoly of state media by suspending public services in addition to limited access to digital archives puts adrift and disorientates the nation, in turn inducing spaces of fear and violence, community fragmentations and disrupting creative flow.
In turn these disorientations of a rooted position (repair) destabilise the public arts infrastructures such as the national museum of Libreville which has no evidence of Gabon´s history being accessible to the local people other than a restricted online public platform. In 2009 the Virtual Museum was inaugurated as a kind of alternative to not having the collections of art present in the capital city. It was produced mostly for the Gabonese public however only less than 25% of the population may have access to online resources or use it sporadically and many schools and colleges do not have academic onlince sources. The deprivation of myth and the absence of storytelling and speech is deeply entrenched in the way people communicate and navigate in their environments. Once people lose the imagination and knowledge of their local cultures, there is a deprivation, a speech amnesia which hinders possible creative oscillations between tradition and modernity.
In Nigeria, a particular case of child witchcraft has become an alarming problem that is being part of a modern myth to initiate a very large monetary business. Since the production of a 1991 fictional film on child witchcraft called End Of The Wicked (), catholic churches and many iconic interpretators such as Helen Ukpabo (Liberty Church), erupted and saught to encourage vulnerable people (mostly more common in rural spaces) to become followers of these fictions and incure real harm and abuse on their own children (http://www.veoh.com/watch/v196340339cSNnb35?h1=Saving+Africa's+Witch+Children).
If performance in art practice is based on myth making and challenging suspect interpretations, engrained in generations of local beliefs, it makes it very challenging for these practioners, as in the case of Ato Malinda, to be part of a multi collective dialogue. Does this collective dialogue only remain in the borderlines of artistic institutions? Does a work remain art if not shared by the people it is given to? How do you break the spatial borders of interpretations without inducing further fears? Are these violent methods excercised by our own governments & institutions over our people limiting our imaginations and familial instincts towards each other?
Without retracing a history of definitions, evidently its most honest forms remain embedded in the conversation of bodies. When the question is can you make art after Auschwitz?, Adorno’s question on the ability of language after trauma, performance creates a space where materiality are being re-put into questions and its quotidian gestures of every day life are held into suspension for meditation or protest. There is no conquest to say to which country this theory belongs to of the phenomena of performativity; it belongs to all of us black and white and in-between. The clearest example we see (for the sake of keeping to the context) of small communities in West Africa on their first meetings with foreigners. Entering the myths of ´abduction of UFO’s.´ Whole villages would negotiate amongst one another, or against each other, to change their whole realities of their relationship to life. Such examples have been the case in Papa New Guinea where individuals agreed to live life without fabrics, change their diets, and even invent whole new languages and religions in order to camouflage and leave false traces to the European anthropologist researchers (or curators??) who in turn described these actions as the normal or savage way of life. Friday-ism is put into practice and must be taught, whereby there should only be one structure for life instead of an archipelago melange of micro-communities sharing spaces. When Toussaint L’Ouverture, the 1st Black Freedom fighter marched his people into battle in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) during 1791, it was not in the intention for revenge but the aim was to liberate displaced nations and races from total slaughter, by re-organising minds, the body and leading a people of both black and white to surrender and develop new spaces for new representation and peaceful negotiation.
So what does it mean to negotiate? Negotiation is a constant waltz of organising communities and making assemblages. Making gestures that may initiate a force, create a rootedness in which all generations organise, negotiate imaginations or possibilities and generate unbordered creative language.
By all accounts, performance art of Africa through many continents has embraced this energy of the political and the reconciliation of the body. For me it is a kind of breaking anthropological methods, contesting terrains, protesting against a foreign body that pushes for a unanimist body.
(African) artists and its diaspora (as much as any other international artist) offer propositions on a body in transit, in constant chimera. Of all colour, multiplicity, in political struggle, and languages. A continent whose skin and voice is beyond these political borders and across time and international terrains, the narratives are not easy; we share similar struggles and dialogues to our past and to our neighbours, the point is not to relive them, but to change them.