At the moment there is a lot of talk in the news about countries and boundaries, with tragic events like the Paris attacks unleashing wider debates on nationality, identity, power and religion. The Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice International Exhibition (until 22nd November 2015) challenges some of these issues while inviting visitors to consider also the notions of national representation in an art context.
The pavilion - with a title, "Personne et Les Autres", borrowed from a lost play by André Franklin, a Belgian art critic affiliated with the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals - is indeed interpreted as an international space in which several creative minds originating from various countries with a focus on African artists, develop their projects, led and coordinated by artist Vincent Meessen and curator Katerina Gregos.
A similar experiment was successfully attempted at the Danish Pavilion during a previous art Biennale in Venice in 2011. But in this new case the pavilion explores more issues, including micro-histories, a shared avant-garde heritage and the consequences of historical, cultural and artistic interaction between Europe and Africa during the time of colonial modernity.
There are also wider political and architectural references in this choice: the Belgian Pavilion was the first to be build during the reign of King Leopold II, a year before Congo Free State (Léopold II's private property, claimed during the imperial powers' 'Scramble for Africa' in the late 19th century) was handed over to the Belgian State.
While being a critique of colonial modernity, the pavilion explores the positive cultural outcomes of colonial history, and the dialogues that developed under colonisation during liberation struggles and after the independence, linking them also to the global situation of unrest and to our collective future.
Concerned with the decolonisation of African states in the 1960s, radical liberation movements of the time and forgotten political figures, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc produced "Forever Weak and Ungrateful" and "Forever, Without You" (both 2015).
This photographic work is a recreation of the original work by Louis-Ernest Barrias representing French statesman Victor Schoelcher showing the path to freedom to a slave. Abonnenc focuses on the ambiguous details behind this statue, on the tactile effects of the sculpture and on the relation between the slave's body covered with a loincloth and the statesman's attire. Though the figures seem to represent two opposites, the boundaries between them and issues such as dependence and exploitation are not so clear.
Elisabetta Benassi's "M'FUMU" represents a ghost tram stop, a shelter made of casts of animal bones from the Royal Museum of Central Africa. The tram stop honours Paul Panda (M'Fumu) Farnana, a Congolese intellectual Pan-African activist, the first Congolese to receive a degree from a Belgian university.
The bus stop actually references a real place: tramline 44 in Brussels runs from Montgomery Square to Teryuren, joining liminal and separate worlds, Europe and Africa, Belgium and Congo, centre and periphery, colonisers and colonised. The tramline was created by King Leopold II for the 1897 Universal Exposition to connect the main venue to the Palais des Colonies.
The ghost stop is a metaphorical shelter protecting those who disappeared in colonial history and helping their ghosts return to the world from which they were once excluded (a reader performed "Soliloquy of the Crazy King", a series of extracts from King Leopold's Soliloquy when the Biennale opened).
In Sammy Baloji's 8 bas-relief copper plates "Sociétés secrètes" accompanied by black and white photographs and archival documents, the artist explores the effects of industrialisation and urbanism imposed on Congo by Belgian colonial rule.
Baloji's aerial views of Lubumbashi showing the cordon sanitaire, a 500 metres wide empty or dead zone imposed during the colonial era to separate black and white neighbourhoods, are displayed next to images of fly and mosquito collections (the insects reference the 1929 fly control campaign; according to the campaign each worker had to bring in 50 flies to receive his daily ration).
The artist's bas relief copper plates based on photographs of scarifications from Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa, combine instead the practice of indigenous scarification, the copper trade (black labourers mined the ore for the profit of white colonisers, but Congo's copper deposits are still exploited by foreign corporations) and Belgian Colonial Secret Service surveillance practices. Secret Service spying and repression prevented indeed local sects or secret societies (identified by scarifications) from opposing the colonial state.
Inside the main space, Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin's "Echiqueté" consists in a game of chess with a twist: rules are largely the same, but, when a piece is captured, it is transformed into a black and white piece, a sort of cross-breed.
The captor decides which identity the chequered piece will take, but the players have to reconsider practices bearing in mind that a menacing piece belongs to them and to their opponent as well.
The game - originally inspired by the configuration of the scene in a photograph from the Bernier family archive showing a ceremony celebrating the constitution of Niger's Armed Forces and the commemoration of the first anniversary of the Republic of Niger in 1961 - becomes therefore a sophisticated metaphor on identity politics, métissage, inter-mixing and hybridity, suggesting the players should find new strategies to negotiate opposition.
In a prominent central position inside the pavilion there is Vincent Meessen's digital video installation: his work revisits an unknown part of the history of the Situationist International. Meessen discovered in the archives of Belgian Situationist Raoul Veneigem the lyrics of a protest song that Congolese Situationist Joseph M'Belolo Ya M'Piku composed in May 1968. The artist went to work with M'Belolo and a group of young musicians in Kinshasa reproducing a new rendition of the song.
At times the projects included in the pavilion move from an artist to explore an imaginary universe, at others they are inspired by real events. Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj tell via side projectors five short fables featuring anonymous characters and fictional creatures, inspired by painter Ernest Mancoba. A founding member of the CoBra group, Mancoba was almost entirely removed from their history. The projections appear on a wall with a series of stylised tubular metal structures.
Maryam Jafri's work is based instead on meticulous research on archival and historical documents. "Getty Vs Muséè Royal d'Afrique Centrale Vs Dr Congo" features images from early Independence in Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya and Congo.
The photographs are preserved in different locations, a Belgian museum, a Congolese Embassy archive in Brussels and a neglected government press agency in Burundi.
The nations and famous image banks claim the pictures belong to them and Jafri explored all the archives, realising that, when compared and juxtaposed, the photographs reveal manipulations, discrepancies, inconsistencies and errors, questioning therefore issues of visual heritage, ownership and preservation.
Interested in Dadaism, Minimalism, Conceptualism and African American political and cultural movements from the '60s, including the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts movements, Adam Pendleton did a collage-like installation in which his "Black Dada" paintings are interpreted as retro-futurism, and combined with his "Independance" and "System of Display" series.
As the artist photocopied, cropped and silkscreened the images - among them a picture of a couple dancing in 1960 during the independence celebrations in Congo, and a still from a film by the Ethiopian director Haile Gerima who was part of the L.A. Rebellion film movement - he remixed them all together giving them new meanings and creating further juxtapositions and interconnections.
James Beckett's installation wouldn't have looked out of place in an architecture biennale. His "Negative Space: A Scenario Generator for Clandestine Building in Africa" moves from the African Modernist tradition.
It consists in an automated storage and retrieval machine (imagine the technology used in warehouses such as Amazon's and you get an idea) that arranges wooden building blocks to create portraits of specific modernist buildings in Africa.
The small buildings refer to their negative spaces, alluding to the building's potential for illegal expansion of living or working spaces. The machine moves incessantly, reordering and reconfiguring blocks and volumes, hinting in this way also at a dystopian scenario of shifting spaces and architectures resulting from the post-colonial situation while pointing at the progressive architecture put to use in post-independence nation-building projects and the exploitation of resources by Western industrial development. This continuous and endless act of reordering blocks becomes empty and cold since it's a machine that clinically carries out the task without ever putting an end to it.
The projects and tales of discordant colonial memories, architectural dystopia and cultural hybridity featured inside the Belgian Pavilion point towards more global issues such as constructing memories and knowledge, leaving visitors with a dilemma about the contemporary narratives we are currently living in, and prompting them to wonder how they will be narrated in future, how much will be real and how much will be inextricable from a constructed discourse.
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