In previous posts we looked at video collages, so let's continue the thread with collages of images via the works of Tavares Strachan.
Born in Nassau, Bahamas, the artist who in 2013 represented the Bahamas at the 55th International Venice Biennale, works with a variety of media, and among the themes he has been focusing on recently there are invisibility and people written out of history, themes that emerged also from his works on display at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
A while back Strachan started wondering very simple questions - who decides who becomes invisible and who gets reminded in a book? The Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, was compiled almost exclusively by white men and could be therefore seen as a tool of imperial conquest that appropriated and condensed knowledge as a means of signalling cultural domination.
Moving from this volume, Strachan decided to come up with his very own compendium of stories - The Encyclopedia of Invisibility - featuring 15,000 entries - among them people, places, objects, concepts, artworks and scientific phenomena.
Among the various entries the artist has included in this post-colonial book, there is a ghost town in Arizona, quantum gravity and the saola, a bovine known as the Asian unicorn.
Some of the pages of the Encyclopedia of Invisibility were then incoporated into his visual collages that combine appropriated photographs (from James Baldwin to Queen Elizabeth II), with diagrams and graphics showing Strachan's wide interests.
The book is therefore a representation of a dichotomy between those who are seen and those who are unseen, and the pages of his encyclopedia were also the inspiration for other works, such as Strachan's "Hidden Stories", pieces looking at truth and visibility that honour the lives of radical individuals.
Among them the Panchen Lama abducted at 6 and never found, but celebrated by Strachan in a cube-shaped mineral oil and glass sculpture, Saint Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott and 14th century Venetian-born author Christine de Pizan who, in order to support herself and her family, turned to writing, and produced the volumes The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies that showed the importance of women's contributions to society. Strachan remembered both the authors via limestone and neon bookends propping up volumes selected by the artist himself.
Strachan is fascinated by different stories of people written out of history, such as Matthew Henson, an African American explorer who arrived in the North Pole in 1909 with Robert Peary, who then took all the merit.
The manipulation of history led Strachan to discover the story of the first African American cosmonaut, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.,a genius physical chemist who trained as an astronaut.
Strachan himself actually trained as an astronaut in 2008 at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and in experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC), the artist's version of NASA for his native country.
Lawrence died in 1967, while instructing a flight test trainee learning the steep-descent glide technique, he was ejected out of the back seat horizontally and died on impact. Eleven years passed before another African American was chosen to undergo astronaut training. Mrs Lawrence apparently receied many hateful and racist letters after his death, saying things like "glad he was dead because now there would be no coons on the moon".
Strachan celebrated Robert Henry Lawrence Jr with a brief neon obituary in which he revealed the racism directed towards the astronaut after his death, but he also dedicated to the astronaut a pulsating neon light cardiovascular blue and purple floating sculpture that, emerging from the darkness, encourages people to think about truth and visibility.
On December 3, 2018, Strachan launched "ENOCH" into space aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket. Created in collaboration with LACMA Art + Technology Lab, ENOCH is a 3U satellite containing a 24 carat gold canopic jar with a bust of Lawrence, blessed by a Japanese Shinti priest. The satellite is expected to continue circling the Earth for seven years in a sun-synchronous orbit, so that, while the satellite will remain unseen to us, Lawrence's spirit will symbolically still be present in the universe.
The theme of the invisibles turning visible has become prominent in our lives as well and not just in art projects: think about how Coronavirus has tragically exposed long-standing inequalities in healthcare and labour systems and how the killing of George Floyd has resonated globally, prompting people to join protests against racism and to denounce episodes of racial discrimination in the workplace. Yet, let's hope that Strachan will continue to expand his encyclopedia and hidden stories: there are so many people, places and events that were forgotten and written out of history for different reasons and that just await rediscovery.
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