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The spiritual awakening in African art that Europe refuses to return

2022-05-16T03:38:00.020Z


A pan-African art project aims to reconnect the continent's youth with their original spirituality. Although it is not his primary objective, the restitution of art plundered by colonial powers is planned in 'L'esprit des ancêtres'


Géraldine Tobe, a young Congolese artist, has been involved in a high-profile company for two years.

She seeks to awaken past souls through creation.

She trusts that, conjuring the spirits through art, today's Africa listens attentively to the floating wisdom of those who have already died... And still remain.

L'esprit des ancêtres, The spirit of the ancestors

in Spanish

,

is not a mere flow of inspiration between the classic and contemporary aesthetics of the African continent.

Nor does it encourage opaque meta-artistic disquisitions.

It does not even aspire – at least, deliberately – to put European museums against the moral ropes, those ancient institutions that continue to guard, despite brief concessions in recent times, the vast majority of African heritage.

With a certain disdain for transcendence, Tobe subordinates the issues of this world to the spiritual, the axis of his project.

As a founding objective,

L'esprit des ancêtres

wants to plant the seed of an ambitious reconciliation: that of young Africans with their rich cultural tradition, the one that colonialism tried to throw into the bin of the cursed.

Powerful idea that, explains the Congolese, has borrowed from the voices of the beyond.

Tobe affirms, with flesh and bone modesty, that she is only a spokesperson for atavistic messages: “What I am doing does not come from myself, I am a medium who transmits to the people of my generation something that comes from far back.

If I didn't exist, the ancestors would have chosen someone else."

On earth, the sequence of the project seems very simple.

12 emerging artists (Tobe included) visited European collections of African art in search of intense connections.

Back in their countries (especially in French-speaking West Africa, but also Angola and South Africa), they reinterpreted the pieces that managed to move them with a contemporary perspective.

Objects with which a kind of metaphysical spark arose.

The result can be seen in an exhibition carousel in African and European spaces that will start next fall.

Hans De Wolf, Professor of Art History at the Brussels Free University and curator of the project, highlights the importance that the artists have been inspired by the original works, the only ones capable of emanating –despite being located out of context– the spiritual dimension with which they were conceived.

Although De Wolf admits that the restitution of African art underlies

L'esprit des ancêtres

, he clarifies that the project moves away from “the purely material or museum discourse”.

For him, it is above all about forging identities rusted by years and years of colonial rain: "Adopting these works with a contemporary reading has a lot of power in terms of cultural continuity."

Kalunga or the uncreated creator

As a child, Tobe sensed the diabolical stigma that often accompanies native African spirituality.

She was born in the 1990s, decades after the Democratic Republic of the Congo gained independence from Belgium.

Endowed since childhood, as she confesses, with a marked sensitivity to the supernatural, she soon understood that the religious legacy of the former metropolis continued to prevail.

In her very Christian family, there was a priest uncle who encouraged her to become a nun.

And a grandmother, she continues her story, "that she performed ancestral rites and that everyone called a witch."

Hans de Wolf and Géraldine Tobe, during an exhibition of the Congolese artist Jeanpy Kabongo

The budding artist grew up struggling between two worlds, trying to create a solid knot within herself that would reconcile two supposedly conflicting visions.

She ceased her efforts after entering a convent and finding no trace of her origins there: "Everything was European saints, European languages, European rites...".

Her grandmother had passed on the concept of

kalunga

, the aquatic border that separates the living from the dead in the Congolese imaginary.

But also, in Tobe's words, “that of which we see neither the beginning nor the end, the uncreated creator”.

The old woman also instilled in her that her ancestors deserved to be honored.

Finally, oral transmission won the battle against the sacred scriptures.

The teachings of her grandmother have permeated, until today, the life and work of Tobe.

With their synergy between the ethereal (her) and the palpable (he), the Congolese artist and the Belgian curator form a curious tandem.

They also embody the suture that little by little closes the post-colonial wounds.

A white man and a black woman paddling together, drawing newly designed bridges, knocking down walls of deafness and resentment.

“We have both inherited the current situation.

It so happens that, being an entirely African project, it could not be carried out without the collaboration of Europe”, admits De Wolf.

“From the beginning something very strong arose between us;

our attunement can pave the way to overcome those negative perceptions that linger,” adds Tobe.

De Wolf has long engaged in cultural diplomacy initiatives, most connecting Asia and Europe.

With

L'esprit des ancêtres

he hopes that an increasingly agile intercontinental dialogue will contribute to the resurgence of heritage pride among African youth.

“The new generations must know that when the first African objects arrived in Paris in 1909, they caused an enormous impact;

they made top-tier artists cry.”

The term primitivism –which designates the influence of African art (also pre-Columbian or Oceanic) on European avant-gardes– may be jarring today, but it served to conceptualize a reality that is evident in fundamental works such as

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

.

"Picasso himself recognized the quality and depth of masks and other artifacts, which went beyond the very idea of ​​modernity at the time," recalls De Wolf.

Tobe is more concerned about the religious drift that, according to her, her country is slipping.

She watches in amazement as more and more young people enter into Christian sectarianism.

“The 'churches of awakening' and their very powerful pastors have flourished, who have hypnotized the Congolese with their obsession with evil, which they see everywhere,” she laments.

Meanwhile, centuries-old beliefs are vanishing, with a high risk of finding, in a few years, the only reflection of it in anthropology books.

"We have to revalue our guardians of memory, our

femmes sages

[wise women]," she claims.

love for fusion

Does

L'esprit des ancêtres hide

a certain cultural essentialism?

An implicit division between Africans, say, pure and polluted?

Tobe responds by referring to the example of a good friend of his: “He is a Muslim.

For him, ancestral spirituality represents something very important that he seamlessly reconciles with his Islamic beliefs.”

This fondness for fusion, so African, crystallizes in the diversity of approaches and formats that the MACM exhibition in Kinshasa will host.

In large paintings and three sculptures, Tobe vindicates the Congolese heroine Kimpa Vita, drawing parallels with her own biography and that of Joan of Arc.

The Senegalese artist KH Bamba brings together Islamic clothing or prayer rugs in collages with a strong symbolic charge.

The South African Lhola Amira plays and reflects –mixing the audiovisual and the performance– with the multiplicity of her identities (she appears in multifaceted versions of herself) and the identity fracture that colonialism caused throughout Africa.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kh Bamba (Khadim Bamba) (@khbamba)

De Wolf highlights the proposal of Paul Alden Mvoutoukoulou.

The Congolese vindicates, in the words of the curator of

L'esprit des ancêtres

, “the concept of healing” while denouncing “the appropriation, by the pharmaceutical industry, of African ancestral knowledge”.

Mvoutoukoulou has been inspired by the artificial division of the African Museum of Tervuren, near Brussels.

"It's a completely schizophrenic museum," says De Wolf.

And he explains why: “If you go to the right, you find the so-called ethnographic objects: masks, statues... If you go to the left, there are stuffed animals, samples of biodiversity, etc.

In African spirituality, both domains are confused: these masks only make sense in nature”.

Mvoutoukoulou's installation, adds De Wolf, “integrates these two spheres to show that it is a single natural philosophy”.

Where to relocate the objects that Europe is beginning to return to Africa –for now, with droppers– is one of the great doubts in the arduous debate on restitution.

“The heritage lived within, in the heart of the community, it was part of education in an intergenerational process;

it taught, at the same time, the incarnation of spirits and respect for nature”, summarizes Tobe.

Like other times during the interview, De Wolf ends the conversation and appeals to caution: “The best gift for those who do not want to return would be, precisely, to simply return a thousand pieces to Kinshasa today, since anything could happen with them.

We want to create a ground for reflection that generates the conditions for a well-done return”.

Again, Tobe refrains from giving an opinion on the material: "Hans deals more with the technical aspects, I prefer to stay on the sidelines."

And he abruptly returns to his role as artist-medium: “My grandmother used to tell me that the people who sculpted the statues went into a trance to give the spirits a physical body.

This is how I see my work, as an artist who tries to give plasticity to those who left”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-16

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