Leaving Ruins: Explorations of Present Pasts by Sammy Baloji, Freddy Tsimba, and Steve Bandoma
2016; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00267
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Anthropological Studies and Insights
Resumotranslated from the French by Allen F. RobertsReference to the poetic work of Derek Walcott helps explain the particular attention of three Congolese artists directed to material and moral ruins that bear witness to traumatic experience. Walcott (1992) inscribes violence at the heart of Antillean heritage: "Decimation from the Arawak downwards is the blasted root of Antillean history." Since the Atlantic and East African slave trades and perhaps before, violence and its management have been at the heart of collective memories of societies of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The societies of Congo and of Walcott's Antilles share an ambiguous attitude toward the colonial/slave past. While history is written from others' perspectives, experience is inscribed in imagination and carried by heritage. Walcott rejects the distinction between imagination and collective memory, and when he writes that "every island is an effort of memory" (1992), he stresses the necessity of memory's permanent effects. Walcott only insists upon the (relative) absence of ruins to underscore the strange nature of history, "which looked over the shoulder of the engraver and, later, the photographer. History can alter the eye and the moving hand to conform a view of itself." As he would add, "the history of the world, by which of course we mean Europe, is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings." Such a gaze has chosen ruins as evidence of the presence/absence of history.2Walcott opposes art to history in a "process of the making of poetry, or what should be called not its 'making' but its remaking, the fragmented memory…. Art is this restoration of our shattered history." In his famous phrasing, "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape." In place of the ruins and heroes designated by the gaze of history, he continues, "I see cabbage palms moving their fronds at sunrise, [and] I think they are reciting Perse…. At least islands not written about but writing themselves!" (Walcoltt 1998:78).3 The voice of the poet "Perse," having preceded Walcott to the Nobel Prize in Literature, "make[s] out of these foresters and fishermen heraldic men!" (Walcott 1987:217). It is the artist, then, who reveals to the world the experience and patrimony ignored by history: "The past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past…. The process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery." Seen from the ruins recognized by a local imaginary, "Caribbean literature is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveler or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture."4Baloji, Bandoma, and Tsimba—all three artists born after the independence of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo—have only indirect understanding of the colonial past, and yet it is the past of their "modernity." They carry in their heritage its incorporated experience and question the history that does not belong to them because it was written from the gaze of elsewhere and refers to the generations of their fathers and grandfathers. The ruins that this gaze designates are not theirs, insofar as the last half-century has left no such experiences that might stand as ruins in future.5 The vestiges of the DRC's Second Republic (1965–1990), during which their fathers were dismissed as nothing but "squatters" in their own land, are only sterile ghosts even as their fathers will never become ancestors. That is, their past is no longer relevant, and their memory, without pertinence to present-day life, obstructs any immediate future, for the Apocalypse is the horizon of collective attention now. In its shadow, imaginary escape to somewhere else can only be a destructive rage fed by exasperation with the nostalgia of the fathers. As Jacques Kimpozo wrote in the Kinshasa newspaper Le Phare of May 13, 2014, "kept at a distance from modern infrastructures (highways, hydroelectric dams, plants producing potable water, ports, airports, hospitals, schools, the market); technological progress in agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishing; new technologies of information and communication; job markets; the banking system; etc., [people] have only two pathways to escape what they consider 'hell': come to Kinshasa and increase the ranks of the unemployed, or cross borders."And yet daily life is only chaotic when viewed from outside. To take control of one's becoming, one must recognize ruins as evidence of a past from which memory opens to a future. Like Walcott (1962:13), who refuses to take as his own "the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts," Baloji reconfigures the ruins of mining industries and photographic images bequeathed by the colonial gaze, Bandoma fragments images pretending to depict Kongo culture as found in art history books, and Tsimba draws up ruins of yesterday's communal living. As "the stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind, … art is this restoration of our shattered bodies" (Walcott 1962). Following steps as though they were Walcott's, Baloji and Tsimba not only replace old metaphors by new ones but their shared purpose is the reconstruction of the world by replacing what is missing in today's DRC (Ismond 2001).Sammy Baloji was born in Lubumbashi in 1978, and now composes photomontages that confront images from here and now—the ruins of modernity—with others from the time of the now-disavowed ancestors of local urban citizenry. The past that these images re-presents can be that of the days of colonial conquest, the time of migrant workers whose labor founded industrial modernity in the Congo, or the Second Republic when Mobutu Sese Seko was at his dictatorial height. Baloji's recent photomontages juxtapose indecent opulence with the lives in ruin of those who are the survivors of postcolonial modernity, as well as their descendants. His camera also matches a local present with calendar and advertisements images from China, as simulacra of the global (c.f. Baudrillard 1995).Freddy Bienvenu Tsimba Mavambu, born in Kinshasa in 1967, creates sculptural assemblages from detritus abandoned in the roads of the capital or from empty cartridges collected on battle-fields of recent civil strife.6 He holds that the street has been his true school, that blacksmiths who taught him to forge and weld are his masters, and that it is his duty to give witness through his art to how life has been brutally extinguished.7Born in Kinshasa in 1981, Steve Bandoma composes his hyperreality through assemblages of scraps of magazine illustrations, drawings, and advertisements that he tears up. He then superimposes the fragments, recomposes them, and so repairs a world that, lacking any sense, does not deserve to be seen as it is. Because there is no real, ruins of representation can only serve to create simulacra.8Sammy Baloji's photomontages demonstrate the evolution of a process of displacement of that which is pending, to an ethical evaluation and an aesthetic of shared representations of actuality. To borrow a term from Michel de Certeau (1984), Baloji's works offer propres—that is, places of departure from which tactics can be imagined and the future imagined. The confrontation of images, most but not all photographic, offers Baloji the possibility to make visible the tragic consequences of rupture between presents and their pasts through the misappropriation of industrial modernity as patrimony. Built by a first generation of Congolese laborers and then left to successive generations, this patrimony has not been transmitted. The rupture that has resulted denies ancestral status to the fathers' generation. In the order of generational succession, salaried labor (kazi in Swahili) more than kinship has created social relations.9 In identifying the evils that afflict society, Baloji works like a local healer (nganga) presenting the living with their responsibilities and indicating to them the path of their personal and collective "welfare." In the manner of his society—industrial, then postindustrial—of Katangan mining, Baloji delves into the imaginaries of precolonial cultures, of Christianity, and of a modernity originating in colonialism. Modern visual culture is the medium through which he approaches social modes of transmitting knowledge, evaluating social justice, and determining individual destinies. His artistic and technical means are derived from globalized culture, and he considers himself to be a contemporary artist without reference to particular culture or nation. Nonetheless, the realities captured by Baloji's camera, their ethical evaluation and the aesthetics through which he places them in his montages, are all local.Baloji's approach gives evidence to the transformation of realities and collective imaginaries of Katanga. Today well known, his Likasi and Mémoire series interrogate the consequences of a break with the past when social bonds were built more upon transmission of access to salaried employment than upon inscription within clan or ethnic ensembles organized through kinship. A decade after accomplishing these works, the social imaginary of Congolese people and the artistic undertakings of Sammy Baloji have abandoned the ruins of industries that have turned their backs on any such history. Having now become "antiquities," these vestiges of industrial patrimony accentuate the tragic character of the present and the failure of the fathers to pass on their achievement of social status through wage-earning employment.Several works by Baloji return to the out-of-date status of personages of this earlier generation by superimposition of their portraits and photographs or drawings realized during the colonial period. Through analogy to the simulacrum of the "ethnographic type," imprisoning real persons in the conventions of an exoticizing gaze (Poole 1997), people of the generation of the fathers are further imprisoned by making of them museum objects—indeed, artifacts. Baloji's photograph of the place where Lumumba was held just before his execution, taken in 2010 for Autographe ABP of London, is a culminating point (Fig. 1).10 Upon a background of wooded savanna and next to the ruins of a house razed to the soil, an old man with grey hair stands before the viewer. Wearing an old suit too large for his wizened body, he struggles to recover the lost dignity of a well-dressed person, but dusty rubber boots in the place of shoes betray him. In his hand he holds a small reddish-yellow bottle of a popular carbonated drink. His placement in the image and the colors suggest an equivalence with the ruined building behind the man—that all that remains of the modernity promised by Lumumba are rubble topped by a crude cross of cement and shoddy commodities like the soda pop that the grizzled gentleman holds in his hand.The gaze of Sammy Baloji follows the imaginary of ordinary Congolese. Without being able to find issue from the ruins of the past, they have recently turned toward a different present than their own. Pictures copied from tourist agency catalogs have joined those of illustrated calendars and notices for soccer teams in replacing the works of local painters that used to decorate the homes of salaried and other upwardly mobile Katangans (see Jewsiewicki 2013). These fragments of mass global culture, printed in China for the Congolese market, nourish dreams of escape toward places where modernity seems accessible (Fig. 2). This last while, Sammy Baloji has consecrated particular attention to such vehicles of an imaginary that snatches at a present that cannot be fully grasped, and their presence in his photomontages suggests the place held by archival images (Fig. 3).Elsewhere, in a discussion of his Mémoires series, I have presented my understanding of Sammy Baloji's vision of domesticated industrial modernity in colonial contexts now lost to the postcolony.11 For the workers and their families, industrial modernization has been replaced by trials and traumas. Yet these challenges have served as a springboard from which to regain dignity. As is manifest in urban painting from Katanga, social memory insists on the necessity of triumphing over death and humiliation if one is to domesticate modernity. Between 1910 and 1970, two generations of laborers built the mining industry and urban society of Katanga. Three pictorial representations organize the work of such memory—the great chimney and slag heap of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (as the principle Katangan copper mine, located in Lubumbashi itself), the genre painting (Fabian 1974, Fabian and Szombati-Fabian 1980) called Colonie belge that depicts Congolese physical abuse at the hands of authorities (Fig. 4), and workers operating heavy equipment; and these give sense to the relationships of man and machine and among miners themselves when faced with new social and political hierarchies.12 The dictum "work is hard, death is near" (kazi nguvu, lufu karibu in Katangan Swahili) underscores captions beneath images of miners. Work (kazi) and death (lufu) form a dyad. One labors at risk of one's life, but work mastered by man procures him a place in modernity. During the 1990s, the mining industry fell to ruins and modernity deserted Katanga. Deprived of salaried employment, society and the industrial landscape were thereafter haunted by the phantom of kazi. Even as the fathers no longer managed their machines, their sons were reduced to digging with pickaxes through the detritus of slag heaps to tear out a few kilograms of low-quality minerals, gaining a man enough to eat once a day, at most.The camera and the computer explore these ruins to give evidence to such dire dramas. Baloji excavates the palimpsest of memories, looking for a new life to render the past able to engender a future. His eye is informed by Katangan experience, his camera seizes its realities. The intensity of Baloji's gaze brings global attention to particular local details. The universal surges from the world of contemporary media within a local frame of imagination to which earlier Katangan urban painting once gave access. To return to this new present some phantom of the salaried work that has deserted society, and to find in the ruins of modernity a different future, Sammy Baloji attaches archival images of the work of laborers in the past (Fig. 5–6). When he confronts their bodies with the ruins of machines, he confirms the convictions of his generation that the fathers are to blame for not transmitting modernity to them, for not honoring the memory of those who, brought to Katanga as the "slaves" of Europeans, made themselves into wage-earning miners. They, more than the whites with their technology and capital, constructed the modernity that they might have left to their sons. Having failed to pass on this boon to succeeding generations, these fathers have severed transmission of urban heritage. Baloji's photomontages (Grau 2004, Ades 1999, Zervigon 2012) give the grandfathers new presence and repair this rupture. After distinguishing between the "true" past and the present, the images propose the means to redress such loss.Comparison between photographs of machines or abandoned buildings that no longer serve any functions and the nudes of Baloji's series "Bodies and Masks" helps us to understand his work as a portraitist of life at its most raw—naked life.13 In central African performance arts, an active mask is always worn by a person, even when those attending the performance feign ignorance of this reality. Such a mask gives presence—and therefore (re)presents—a spirit or an ancestor that is otherwise absent. Sammy Baloji's photographic project takes an opposite tack. Baloji accentuates evidence by photographing what the eye sees rather than what social conventions might hold (Fig. 7). In this way, the naked body of a person wearing a mask imposes itself rather than being effaced. The nudity creates malaise for the spectator and emphasizes the effects of unveiling. When masks emerge in a performance, the energy of a mask and of the spirit to which it gives presence is made actual by the body of the person wearing it.14 The portraits (masks) of machines or buildings that are no longer functional because they lack the work (kazi) of absent miners underscore the failure of modernity. A machine without a man using it to affect work is nothing but an abandoned mask (Fig. 4).15 Portraits of masks of industrial ruins direct one's gaze to penetrate the surface of Baloji's photomontages, and lead the viewer to cross the strata of his palimpsests. The organization of these images through the aesthetic of an imaginary from the mining society of Katanga is immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the urban paintings of the same region (Jewsiewicki 2013). As he uses archival photographs, Baloji firmly positions himself in the historical mode of restituting the past, and he works with the factual, but the sense of each scene that he composes with people displaced from their time to Baloji's own can only be understood as a doubled representation (Fig. 3). Restitution of the meanings of experience, thanks to a framework of collective imaginaries, permits readings of what appearances signify socially. The work of memory between the frame of social imagination and the significance of appearances transforms the naked body into a social being.16 Industrial landscapes portrayed as masks of modernity speak to an incapacity to assure the availability of kazi.Let us consider two of Baloji's photomontages. At the center of the first (Fig. 5) is a worker wearing a tattered, sleeveless shirt with light and dark stripes like that of the prisoner in the popular urban painting Colonie belge. With a double chain locked around his neck, he folds his muscled arms passively in front of him as he hauntingly stares at the viewer. His gaze is belligerent as well as tragic—a gaze one would expect from the hero of Luba/Lunda epics who has returned home (culture) after having overcome the most challenging forces of other worlds. Behind him is a desolation of abandoned buildings, flooded factory roads, masks of grimacing metal, and empty rails leading nowhere. No train, no one else in sight. This migrant worker, brought to the mines a slave of the Europeans and their machines, accuses his descendants of not knowing how to transmit the heritage of his tribulations. The chain signifying his bondage refers us back to urban paintings depicting the abuse of porters during colonial times, as well as to late nineteenth century caravans of enslaved Congolese heading into exile and oblivion (see Jewsiewicki 2013).In a second montage (Fig. 6), we see four naked men in the foreground.17 Such an image would be offensive to Congolese viewers, for the nudity of the men would recall humiliation like that of the prisoner in the Colonie belge painting, whose naked buttocks are being scourged in public through a punishment so common that it stood for the colony itself. Exposure of the nudity of an adult man is an insult to his dignity and profoundly demeaning. The colonial penalty of whipping was physically painful but above all mortifying because a man's pants were pulled down publicly. People remember this act of debasement by the State, especially because the spastic movements of the body after each stroke made it seem as though, in public view, he were fornicating with the Earth. It is impossible to know whether, in Congolese urban culture, this prescription of male nudity follows the Old Testament, where Ham—understood as the biblical ancestor of black people—was cursed for not having covered the naked body of his father, or rather follows pre-Christian principles.18 The two works return us to the naked bearer of a mask in the Corps et masques series. Fragmented in découpage, the original caption remains visible on the four men's bodies. Such writing attests to the "authenticity" of the image even as it suggests the inscription by the State upon its "possessions." In the Colonie belge painting (Fig. 4), the man's jersey striped in yellow and black as well as the bleeding stripes of the whip left on his buttocks reproduce the colors of the Belgian flag, indicating to whom this man "belongs." Returning to Baloji's photomontage, on the right behind the men, one can perceive the ghost of a conveyor that used to carry the dross of the facility's immense smelters to the summit of the vast slag heap. To the left rise the entrails of an industrial building beside which a chimney emits no smoke or steam. The platform on the slag-conveyor to the right is striped in black and yellow, recalling the jersey of the prisoner of Colonie belge, while the iron scaffolding is painted red ochre like the color of dried blood, but also like central African laterite soil. Red ochre is also the color of the tarpaulins deployed in the mining industry that, when worn out, were transformed into siding and roofs for miner's dwellings. Red ochre is therefore the color of the daily work of this lost modernity, as well as the color of the earth within which riches are sought. The color serves as the background of images evoking studio photography that conferred the statute of modern persons to urban people throughout the twentieth century.In his Kolwezi series (Baloji 2014), several portraits are realized with the "canvas" of red ochre tarp as their reference. The persons whose clothing is as miserable as their places in life adopt poses as though they were in a photographic studio. These postures and gazes captured by the camera defy the destitution the decor suggests. In the same series, Baloji sets a photo of urban Congolese homes whose roofs are made of red ochre tarp against a Chinese advertisement that decorated one of these habitations (Fig. 2). In this picture, one can see a sky-blue swimming pool in the middle of an impeccable green lawn. Is this the hell of the present versus the unattainable paradise of an elsewhere? Red ochre is also the color of the large entry door of trucks, with a smaller door beside it for passengers that is of the same hue. A star of five points surmounts this ensemble, seemingly giving but also preventing access to the installations of the Zhong Hang Mining Company of Kolwezi. Again, what lies behind these doors photographed by Baloji, hell or heaven?19With a diploma in hand from the Fine Arts Academy of Kinshasa, Freddy Tsimba went to "the school of the road," as he puts it, for real life pulses there. He undertook a long apprenticeship with artisans of metal and fire who, according to Tsimba, possess and produce cultural continuities. He was born and raised in Kinshasa, and his parents are Kongo from Manyanga. Without questioning this social inscription, Tsimba feels especially close to his maternal grandmother, Kolo Nsunda, whose "cosmopolitan" experience and knowledge of the Congo he stressed. On the "official" web page of Freddy Tsimba (http://freddytsimba.wordpress.com/) under the rubric of "media: photos" his grandmother can be seen holding a great-grandchild (her ndoyi—namesake) in her arms as the only other person depicted. This virtual identification with his grandmother inscribes Tsimba in time and lineage. It is not without interest to note that he is the only one of the three artists under discussion here who claims generational continuity in such a clear-cut way. Nonetheless, he refers to the generations of his mother rather than to those of his father or maternal uncles. Let us note the strong presence in his creation of the woman/mother, less, it seems to me, because his ethnic milieu is matrilineal than because, preoccupied with human life, he celebrates its source.20The organization of Tsimba's "Portraits" on his web page takes on a specific sense when confronted with the image/performance captured by video. In 2010, during an exhibition of African art at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, Freddy Tsimba was followed by a videographer, as were others who had been invited. Looking at an nkisi figure and being surprised by it, he exclaimed, "That, that came from my village. Imagine!"21 The sculptor seemed to be in the presence of a mirror held to his own work by a Kongo artifact created more than a century earlier. Tsimba was seeing a figurative nkisi having the form of human being for the first time, and in effect, for generations none like it had been made.22 In Kinshasa, no art museum is presently open to the public. From his only visit to "the village," when he was six years old, Tsimba remembers a dance performance and being deathly afraid, in his childish way, of an enormous fish caught in the Congo River. Let us complete these anecdotal comments with remarks about the narrative structure of Tsimba's transformation from a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts to a sculptor who feels himself descended from masterful Kongo blacksmiths and who expresses human suffering by cutting and weaving together scrap metal using a blow torch (Fig. 8).Two significant images come to his mind when Tsimba reflects upon his foundational moments: crossing a water course and the arrival of a messenger. Tsimba decided to become an artist following the intervention of a friend of one of his sisters. Having seen his drawings in the sand, the friend told Tsimba to do the same on paper. On the basis of the resulting work, he was admitted to the Fine Arts Academy. Later, having completed his apprenticeship with blacksmiths, Tsimba decided to collect spent ammunition cartridges in Kisangani, then a theater of armed combat. Telling of his trip, he emphasizes crossing the Congo River at Kisangani and then being imprisoned. He recovered his liberty when he melted the cartridges and cast a cooking pot from them, thereby transforming an instrument of death into something supporting life. Such stories that inscribe the choices of life or an artistic career in frames of social memory affirm that an exceptional destiny awaiting him would not put his social identity in question. Becoming an artist has not meant that Freddy Tsimba has ceased being a Kinois (inhabitant of Kinshasa), nor being Kongo, however.In the Kongo imaginary, water is the place inhabited by the dead and other spirits. To cross the watery frontier between the world of the living and that of the dead signifies being blessed by wisdom held by the ancestors. They are the only ones who can simultaneously know the past, present, and future. Water and its crossing therefore occupy important places in Tsimba's work, such as his Waiting for the Last Boat, To Leave Without Return (a pirogue made of spoons and forks floating on water traced by munition cartridges and skulls in cast metal), or The Other Side of Life (Fig. 9). In the Protestant dogma that Tsimba follows, crossing the Red Sea constitutes the passage from enslavement to the Promised Land, and the messenger (as played by the friend of Tsimba's sister) indicates election by God as confirmed or destined. Family life in Kongo communities and Protestant faith have given Tsimba familiarity with two cultural memories. He draws inspiration from the aesthetic and techniques of Kongo healing as well as Protestant practice. From the eighteenth-century Kimpa Vita (of whom Tsimba has composed a sculpture) to Simon Kimbangu in 1921, numerous Christian prophets (nguza) have appeared in Kongo country to heal society and to take full possession of the modernity of each époque (Janzen 1979, 2013; Thornton 1998; Mboukou 2010). Freddy Tsimba is an artist rather than an nguza prophet, but like them, he creates objects of power permitting him to open a space of healing and recreate social order. His actions answer the articulation between Kongo cultural specificity and the Christian universalism of "nguzism" prophecy. No matter whether one of Tsimba's sculptures or an nkisi, the intensity of any so powerful an object has universal reach and import.What Wyatt MacGaffey has written about minkisi (pl. of nkisi in the Kongo language) can be extended to the cultural genealogy of Tsimba's sculptures.23 An nganga—that is, a healer and practitioner operating minkisi—uses a sculpture or other sort of container to hold ingredients derived from animals, minerals, and plants, as well as artifacts of human circumstances. In Congo, creating nkisi power objects is a widely spread cultural practice. For instance, closer to Sammy Baloji's home, relics of human experience (called vizimba by Tabwa) such as a fragment of a blind man's stick or a piece of bone from someone executed for homicide (even when only attempted) are essential to the most powerful nkisi bundles.24 An nkisi is made and used to resolve particular problems and constitutes a field of incessant experimentation. Anything found not to work is abandoned, and something new is added or created in its place. While some minkisi have little importance beyond their direct purposes, others are famous, invested with potent powers, and are directed to maintaining law and order. Following Kongo thinking, when it acts, an nkisi is at the center of a theatrical ensemble of songs, dances, and norms of comportment. Memories of past actions of the sort are revived by social tensions, adding to the community's excitement. A great nkisi nkondi (MacGaffey and Janzen 1974, MacGaffey 1991) should be frightening. Through the accumulation of ingredients unknown to all but the nganga who composed the nkisi's bundles, and by pieces of iron nailed into its body, such a figure intrigues and disquiets. The public knew when an important nkisi was created by an nganga following an extraordinary revelation. Through processes of fabrication, an nkisi is inhabited by
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