Futures and Fictions Page 15
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SCAVENGING THE FUTURE OF THE ARCHIVE
A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel and Daniel Kojo Schrade
Henriette Gunkel: I would like to begin this conversation with a focus on the archive as a source for the future-oriented and the speculative since the archive was one of the first aspects we discussed in relation to your work. In your abstract paintings you tend to bring in otherworldly figures and narratives that inspire you and that seem to be familiar to an Afrofuturist canon, like Lee “Scratch” Perry or Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example. But you also focus on narratives and figures that reflect on your geopolitical positionings often ignored in the context of Afrofuturism — narratives and figures that are often hidden and out of reach of public knowledge, and in a way reference art practices that are not widely considered as part of black cultures. One example is your Brother Beethoven series for which you turned to classical music and researched the history of the Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower and the inspiration and challenges he posed for Ludwig van Beethoven. You understand this archival work as a retro-futurist approach, as a way of digging the future out of the archive — which also means that you look at archival material differently, as always already including the futuristic (either in terms of form or narrative) which seems to allow you a certain level of fictioning in your art practice.
Based on the conversations we had, and my engagement with your art practice, I began to rethink my own approach to Africanist science-fictional interventions and became increasingly interested in temporal strategies and the aesthetics of time, in forms of the futuristic that do not refer to typical science-fictional or Afrofuturist tropes, such as Martians, spaceships and hyper-technology, to name a few. I shifted my focus on forms and senses of otherworldliness that we could draw from the past and that would help us to develop a genealogy, if you wish, of futurist interventions in art practices on the African continent that do not necessarily announce themselves as such. Art practices that precede recent science-fictional interventions which received much attention on a global scale, such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2005), for example, or Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009), which are widely considered as the first African science-fiction films. So I invited you to the University of Bayreuth, Germany where I was working at that time and which has a long history of African Studies (with all its problematic implications). The idea was to visit an archive of African art, images and objects together and to explore, over a period of two weeks, what a genealogy of the futuristic could look like. We entitled these two weeks Scavenging the Future of the Archive.
Daniel Kojo Schrade: The idea of digging the future out of the archive has been around for a while, but continues to be an extremely relevant strategy. There is still a lot of material to dig out and to re-contextualise. Afrofuturism immediately has to do with research, bringing the future and the past together, while activating the space in-between. Claiming that space in-between is a very research-heavy endeavor. Looking backwards while imagining oneself in the future and being aware of the space in-between requires a lot of discipline.
The archive of the University of Bayreuth’s IwalewaHaus consists of an art section, an audio and video archive, a poster section, and an ethnographic collection foremost from Africa. The main geographical focus of the collection is Nigeria, though some important pieces are from Sudan, Mozambique, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our focus in the two weeks in the archive together was on collections of contemporary, popular and modern art, the audio archive, and selected pieces from the ethnographic collection. One of the reasons why the IwalewaHaus archive is a great research field is its lack of a consequent collecting strategy. The many sections of the collection have multiple nuclei, shaped by “collectors” with a wide range of capability. It was therefore exciting, specifically from my point of view, my artistic perspective, to dig into this extravagant collection. We had to work like foragers. We rummaged through the archive trying to find the courage that would matter on our mission to do fundamental Afrofuturistic research: Scavenging the Future of the
Archive. We first studied all the visual components we were able to find in the audio archive, which contains more than two thousand CDs, LPs, singles, MCs and tapes of the work of foremost African composers and musicians from the 1950s onwards. This rather unconventional engagement with the audio collection led to a four-minute, animated slide collage, which uses twenty of the LP covers and Arthur Russel’s composition The Platform on the Ocean as the sound track. The graphic design of these selected covers depict space in a very futuristic way, whether this is a photographed or painted urban space, a landscape, an interior, or the light in the background of a portrait.
Figure 1. Ousmane Faye (1980). Painting on glass, 14cm x 12cm.
Back in the main collection we came across several works that were interesting f
or us, including a beautiful little 14cm x 12cm painting from the 1980s, on glass by the artist Ousmane Faye. The digitised archive catalogue describes the piece as follows:
Portrait of male in front of white background. The figure wears a yellow dress with white v-neck, which merges into a blue triangular pattern, pointing one of its edges downwards. In addition the figure wears a red fez on their head.
While there is nothing wrong with the description, which foremost aims to make the piece identifiable, it misses out on equally relevant facts. Faye’s painting additionally represents the most substantial basic components of colour-theory and geometry. The four geometric basic shapes — the circle, the rectangle, the triangle and the square — are key to the composition of the piece. The dress represents the circle, the fez represents the rectangle, the triangular pattern represents the triangle, and a line surrounding the entire piece represents the square. The colour composition of the painting is just as consequent. Faye used the basic colours Cyan (red), Magenta (blue), Yellow and Key (black). Every imaginable colour can be mixed based on the CMYK colour model. While Faye’s colour choice stands for the fundamentals of human visual perception; circle, rectangle, triangle and the square are the basis for the calculation of volumes and areas. They are the basis for geometry and astronomy, central for the calculation of shape, size, relative position of objects (planets) and the properties of space; the foundation for the digitisation of space (Ehrhart-Polynominal).
HG: The discussion we had around Faye’s piece allowed us to think more specifically around the aesthetic forms of time. Time as a form. The futuristic. We came across, for example, images of the works by the late Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez who built these fantastic utopian city models, which we can easily recognise as futuristic, as urban fabulations of a Kinshasa to come. Or the works of Méga Mingiedi, who in a way follows in the footsteps of Kingelez and creates large-format drawings of imaginary takes on Kinshasa that include elements of collage. In a way Mingiedi creates his own forms of skylines which can also be understood as urban timelines. In some of his drawings/collages you can find colonial figures like Leopold II next to Patrick Lumumba, or Mobuto Sese Seko next to skyscrapers and images and signs of capitalism and commercialisation/advertising. One of the works we looked at is Mingiedi’s Kin Delestage from 2010, which is a drawing-collage in extreme landscape format (45cm x 245cm). In addition to the presence of historical events, Mingiedi maps out a potential future for Kinshasa represented by skyscrapers with antennas and satellite dishes on their rooftops. In the foreground his intense layering of drawn lines produces a multi-layered information highway that refers to futuristic tropes/concepts of speed and acceleration that he envisions for a city such as Kinshasa, while remaining committed to history and the struggles for independence and its aftermath. As such, the piece can be read as a “seismographic skyline”. So of course, Kingelez and Mingiedi’s art works were easier and more accessible than the image that you referred to by Ousmane Faye.
One of the most challenging moments was the interest in masks that the archival work triggered — which, as we know, occupy a rather problematic object of study in the field of African Studies, but also more broadly in white conceptions of “Africa”. In the course of our workshop and through your reading I became interested in masks, for the first time, really, and in particular around the notion of fictioning in your reading of them. So we dared to ignore anthropological or religious knowledge production around those objects and produced our own reading. And maybe our focus on masks is not so surprising after all as it also developed out of our interest in the Dogon cosmology — the Dogon in Mali who understand themselves as descendants from Sirius B which they could astronomically reference correctly long before any Western technical devices could capture the star that was only photographed and hence “proven” in its existence in the 1970s. Every fifty years — this is how long it takes for Sirius B to complete its orbit — large-scale festivities take place in which the mask becomes an
Figure 2 and 3. Dogon Masks (West-Africa) and Bedu Mask, Nafana (West-Africa).
important element.
One image that we came across shows such celebration and ritual. The masks here, as you pointed out, are not only disguising the face but the main part of each mask extends above the head and as such extends the body and connects it with something broader. It can thus be understood as a communication device. As such this image and the masks resonate with Sun Ra’s myth-science and how artists and performers re-create themselves — in Sun Ra’s case in times of experienced oppression and discrimination. The Dogon masks further point to the fictioning aspect of technology, or an understanding of technology that moves beyond a common understanding of science and which refers to different, possibly spiritual ways of making use of the tools available. We can also find this approach in your own paintings in which you use analogue antennas, umbrellas, or even a flat iron.
DKS: Communication is indeed another key component in my reading of the masks of the archive we have studied. Masks are communication tools in a broad sense and some of them seem to have extensions for more sophisticated communication beyond the terrestrial space. You have already mentioned the Sirius B cult of the Dogon people of Mali. We also looked at a Bedu mask of the Nafana people, which are located not far from the Dogon, in north-west Ghana, Bukina Faso. The mask consists of three sections, a trapezoid lower part, a rectangular centre part and circular top. The geometric-abstract painting of the piece is limited to triangles and squares. Two holes in the lower section and support structures on the back indicate how the mask was worn. So the circular top, sitting on the rectangular central section, is actually in the position of an antenna. The mask turns into an emanation-tool, a receiver, a communication device.
I am applying this reading to many Senufo and Dogon masks, as well as to selected architecture, objects and two-dimensional works from West Africa. My Ghanaian background is not the only reason for my interest in the re-reading of these charged cultural keystones. Through my own work, I permanently negotiate extended communication, the navigation of spaces and the complexity of time. One of the repeated motifs I am using in my painting, drawing and performance work is the umbrella. I read a lot into the umbrella. It is a mobile device and you can carry it. It is a communication device as well because if you invite someone to walk with you under your umbrella, for example, you come into very close contact and can talk. It is a crafted space, with immediate exceptional conditions and it is a space that can travel. Also, if you flip the umbrella around, it could function as a satellite dish or a container, a vessel, so it has multiple meanings depending on how you position it.
HG: This focus on technology and communication devices in your art practice and your research is really intriguing — how you strategically repurpose existing technologies to re-engineer a collective understanding of politics and diaspora. In your work you seem to demand an investment in technological innovation irrespective of the market, consumerist needs and SF capital by focusing less on new forms of technology, but, more importantly, on new forms of using existing technology. I read your work as fictioning technology but also as pointing to a spiritual use. In that sense you seem to bypass the question of access and the technological/digital divide, for example, and refocus our attention to what is already easily available to us.
What I could see from your research, though, is that you do not approach devices such as the umbrella naively, in that you conceptualise them as uncontested and unmarked devices. You seem to be aware of the violence and risks built into these devices, and their potentiality to create inequality and exploitation. In your research around the umbrella, for example, you trace their racialised uses and repurpose them from a theoretical and political diasporic position. In another conversation, you argued that these mutated technologies tap into “survival strategies that were, and still are, existential in the depths of the (Black) Atlantic, in outer space, or in social spaces that aren’t clearly defined —
in spaces in-between”. Maybe you could talk a bit more about these spaces in-between, also in relation to your own work.
DKS: As we all know, the dimensions of space and time are far from being set in stone. In our current, rather linear-functioning society, I am interested in concepts that have the potential to help shape important aspects of the future. The technological aspect of Afrofuturism is not so much of interest to me. I try to re-contextualise the past in order to better understand the challenging present, while considering future concepts.
Figure 4. © Daniel Kojo Schrade (2010), Blueberry Hill, video still. Performance: Bayreuth.
I am an artist working mostly with mediums like the body and paint. In many of my performances, I use my body movements to spin a “net” throughout the performance space. At certain locations they get tied together and these intersections serve like synapses where, instead of neurological signals, various sounds get communicated by me talking, singing and creating noise. The “net” then functions similar to the strings of an instrument with the exception that its soundbox is the space.
Devices such as the umbrella that I can literally attach to my body, and extend my body with, are important within my work. As you mentioned, socio-culturally the umbrella has a very rich and complex history and artists seemed to be interested in them long before me. For example, the French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848), who depicted colonial life in Brazil. When I discovered his lithographs, I realised that he included umbrellas in a substantial number of his works. It seems as if at some point the umbrella took over by becoming the main narrator in/ of his works. In one of the pieces there is a servant, holding a closed umbrella. He is not just carrying it for the “master”; he is wearing it. It is almost like a musket, a safety device, a weapon, and as such way more than just a service tool. Although the body of the servant is depicted as much smaller than that of the “master”, extended by the umbrella and positioned in the centre of the print, the servant ends up being taller. We do not know whether this image composition means that Debret consciously considered the subtext of the piece, or whether he was rather a rapporteur, a witness of a moment. Besides its technical practicality — providing shadow, or shelter from rain — the umbrella is certainly a status symbol. Potentially extending the height of a body, marking and extending the space a body can claim while walking or sitting. The Ghanaian Aschanti people use umbrellas as such a signifier, to mark the social status of those who walk or sit within their space. So the dimensions of these umbrellas really matter.