Geraldine Tobe, a young Congolese artist, has spent two years devoted to a high-minded company. She seeks to awaken past souls through creation. She trusts that, having conjured up 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 ancetres, The spirit of the ancestors in Spanish, it is not a mere flow of inspiration between the classical 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 stark 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 goal, L´esprit des ancestors he 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 damned bucket. Powerful idea that, explains the Congolese, she has borrowed from the voices of the afterlife. Tobe affirms, with flesh and blood 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 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 (including Tobe) visited the European collections of African art in search of strong connections. Back in their countries (especially in French-speaking West Africa, but also Angola and South Africa), they reinterpreted the pieces that moved them with a modern look. Objects with which a sort of metaphysical spark arose. The result can be seen in an exhibition carousel in African and European spaces that will start next autumn.
Hans DeWolf, art history teacher at the Brussels Free University and curator of the project, highlights the importance of the artists having been inspired by the original works, the only ones capable of emanating –despite being placed 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 ancestors, qualifies 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
Tobe perceived as a child the devilish 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 the story of her, “that she did ancestral rites and that everyone called a witch.”
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 gave up on 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 imagination. But also, in the words of Tobe, “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, the 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 tangible (him), the Congolese artist and the Belgian curator form a curious tandem. They also embody the suture that little by little closes the postcolonial wounds. A white man and a black man rowing together, building newly designed bridges, breaking down walls of deafness and resentment. “We have both inherited the current situation. The circumstance arises 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 persist”, adds Tobe.
De Wolf has been embarking on initiatives for some time cultural diplomacy, most connecting Asia and Europe. With L´esprit des ancestors trusts that an increasingly agile intercontinental dialogue will contribute to the resurgence of patrimonial 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-level artists cry.” The term primitivism –which designates the influence of African art (also pre-Columbian or oceanic) on the European avant-garde– may be jarring today, but it served to conceptualize a reality evident in fundamental works such as The Avignon ladies. “Picasso himself he recognized the quality and depth of masks and other artifacts, which went beyond the very idea of modernity at that 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 delve into Christian sectarianism. “’Churches of awakening’ have flourished and their very powerful shepherds, who have mesmerized the Congolese with their obsession with evil, which they see everywhere,” he laments. Meanwhile, centuries-old beliefs are fading away, with a high risk of finding, in a few years, their only reflection in anthropology books. “We have to revalue our guardians of memory, our femmes sages [mujeres sabias]”, he claims.
love for fusion
does it hide L´esprit des ancestors a certain cultural essentialism? An implicit division between, shall we say, pure and contaminated Africans? Tobe responds by alluding to the example of a good friend of his: “He is a Muslim. For him, ancestral spirituality represents something very important that he easily reconciles with his Islamic beliefs.”
This fondness for fusion, so African, crystallizes in the diversity of approaches and formats that will host the exhibitions through which the project rotates. 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 KH Bamba he brings together clothing or Islamic prayer rugs in collages with a strong symbolic charge. the south african hello amira she plays and reflects –mixing the audiovisual and performance– with the multiplicity of her identities (she appears in multifaceted versions of herself) and the identity fracture that colonialism caused throughout Africa.
De Wolf highlights the proposal of Paul Alden Mvoutoukoulou. The Congolese claims, in the words of the curator of L´esprit des ancestors, “the concept of healing” while denouncing “the appropriation, by the pharmaceutical industry, of ancestral African knowledge”. Mvoutoukoulou has been inspired by the contrived division of the African Museum in Tervuren, near Brussels. “It’s a completely schizophrenic museum,” says De Wolf. And he explains why: “If one goes to the right, one finds the so-called ethnographic objects: masks, statues… If one goes 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 – for now, slowly – Europe is beginning to return to Africa is one of the great questions 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”, sums up Tobe.
As other times during the interview, De Wolf ends the conversation and appeals for caution: “The best gift for those who do not want to return would be, precisely, to return without further ado, today, a thousand pieces to Kinshasa, since anything could happen with them. We want to create a ground for reflection that creates the conditions for a return well done”. Again, Tobe refrains from commenting on the material: “Hans deals more with the technical aspects, I prefer to stay out of it.” 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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The spiritual awakening in African art that Europe refuses to return