The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. Included here are abstracts and recordings of the panels. In order to continue the conversations, written responses from Sarah Lookofsky, current Dean of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and former Associate Director of the International Program at MoMA, and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, will soon to be linked on this page. The seminar series was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow; Madeline Murphy Turner, Former Cisneros Institute Research Fellow for Latin America, and Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize seminars, of which Transversal Orientations Part II forms part. These seminars connect the broad research interests of the four groups and enable members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art.

Transversal Orientations Part II was conceived as a continuation of the conversations and possibilities raised in the 2021 seminar. Building on the ideas generated in this first iteration, which invoked transversalism’s potential for envisioning alliances and surpassing oppositions, this year’s seminar sought to explore and annotate the transversal as a methodology for working between geographical borders and beyond disciplinary and epistemological siloes, while also acknowledging the challenges of such an approach in our fractured, solipsistic present.

Some of the questions raised were: what can we learn by looking and speaking across geographies, histories, and epistemes? What patterns, knowledges, currents, and recognitions emerge when we interweave regional concepts and metaphors? What emancipatory worldviews arise or collapse at these unexpected intersections and gatherings? And, finally, how can we utilize a transversal perspective amid our present-day reality, in which right-wing nationalist leaders have come to power, borders have been fortified, and dialogical exchange often seems to be insufficient or even unattainable?

A term that originates in the field of mathematical geometry, the transversal has been taken up by thinkers to destabilize the ways in which relations are canonically accepted. Transversality “implies a desire in interdisciplinarity for knowledge and practices that are in some senses yet to be made proper.”¹ While aspiring towards the transformative potential of the transversal approach, this year’s seminar came to terms with the lived limitations and violences of categorically closed designations.

Comprised of four panels over two days, each panel featured a distinct pair of speakers  who engaged and acknowledged the limitations of transversalism in the historical present through issues of territory, colonial catastrophe, gender politics, and non-human ontologies.

Participants

Pamila Gupta, Daniel Lie, Sophio Medoidze, Nnenna Okore, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Isabel Sandoval, Diana Tamane, Daiara Tukano

Acknowledgements

The Fellows wish to thank the C-MAP Group Leaders (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Roxana Marcoci, Inés Katzenstein, Stuart Comer, and Cara Manes) and Jay Levenson, Marta Dansie, Michelle Kuo, Josh Siegel, Howard Deitch, Christopher Brown, Mitchell Leitschuh, and Hayna Garcia for their invaluable input and assistance.

Day 1

Panel 1: In Thick Co-Presence

This panel explores the co-dependence and kinship between humans and other-than-humans. Looking specifically at the co-constitutive relationship between care and harm, this panel relatedly investigates the roles that gender and sexuality play in the creation of shared ecologies. The panel title comes from Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which discusses the importance of eschewing the future in favor of present realities and challenges.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Daniel Lie’s work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Lie’s practice is their desire to develop works which decenter human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term “other-than-human beings,” such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that morph, decay, and evolve, Lie’s ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor of science and technology studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

Panel 2: Cycles and Reclamations

Cycles and Reclamations probes the relationship between art and social engagement pertaining to ecological crises and territory disputes. It asks, how do practitioners draw attention to these challenges by transversing professional and cultural silos? When working with the subjects of land and sea, how do creators engage with politics to call attention to the adversities we endure? Finally, what kinds of creative encounters can be proposed as solutions?

Nnenna Okore is an artist-researcher-teacher who uses artistic practice, pedagogy, and social engagements to address ecological issues. She has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, art making, and an awareness of current environmental issues. Working largely with eco-based materials, Okore uses food-based bioplastic materials to create delicate works of art that engender dialogue about waste reduction and sustainable practices in art making. Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award and Creative Victoria Award from Australia.

Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio – Duhigô, known as Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano Indigenous people – Yé’pá Mahsã, Eremiri Húusiro Parameri clan of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, was born in São Paulo. She is an artist, activist, educator, and communicator who graduated in visual arts and master in human rights from the University of Brasília. She researches the right to memory and truth of Indigenous peoples. From 2015 to 2021 she was the coordinator of Rádio Yandê, the first indigenous Internet-radio in Brazil. Recently, she won the 2021 PIPA Online Award, organized by the PIPA Institute, the most renowned Brazilian visual arts prize. She studies the culture, history, and traditional spirituality of its people together with their family. She lives in Brasília.

Day 2

Panel 3: (Im)possible Returns

Taking up the call for critical (art) geography to think about the complexity of communities, and an awareness of the issue of scales when we discuss and employ a transversal vision, this panel draws on the transversal as an intense interdisciplinary mode whereby different topologies, for instance, colonial or post-Soviet migration, come into communication, bringing newfound understanding and literacy to the consequences of imperialism.

Pamila Gupta is a professor at WiSER, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring, and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa. She is the author of two monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014) and Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (2019).

Diana Tamane (b. 1986, Latvia/Estonia). In the artist’s works, family albums, documents, and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and how a complex political history and presence intertwines with the needs and dreams of ordinary people. Tamane graduated from the Tartu Art College, the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, and HISK post-academic program, Ghent. In 2020, with APE, she published Flower Smuggler, which has received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and been shortlisted in the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Panel 4: Rituals and Rapture

Joyous, occult, or banal, rituals are a part of our everyday lives and imaginations. This panel explores how rituals – religious, social, daily, or otherwise – are depicted in art and film. In particular, the significance of gender in rituals will be discussed to shore up how supposedly fixed borders (material, bodily, territorial, epistemological) can be crossed.

This panel featured screenings of film and moving image works by Sophio Medoidze and Isabel Sandoval that have not been reproduced here. Watch the pre-recorded conversation between Medoidze, Sandoval, and C-MAP Fellows Inga Lace and Wong Binghao in the video link below.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at the OUTPOST gallery, Ermes Ermes, LUX, CAC Bretigny, Serpentine Cinema (Peckhamplex), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tate Modern (upcoming), and others. She was a recipient of Tyneside cinema’s Projections commissions and Feature Expanded development and Sub-ti awards for her latest film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!). A collection of Medoidze’s short stories, Bastard Sun, will be published in 2022.

Recognized by the Criterion Collection as “one of the most exciting and multitalented filmmakers on the indie scene,” Isabel Sandoval has made three dramatic features, including Señorita, Apparition and the Independent Spirit Award–nominated Lingua Franca. Her films have played at major international festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, which won a development prize at the 2021 Berlinale. She recently directed the FX limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book, starring Andrew Garfield.

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While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands. —Michel-Rolph Trouillot¹

Immersed in Saigon-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s four-channel screen projection The Spectres of Ancestors Becoming (2019), near physical form and presence emerge with the stirring narrative conveyed by the compelling voices of men, women, and children who share a common but little-known transnational history—that of Senegal’s Vietnamese brides and mothers. Nguyen’s narrative-cum-dialogue magisterially transforms Dakar’s RAW Material Company into a dark alcove, a perception field where the fabulations of Senegal’s Vietnamese community reach us from different corners of the room. The cross-generational dialogue is made to brush one’s shoulders and cheeks, raising those fine, emotional hairs that seem to come to life with spectral narratives. This powerful, multi-prismatic, individual yet plural hymn—a Senegalese-Vietnamese “community voice”²—emanates from Nguyen’s longtime local collaborators: Vietnamese women, their African partners, their Métis children, and their once-distant in-laws. Nguyen’s narrative traces the fine crisscross, slender colonial trajectories of peoples displaced, the threads invisibly stretched across the French Imperial map by colonial administrators. Unsettling and displacing cartography, Nguyen attends to stories of south-south solidarity, forbidden love, conflicted departures, slow arrivals, Creole synthesis, and generational resilience.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s elegy The Specter of Ancestors Becoming recalls the in/visibilized transnational solidarities and intimacies forged despite colonial surveillance, abuse, violence, and death during France’s nine-year guerrilla war known as the First Indochina War (1946–54). At the root of his project is a group of men known as the tirailleurs sénégalais, or Senegalese riflemen—colonial troops not only of Senegalese origin³—who fought for France in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the colonialist’s last claim for power, and their lost (and found) Vietnamese sweethearts, loves, and wives.⁴ As scholar and historian Sarah Zimmerman has noted, “[The Indochina War] was the first large-scale anti-colonial war where evidence suggests that the tirailleurs sénégalais questioned their role in French colonialism.”⁵

The Tirailleurs

As early as 1946, camps in West Africa and France began preparing West African troops to participate in late colonial “counterinsurgency” operations in the Annam and Tonkin regions of Indochina. The first troops, known as the tirailleurs sénégalais, arrived in Hanoi and Haiphong in 1947, despite their effort and contribution to World War I and II going unrecognized.⁶ To render the service attractive after the two great wars, the French passed laws converting African “volunteers” to conscripts by the end of their first year of service. Intermediaries, known as chefs de cantons and chefs de cercles, produced new ”volunteers,” accumulating favors and monetary bonuses in exchange for their coercion of African youths. As part of their campaign to win men over, the French colonial military funded a range of public spectacles, such as “parachutist demonstrations, photo expositions, speeches by veterans, and film screenings.”⁷ In light of this, many young men considered a career in the army as a means to secure economic and social independence. Part of the promise of an ameliorated life included attending the École des enfants de troupes (which, in reality, did no more than indoctrinate servicemen into military order and teach them basic French) and the École militaire préparatoire africaine, or military school which offered technical training in areas of great interest, such as radio operation, auto mechanics, and French language skills. In addition to this, room, board, and tuition were sponsored by the military. But most tirailleurs serving in the First Indochina War did not attend these schools, and instead trained for a mere five weeks at a military camp in Southern France.⁸ Rather than providing them with important skills for field operations in Indochina—particularly, and key to survival, water operations and swimming—the military placed greater emphasis on French comprehension and literary skills. As such, “volunteers” were ill-prepared for the challenges they faced, and the soggy territory that varied greatly from the dry Sahel and West African Savannah they were used to.⁹ Many deaths went unrecorded, but it is estimated that some 20,700 French nationals, “of all origins,” including the “Metropolitan colonial army” died and that 22,000 were wounded; African troops coming from French “North Africa” and “Black Africa” accounted for 15,200 deaths and 13,900 wounded.¹⁰

Optimizing the fact that the French did not recuperate the bodies of dead soldiers, some tirailleurs crossed the enemy line, joining the Vietminh. Aware of the fact that the “enemy” did not execute their prisoners of war, but instead put them to work, others defected, choosing to bide their time doing hard labor, which was no different from the work they did for the French, until they were freed.

Many—including those who swore allegiance to France—fell in love, transgressing the political divisions and chronological boundaries of war.

We fought as best we could in Indochina but in the end the VietMinh (sic) were too strong for us. They were fighting to be free and we were fighting because we were told to do so by our officers. There is a difference. — Goulli Zo, Tougan, Burkina Faso¹¹

Love across Division

Such is the case of Lan and Waly, the two protagonists in Nguyen’s first episode, written by Anne Marie Niane, one of the artist’s local collaborators, who herself left Vietnam at age five.¹² Niane worked with Nguyen to “rememory”¹³ the dialogue between her forebears, dialogues that, in Justin Phan’s words, “could have taken place, but never did.”¹⁴ Married for six years with three children, the couple, who Nguyen revisits by way of analepsis, find themselves at an anti-colonial crossroads raised by the French whirlwind evacuation upon defeat.¹⁵ In their stiflingly hot, cinematic kitchen, within earshot of their young children, husband and wife debate whether to take up the French exit ticket offered them aboard the Marseille-bound SS Pasteur.¹⁶ They have settled on this eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, or so it appears, for the room exudes a warmth and hominess, a care redoubled by Lan’s slow, ritual washing of the family’s dishes. Understandably reluctant and anxious, Lan takes issue with Waly’s ultimatum to abandon Vietnam with her children, or remain alone. She is trepidatious, torn: What position will she hold as a Vietnamese woman and wife in Dakar? What names will her beloved children be called, knowing the treatment already meted out to her by French colonial occupiers?¹⁷ Waly, in turn, cannot fathom betraying the ambiguous but strong bonds tying him to France. Staying would be a betrayal, to which Lan jabs, “So you prefer to betray me?” This is a clash of parental viewpoints and affiliations the couple will revisit and replay, time and again, and a haunting tension Nguyen and his collaborators jointly stage to recall the colonial conundrum that families, forged across colonial and color lines, ultimately encountered.

Orality (the word spoken) and aurality (the word as it [re]sounds) are privileged sites in Nguyen’s oeuvre. Some of us hear ghosts, others of us address them, not—and here I paraphrase Karen Barad—to entertain or reconstruct a narrative of what once was, but “to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future).”¹⁸ On choosing to have the writers of the script read their dialogues on one screen, while actors ventriloquize them to their re-staging on the other, without both screens ever entirely existing in full view of a somewhat dis/oriented audience in the center of the room, negotiating their angle of vision in this changing horizontal field, Nguyen cultivates the “force of the conjunction,”¹⁹ a variable space-time juxtaposition, playing with lip sync that allows the spectral (and unsaid) to slip through and take hold.

It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it. —Jacques Derrida²⁰

History—the stories we tell—is made of omissions and silences, and is never replete, never black, white, or as clear-cut or conclusive as the patriarchal victors of war will have us believe. Not exclusively contained in the “ordered narrative of books,” or hushed archival corridors, history as novelist Alex Halberstadt reminds us, is an “affliction that spread[s] from parent to child, sister to brother, husband to wife.”²¹ As displaced peoples and their born and unborn children can attest, history lives through us without our consent or even our knowledge.

Observed from the margins, Nguyen compels viewers to consider memory, and how life in revolution took place beyond official, state-dug trenches and mute archival records. As a matter of fact, despite French opposition to relationships between originaires, Senegalese (and French) troops cohabited with the Vietnamese, building ties of trade, anti-colonial solidarity, intimacy, and love. Senegalese men lived married lives in Indochina. Some lost contact with their partners and children when transferred to another combat zone; others lived side by side in military family housing throughout the conflict; many extended their tours of duty in order to file and receive paperwork validating their marriages to local women.²² The end of the war separated and ruined families. In some cases, Indochinese families pressured their daughters to remain in Indochina while their partners claimed paternal rights to their children; in others, children accompanied their fathers to West Africa, definitively losing contact with their mothers. In certain stances, Indochinese women delivered their children to French social programs.

Included in the Dakarese iteration of the installation²³ are constellations of local family albums—tender and intimate betokening snapshots of time, tradition, and togetherness—marriage, the growth of families and communities, communion as sharing of food.²⁴ Retrieved from intimate troves and entrusted to Nguyen, RAW, and its visitors, these testimonies call on our capacity to hold and truly care for the memories of resilience and resistance embedded in the colonial betwixt.

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On a good day, the work of an art historian and curator begins with a distinctive kind of quiet, slow, intense, haptic engagement that the medium of painting irrevocably invokes. One revels in the play of color, composition, and surface, which points, in a push and pull, to one’s locatedness as an outside observer. Such is the grip and enchantment of losing oneself in the powerful historical and pictorial folds of a gripping painting. The delirium of this love affair also calls for a certain amount of sobriety and analysis; turning the canvas around, looking for the clues, utterances, and telltale signs that whisper its life story—its time and location of making, title, travels, ownership, and perhaps, through a tear or droplet, some of its misfortunes.  

Executed by polyhedral and prolific Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes (1924–2012) in the watershed year of 1973,¹ the verso of Omenagem a Amílcar Cabral (Tribute to Amílcar Cabral; fig. 2) discloses an emotional outcry on the death of revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral. Just a few months after his meeting in October 1972 with African American organizations in New York City, Cabral was killed by a group of armed men—Portuguese agents who, in the early hours of the morning of January 20, 1973, took his life at point-blank range.²

A founder of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Independence Party for Guinea and Cape Verde, or PAIGC) in 1956, and one of only four university graduates from Guinea-Bissau, Cabral traveled across the country between 1952 and 1954 as a young agronomist, gaining profound knowledge of the land and its people, which he prioritized in his intertwined, decolonially-minded political and cultural practice. Under his leadership, the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde galvanized into one fighting force against Portuguese colonialism. Cabral was aware of the large number of plots to assassinate him,³ but was firm in his belief that the anticolonial struggle would continue without him. As he stated in an interview in October 1971: “If I die tomorrow, nothing will change in the ineluctable evolution of the fight of my people and their victory. . . . We will have dozens, hundreds of Cabrals in our people. Our nation will find a militant to continue the work.”⁴

Expressed in the artist’s expansive and distinctive cursive handwriting, in an inimitable mélange of Portuguese and Italian (the two languages that Lopes made her own), one reads the following illuminating declaration: “Cabral has died physically, not only in Guinea, but in all of Africa, in all the world! But he lives on . . . forever!” Splayed across the wooden stretcher, Lopes also provided an explicit instruction to herself—as well as to her dealers, family, and stewards—that this work should not be sold. The different pens she used for her palimpsestic inscriptions along the wooden stretcher signal how she returned to this painting time and again, how meaningful it was to her—and how she wished to see it included in her historiography.⁵

Lopes had been living as an exile in Europe for approximately nine years when she painted Tribute. She had fled Mozambique in 1964 to accept a bursary offered to her by Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation.⁶ Published in 1964, Luís Bernardo Honwana’s now-classic short story “Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso!” (“We Killed Mangy-Dog”)—a trailblazer in anticolonial short stories from Southern Africa, which included fragments of drawings by Lopes and her actual  handprint⁷—had just been banned, and the two found themselves in the crosshairs of the colonial police.⁸ Prior to this, she was part of a group of artists who took an anticolonial stance, communicating their withdrawal from the 1963 Bienal de São Paulo, believing that she would be representing a Portuguese province, not Mozambique, in the “Ultramar”⁹ (fig. 5).¹⁰ Leaving behind the stability of a teaching post as well as her twin boys, Lopes left Mozambique in 1964 to study ceramics in Lisbon under Querubim Lapa (Portuguese, 1925–2016), until another opportunity emerged in Rome to study classical art.

Despite her work having been the object of two major exhibitions in Lisbon (in 1973 and 1979, respectively),¹¹ Lopes was never represented by a Portuguese (or, for that matter Italian) commercial gallery—a reality that begs further engagement and unpacking—bearing the brunt of building and maintaining a career as a Black, “third-world” visual artist and mother. Against the odds, she harnessed her innermost energies to produce a singular oeuvre that contributes to our understanding of the emergence of modernism in Mozambique as a nationalist aspiration. Arguably inspired by her first husband, poet Virgílio de Lemos (Mozambican, 1929–2013), Lopes significantly bent her European expressionist training to her African idiom, producing an initial body of works that exposed the depredations of Portuguese colonialism and fascism. Refusing social mores, aesthetic atomization, and capitalist tethers, she painted, sculpted, and contributed to the nationalist and pan-African cause and aesthetic, producing extraordinary abstract and geometric works in her later years, opening her home to the Mozambican cause, and giving her work away freely to the friends and causes she believed in most.

An instance of what Italian critic Claudio Crescentini has termed a “phenomenology of commitment,”¹² according to her Italian widower and founder of the Bertina Lopes Archive in Rome,¹³ Tribute is likely to have been executed during a stay in Lisbon,¹⁴ possibly to visit one of her sisters, Custódia Lopes, who in 1973, formed part of the 10th legislature of the Estado Novo (under António de Oliveira Salazar) as a congresswoman for Mozambique. Despite existing on opposite ends of the political spectrum—Bertina, a cautious socialist and nationalist, and her sister, Custódia, an incongruous representative of the colonial government—the siblings maintained close contact, and Custódia, who traveled the world, always kept her artist sister in mind. As a matter of fact, while residing in Paris, Custódia would, in a gesture denoting some ambivalence toward the colonial regime, send postcards and reproductions of Picasso’s work to Bertina, then in Lourenço Marques. Bertina in turn used these images in her revolutionary lessons at the General Machado all-girls school.¹⁵

Measuring 55 1/8 by 74 13/16 inches (140 x 190 cm), Tribute is dominated by a thick, deep impastoed crimson background and a central messianic, totemic figure with outstretched arms that reach across the painting, embracing an abstracted, flattened Black crowd that peoples the lower half of the canvas.¹⁶ In the periphery, four executioners in pith helmets, spread out in menacing pairs on each side, are rendered in profile with glaring eyes and snarling mouths. These figures recall the Portuguese secret police, or PIDE, who not only surveilled the artist while she was living in Mozambique, having considered her a person of interest, but also, and of direct import to this work, recruited Cabral’s assassins from its Tarrafal prison. A haunting presence in her life, these men populate several of Lopes’s anticolonial works from the period. Such is the case of the multiple soldiers in Senza Titolo (Rappresaglia) (Untitled [Retaliation], 1963; fig. 6) or Cantiga do Batelão (Boat Song, 1963; fig. 7), which is dedicated to her friend, nationalist poet José Craveirinha (Mozambican, 1922–2003), who was arrested by the PIDE briefly in 1964 and for a longer period in 1968. Boat Song portrays the arrested poet, his arms raised in the air, surrounded by a group of helmets. Around the captive poet’s neck, Lopes painted a large luminous tooth tied to a bright red string, arguably a reference to Craveirinha’s poem on the dilemma of vengeance: “Olho por olho / Eu ou tu / Beijo por beijo / Unha por unha / Milho por milho / Nós ou eles / Eles ou nós / Dente por dente / bala por bala / E . . . poetas cem por cento no exterior deste dilemma / ou Pátria ou Nada!”(“An eye for an eye / Me or you / A kiss for a kiss / A nail for a nail / Mealie meal for mealie meal / us or them / Them or us / A tooth for a tooth / A bullet for a bullet / And . . . poets beyond this dilemma / Homeland or Nothing!”¹⁷ In her later Omaggio per la morte di Picasso (Homage on the Death of Picasso, 1974; fig. 8), three of these signature figures of repression appear on the left, on the heels of a group of supplicating women.¹⁸ Their ominous presence also features in a painting by her peer Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (Mozambican, 1936–2011) entitled Grito de Liberdade (The Cry for Freedom, 1973), which, accessioned into the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 2020, is also dedicated to Cabral.¹⁹ Ngwenya, unlike Lopes, has portrayed the soldiers not only as observers, but also as infiltrates, translating social life in Mozambique at the time when no one could be trusted.

With Tribute, Lopes transmutes the body of Cabral. No longer a man, he is risen, a forebear who looks down on us from a vantage point above. Cabral is the purveyor of an essential, vital force that we witness in the radiating, thick lines that surround the central auratic figure. Arguably, Lopes drank from the negritudinist cup in her homage,²⁰ imbibed via “Black Blood” by poet Noémia de Sousa (Mozambican, 1926–2002), who like Lopes, frequented the Associação Africana.²¹ Neither imitation nor representation, Lopes’s translation aimed to synthetically render Cabral as a syncretic ancestor, ultimately presentifying him as a messianic apparition. Masked, the totemic figure is a liminal performer, moving between spaces, between the community and its outskirts, the living and the dead. The threshold that is crossed and the fusion that is achieved allows for communion between the living onlookers and the deceased, between African and Christian iconography, bridging the chasm between the deceased and his people.

Like it was for her modernist, nationalist peers, poets José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, and coconspirator Luís Bernardo Honwana (fig. 1), art for Lopes was part of identity formation, reconnecting the self to her antepassados, or those who came before us. In the battle between assimilation²² and re-africanization,²³ it would be Africa that would rise and take primacy—a resurrection embodied and communicated by Lopes in Tribute for coming generations.

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The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize a seminar among all four groups that connects their broad research interests and enables members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art. Hinged on the transversal as a means to engage with and envision new networks and ways of thinking about modern and contemporary art, the 2021 edition offered an exploration and interrogation of the intertwining of multiple coeval life-worlds through concepts of “extending across.”

Over the course of two weeks, transversalism was offered and considered as a third, enabling term. To transverse is to surpass bipolar socio-historically constructed oppositions such as traditional and modern, male and female, man and nature, local and foreign, theory and practice, etc. Rather than adopting a center-periphery dyad or adhering to “mainstream” canonical standards, changing our perspective of looking at art opens up a way to account for different philosophies and nuances of comparison. This seminar series made reference to the methodology of “minor” transnationalism, to think and relate along other scales of knowability.

In addition, the seminar considered what it means to penetrate, exceed, and undermine geopolitical borders that have been set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe; accessible and inaccessible; to construct an “us” and a “them.” A border, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

By considering the transversal in its temporal, geographic and/or directional dimensions, as simultaneity, the seminar series elucidated the implications of the adoption of this operative term to art history, the museum, exhibitions, collections, philosophy and/or artistic practice. In doing this, new relational terms, stories, and people can be thought of together again.

Panel 1: Looking Sideways

This panel examined the processes of migration and contra-flows connecting regions while examining their artistic legacies. Looking at particular geographies, artists, and their stories across time, it aimed to challenge mainstream conceptions of the directionality of exchange within modern and contemporary art. How can minor positions weave a fabric of their own links directly, bypassing the centers of power and information? How can these transnational shared stories be acknowledged and told in a context that recognizes their complexity within history and display systems largely guided by national or global presentations?

Introduced by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and moderated by Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Chairat Polmuk, Lecturer, Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. You can read it here.

Panel 2: Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire

This panel was organized around the idea of the transversal as transfer between disciplines, geographies, the performer, audience and participants, and/or the professional and nonprofessional. By looking at and considering the “repertoire” and acts of transfer through, for instance, translation and embodied dialogue, “hidden” processes of transnational contact and local histories, new cartographies, and unseen relations come into evidence.

Introduced by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA and moderated by Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Laine Kristberga, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Philisophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia, Riga. You can read it here.

Panel 3: Entangled Terrains

This panel is the outcome of an invitation to Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective, and Chie Ikeya to reconsider or remap regions. Thinking about people who cross borders and borders that cross people, the session presented perspectives that acknowledge multidirectional histories of migration, colonialism, and the destabilization of current geographical perimeters. Panelists were tasked with reconsidering territorial logic and place vis-a-vis the mobility of individuals; how our relationship with the inhabited terrain might reformulate imposed delimitations. In this session, borderlands and the spaces in-between were examined, and the manifold ways in which art and visual culture entangle terrain.

Introduced by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA and moderated by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. You can read it in English here and in Portuguese here.

Panel 4: The Politics of Position

This panel explored the particular conditions of locality and the productive tensions between local and global contexts. How do the languages, values, and histories of art and its attendant sociopolitical conditions differ from place to place? Can they be translated, communicated, and made legible, if at all, on a global scale, and what are the stakes of this transfer? Invited speakers discussed the specificities of their local or regional positions or punctuated a pristine map of universality. These discussions aimed to generate understandings of art and culture that are not uniformly appraised and consumed, as well as a sensitivity and humility when encountering art from unfamiliar contexts.

Introduced by Inés Katzenstein, Director, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA and moderated by Madeline Murphy Turner, C-MAP Latin America/Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, MoMA; Ph.D. Candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Response by Riánsares Lozano de la Pola, Researcher and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City. You can read it in English here and in Spanish here.

View the past event page here. 

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Nancy Dantas: Azu Nwagbogu, I would like to begin by congratulating you on maintaining and sustaining the Africa Artists’ Foundation over the past fifteen years. Can you tell us a bit about the foundation? What have the last fifteen years been like and what challenges are you faced with as an organization in COVID times?

Azu Nwagbogu: Thank you. It’s very kind of you to notice the effort and commitment it takes to run and sustain an organization like AAF. The time has flown by…

The COVID situation changed those parameters of AAF that we had taken for granted. It called a timeout on proceedings (to borrow the basketball parlance). In this interregnum we can observe more deeply and make adjustments. It has allowed for introspection and a re-evaluation of the modalities of our activities. More time for research, but equally for thinking of new infrastructure. Before COVID we were already rethinking AAF. LagosPhoto was cannibalizing AAF! The power, immediacy and distribution of photography and if you like the success of the festival and the desire for global-event-economy art-related situations with its celebratory position also brought on a weightiness and some complexities. 

But about the ‘Covidian’ upheaval! If one thinks about it, on a certain intellectual and visceral level, there is a certain preparedness for the current dystopic pandemic condition we find ourselves in at the moment. The dominant trope with African contemporary and diaspora artists over the last decade, or perhaps even longer, has been an obsession with utopic and dystopic futures. Now that we have arrived at this moment, there is an almost tangible anticipation that change is imminent and that our activities at this moment could catalyze this change. Hence Generator.

ND: As I understand it, you are currently working with Clémentine Deliss on a long-term platform, Generator, whereby you will be thinking about and through collections and artefacts towards restitution. As part of the Lagos Photography Festival, you have commissioned the migratory artists’ cooperative Birds of Knowledge to design an online and interactive museum. This is one of the many manifestations that Generator will take. Has the collective started work on this platform? How is it being envisioned? When can we expect to see the fruits of this collaboration?

AN: Generator was devised by Clémentine Deliss and myself as a new infrastructure for an arts educational institution of the future. With Generator, we think about people, objects, experiences and their trajectories. Each dimension of Generator aims to provide a new frame for global creative thinking on how to best access, research, restitute and remediate Africa’s cultural heritage for the continent and beyond. That is how we also developed the concept of the Home Museum, by starting with the most intimate, domestic parameters in order to speak about a wider concern around cultural heritage and its repatriation. Clémentine’s students at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts set up a new research cooperative named Birds of Knowledge. The members are artists and social designers whose immediate origins hail from Nigeria, Tunisia, Cameroon, China, Turkey, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Germany. They have devised different ways of engaging with the diversity of the Home Museum’s individual contributions. There are nearly 300 entries—­from over 25 African countries and many others ranging from Saudi Arabia to China. We have commissioned Birds of Knowledge to build the actual online architecture for LagosPhoto20’s Home Museum.

We are working both on conceptual and infrastructural issues right now. We ask ourselves, what do we need to do to make the shift from an event-led economy to a new format of venue that is sustainable, responsible and experimental while practicing a decolonial and inclusive approach? We see restitution as an ecological question related to designs for survival, but also to play and forms of social living. For this reason, we broach the question from a trans-disciplinary perspective, crossing know-how and art forms, and generating trusted and stimulating dialogues. We want to help to empower young artists to engineer new models for social design by thinking through historical collections and traditional artefacts. This is something that Clémentine Deliss tested out at length during her directorship of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt (see “The Metabolic Museum”, Hatje Cantz, 2020). 

We aim to bring together an international and symbiotic faculty of virtual artists-in-residence, curators and other creatives. Students can study and connect through the online-campus of the “Generator Compound”. Digital visitors and researchers can use Generator to meet, talk, look, think, read, become inspired, and address their vocations. Online courses are based on providing instruction in practical and organizational skills as well as engaging with decolonial and post-ethnographic approaches to cultural theory, history, design, photography and art practice.

The start point for our current intervention with the Home Museum and Generator was actually based on the work we undertook between January and February 2020 when I invited Clémentine Deliss to research the situation on restitution in Nigeria. Together with AAF staff, Olayinka Sangotoye and Ugochukwu Emeberiodo, we went on a research trip visiting municipal museums in Nigeria. 

CD: Digital inclusion is central to the development of Generator. By creating the Home Museum, we are working toward a new kind of digital architecture for museums! It’s easy to fall back onto the classic floor plan when you do an online museum. So this experiment will hopefully lead to a number of different ways for us to manipulate the digital and make it both inclusive and relevant to a wide audience. Meanwhile, I am very curious about the changes in museum architecture and new buildings for culture that may come about as a result of COVID-19. We know for sure that we need to rethink our use of museum space, prioritise other parts of these venues too, such as the storage spaces, perhaps turning them into new spaces for investigating the vast collections held by museums in Europe. Such access can lead to fantastic research and retrieval.  

AN: This is a great place to end. Perhaps I could use this opportunity to mention the two guest curators working with Clémentine Deliss and I on the Home Museum: Oluwatoyin Sogbesan and Asya Yaghmurian. Oluwatoyin has been working on inclusive participation with museums for years now and has an approach to learning that incorporates WhatsApp and the common communication tools we use today. Asya Yaghmurian is an Armenian curator now based in Berlin who was instrumental in the last Ljubljana Biennial of Slavs and Tatars, and who worked with Clémentine on the project she curated for Hello World. Revising a Collection (Hamburger Bahnhof, 2018). Asya complements the position of Oluwatoyin, so that both reach out from different perspectives toward a new online reality. Interestingly, we all have this common history of working with existing museum collections as I too curated a chapter for Hello World along with Sven Beckstette.

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