Carlos Quijon, Jr.: A typical entry point to the political in art is representation. I am interested in how you conceptualize the political and ideas of representation in relation to your practice, particularly in terms of your chosen materials and modalities. For one, this question relates to how you are also very embedded in activism, and most of your works use the forms and materialities of activist paraphernalia—banners, placards, etc. These are forms that are not necessarily made to last. Usually they are made from whatever materials are available and intended to be site-specific and very agile. For the other, there is the notion of address. We can think about the place of Port Dickson in Malaysia in your work, which is, in a sense, a hyperlocal site. What do you think about that in relation to, for example, the legibility of the political in your work? This question of address further opens up to the category of contemporary art. How do you reconcile your practice’s specificity of address with the wider circulation and citations of global contemporary art? Is this something that you also try to speak to in your work?

Sharon Chin: One of the features of doing activism here [in Port Dickson]—extremely local political action—is that so much depends on being around. The more I participate in the art world, the more I’m in a state of hypermobility that puts me at odds with staying local, or as I prefer to say it, being around. I’m away for a time, and I’ll miss things—that’s normal. But if it keeps happening, then the relationships that have built up from me being around start to adjust to the reality of my intermittent presence. And it’s not just neighbors and townspeople, it’s the land. The animals and plants, the mangrove trees, the rocks on the beaches . . . they forget my name, they lose my number. 

This sounds like a one-way ticket to burnout at both ends. But spending time on the land has helped me understand that endurance can look less like individual struggle and more like collective ongoingness. When I saw the first green shoots in a mangrove forest devastated by an oil spill, I knew that crabs and snails had probably come back under the mud and were doing their thing. At some point, if we’re lucky, the feedback loops of mutually engaged agents in an ecosystem reach a stage where they take on a life of their own. I try to remember that and focus my activism on multiplying relations between neighbors, surrounding neighborhoods, local authorities, and refinery executives. Broadcasting online is not central at all to the strategy, but it is an important tool to have. The goal is to create social connections that are dense enough to produce emergent outcomes—and to reduce reliance on any single agent.  

What I call “going on the land” is just spending time in the landscape that I call home. Being with the land, hiking, whatever. I’ll admit, in the beginning (a few years ago), I would go with a proposal or grant deadline chasing my heels, and look to the land to provide—I don’t know—content or insight or something I could use. But in recent years, I’m not searching for anything when I’m out on the land. It’s more like a leisurely day with a favorite person—brunch, a second coffee, evening drinks. That kind of pleasurable intimacy and companionship, always finding something new in their dear, familiar face. A relationship defined by long and stimulating ongoingness.  

Then there’s the oil refinery next door. That’s an ongoing relationship too. It was established by Shell in the 1960s and taken over by a Chinese multinational in 2018. The first few years of the new management were not bad—they engaged residents in good faith and actively tried to mitigate the pollution from the refinery. But that changed when the C-suite turned over, and the last three years have been like living next to Mordor. I need to be around all the time, otherwise we lose momentum in the neighborhood organizing—a fact that’s at odds with the mobility and visibility requirements of participating in the art world.

A similar ongoingness has been playing out in my practice since 2018, when Creatures of Near Kingdoms came out. It’s a book of short stories about fantastic animals and plants, set in Southeast Asia. My partner Zedeck Siew wrote the stories, and I made a series of linocuts and repeating patterns to illustrate each one (fig. 1). I’ve iterated some of the animal forms in the book into a number of projects over the years: enlarging them into placards for a climate protest in Kuala Lumpur (2019; figs. 2–5) and photographing them as shadow puppets lit by the refinery flare for Creatures on the Move (2022–24; figs. 6–8). An upcoming show in 2026 will bring me closer to realizing my vision of a shadow-puppet play, but it will also be about animals disappearing from the scene, leaving humans alone on the stage we created and in the spotlight we’re so unwilling to share. Where have they gone? I want to find out—I will follow them.    

To your point about how these conditions have shaped the formal aspects of my work, I’d say I’m conscious of playing with a certain lack of polish in presentation. I am familiar with the grammar of the gallery or museum space. I’m not sure these are necessarily political choices given the context, but they are certainly aesthetic ones. For example, wheat-pasting poster images directly to the gallery walls for Creatures on the Move, as opposed to using light boxes or getting wall stickers professionally installed (figs. 9, 10). The technique is messy and laborious and finicky enough that I have to be on-site to do it myself (with assistants). But the glitches and wrinkles left behind exude the warmth of humans working in space and time, which I believe can be perceived by the person looking. How much of this is just compensating for my lack of technical ability or resources to create high-definition finishes? It doesn’t matter. I’m an artist as well as an activist, and how good or bad my politics are is not a stand-in for the formal choices I make in a gallery space. It’s probably more important to remember that the reverse is also true.   

CQJr: My next question is a bit more self-reflexive. I am wondering if there’s some anxiety about these forms being cannibalized by the art world. In relation to, for example, more performative, ephemeral, temporary forms and how these kinds of materials and forms have been co-opted by the contemporary art world into mere spectacle or contemporary currency. I was wondering if you have this anxiety? 

These kinds of forms can easily be co-opted by contemporary art into abstract values of specificity or timeliness. Or if there’s no anxiety, I am wondering if you’ve been thinking about ways to prevent this co-optation. I think, off the top of my head, that your idea of “anti-polish” is something like that. Do you have these kinds of strategies for how to participate in the contemporary art world without having the political edge of such forms blunted by it?

SC: In contemporary art spaces, staging—what is allowed to be visible—is everything. I am constantly aware of that. In many ways people can only perceive what is put in front of them. In terms of the reality of living next to an oil refinery, I’m not interested in representing my activism work in a gallery space because 1) I have yet to be moved by seeing a spreadsheet in a museum, and 2) it doesn’t help the activism. 

Although I have been tempted sometimes to do that because there’s a legitimacy to all that documentation, I’m averse to most archive-based artworks in a gallery setting, where there are vitrines, diagrams, files of documents to dig through, books on a shelf, etc. And I understand it’s a whole museological thing. What’s interesting is that evidence-gathering has been crucial in our neighborhood’s struggle against refinery pollution. There’s so much data collection and building paper trails for every stage of engagement. Then the material has to be translated, i.e., made legible, to various agents. In fact, CCTV footage of the refinery’s flare stack has done the most so far to convince both the public and the authorities of the harm that’s being done to us by industrial emissions (figs. 11–12, 19–23). 

But when it comes to an exhibition, I’m not thinking about that kind of legibility at all. I’m concerned about how these empirical data are translated into questions of form, of space. I’m concerned with what’s going to seduce the person who’s looking, because that’s why I look at art: to be entranced and transported into the heart of something. 

The anxiety about being co-opted, I feel . . . no, I don’t. Maybe I used to, but these days, there’s a confidence in being able to step into different spaces and contexts. It’s funny—I used to have more anxiety about it when I made art about national politics, like Weeds/Rumpai  (2013–15), a series of weeds painted on political party flags collected during election time (figs. 13–14), or Mandi Bunga/Flower Bath (2013), a performance inspired by the Bersih movement for clean and fair elections, in which I had a hundred people take a flower bath with me in public (figs. 15–18).

I think doing activism at the local level has made me more confident about stepping into and addressing the particularities of any given space. So if we’re in the contemporary art space, I’m in control of what goes in, what is staged, and importantly, what is refused. Sometimes it helps to think about being like a river (although I find it vaguely obnoxious or cringeworthy—who do I think I am, Bruce Lee?), because that means there’s no place I won’t go, but also, I’m just passing through; I won’t be trapped, and there’s nothing to fear. 

Whatever the work or project is, it’s made to be carried into different contexts. There is a lightness and contingency built into the form that helps it catch whatever current is available. All this stuff needs to find its way back, too, to the place that gave it meaning—that’s its momentum. That circulation is very important, because it’s how you don’t get trapped by prestige or authority or the need to impress. The gallery or institution is not where things end. It shouldn’t end there. It’s just another stop.

CQJr: I think this also speaks to how you foreground ideas of distribution and circulation and their relationship to the political. I feel like the one thing about forms, particularly “activist forms,” like the effigy, the agitprop, the zines, is that all of them that are easy to produce and distribute, easy to let go of, easy to shed off, easy to keep. So, I think that’s also something interesting about your practice, how that formal genealogy also informs or is thought through your works. There is a keen attentiveness to this across what you do.

My last question is in relation to the categories. I feel like the categories always matter because with the categories comes currency and visibility. What do you think about art and activism? How do you see, in your practice in particular, the relationship between art and activism? And I want to dovetail this question to what you mentioned before as the seduction of form.  

I feel like that was something interesting when we were doing the project with Ilham Gallery in Malaysia. Of course your work there was about Port Dickson and the effects of the refinery on the community, but you created wayang puppets of animals found in and around Port Dickson. This was the translation that you mentioned earlier, and it was so evident in that project. You don’t lose sight of the politics of the refinery, but it’s not like your activist persona will be the same as your artist figure. I am wondering if you can talk more about the relationship between art and activism—and how the forms are the ones in a way mediating the relationship for you. 

SC: I think this can be clarified with that river metaphor. Lately I have started to ask myself, “Can the neighborhood speak to the national or international, and what does it have to say?” But then there’s the other question: Can the national or international artist speak to the neighborhood? 

When I lived in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, I felt comfortable about speaking on what I perceived to be national issues, translated through an intensely personal and subjective lens. My works were addressed to an imaginary national audience. But the thing about moving to Port Dickson and becoming a local is that the address turns around, and I am confronted with the question of how to speak to the people here. Now the river metaphor turns into a challenge to live up to: Can you go everywhere, in all directions? Back and forth from the neighborhood to the national and from the national to the neighborhood. So we’re just circulating things constantly: forms, ideas; translating, carrying something from there to here.

I think what artists and activists share is a spirit or a will to intervene in reality. You’re awake to the world and all its forms of address to you. You’re picking up those calls, baby. Otherwise, where will the art come from—or the frankly stupid conviction required to make things better for life on earth?

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This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world in the artists’ creative process. By exploring the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman actors in artistic expression, Germana Roquez prompts us to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of representing the natural environment, drawing from both rural and urban contexts in Peru as case studies.

The modern Western concept of landscape has traditionally implied the existence of an observing subject and an observed territory. It corresponds to an anthropocentric perspective, in which humans are superior to nature and thus allowed to control the territory and extract its resources. In the arts, this understanding has conventionally meant the depiction of an expanse of natural scenery from a single, detached viewpoint. While artists in recent decades have proposed diverging manners of representing the landscape (or the territory that surrounds them), new critical studies and theories have posed other ways in which it can be analyzed.¹The development of ecocriticism and new materialisms has been particularly instrumental in questioning the centrality of humans in ecological contexts and in highlighting the agency of nonhuman elements.²

However, as Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Sara Garzón have all noted, we must acknowledge that these seemingly new ideas in fact originated among Indigenous groups and have been a constant presence in their millenarian thought.³ Further, Indigenous artworks that reference the natural environment offer alternative thought models.⁴To understand Indigenous perspectives on the notion of territory, we must engage with diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. One important subject among many Indigenous groups is the concept of vital materiality and the interconnections between different beings and elements on earth. Indigenous and rural communities in the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America perceive that all entities in nature are interdependent, and yet that each one possesses agency and intentionality all its own. Moreover, many of these elements hold sacred significance.

Building upon Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, this text addresses the ways in which people from the rural communities of Sarhua in the Andes and Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazonia comprehend the material world that surrounds them and how this understanding guides their aesthetic production. First, I analyze painted boards produced in Sarhua and Shipibo-Konibo textiles. I argue that these objects are “embodied landscapes” interacting with human and nonhuman elements that define their material, formal, and iconographic configurations in both sacred and nonsacred ways. Next, I analyze a series of paintings created by contemporary Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists who have relocated (or whose parents relocated) to the capital city of Lima. This inquiry illustrates how these artists, while adhering to many traditional Western painterly conventions—particularly the use of representational images, cartographic renditions, and the landscape as the background or setting for human activities—are still able to evoke the natural environment from the sacred and animistic perspectives that they inherited from their communities.

Painted Boards and the Power of the Mountains

Sarhua is a rural community located in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian central Andes. Sarhuinos inhabit a small town in a valley surrounded by big mountains, and they use the adjacent lands for agriculture and livestock labor. Among the community’s most important symbolic objects are the Tablas, long painted boards that date as far back as the 19th century. About 118 inches high and 12 inches wide, they are normally attached to the ceiling of a newly constructed house.

Their main functions are to represent kinship relations and to maintain systems of reciprocity within the community.⁵But Tablas also protect the house and the family that lives in it, together with their lands, animals, crops, goods, and chattels. People in Sarhua, as in other Andean regions, consider the mountains, known as the apus or wamanis, to be agentic, powerful beings.⁶I pose that the Tablas care for the houses in the same way that the apus care for the town. Both the materiality and iconography of the Tablas and their participation in ritual are central to this analysis.

Sarhuinos make the Tablas when a couple is constructing the roof of their new house. The Tablas are read from bottom to top, beginning with a dedication from the compadres,⁷followed by depictions of the Virgin of the Assumption, the patron saint of Sarhua; the couple who owns the house; their close relatives (who appear in order of importance); and the sun.

Sarhuinos obtain the wood to make the Tablas from various trees, including pati, aliso, or molle, all of which grow in the valleys near the town, and use the burned branches of chillka, or willow, also from the valley, to outline the figures. They obtain the colored earths used to paint the figures from the mountains that surround Sarhua. To apply the colors, painters use retama sticks and feathers from local birds, and to fix the colors, they use qullpa, a type of resin they obtain from rocks located in the highlands.⁸ Indeed, the materials necessary to produce the Tablas come from the whole of the Sarhuino landscape. Native American curator Patricia Marroquín Norby has pointed out that in many works of Indigenous art, the source of the materials, the way in which they are collected, and their treatment speak to the relationship between the inhabitants and their territory. These works, therefore, do not represent the landscape; rather, they are the landscape.⁹

When the Tabla is ready, the compadre delivers it to the new homeowners in a ritual called Tabla Apaycuy. He and his wife, family, and friends, together with other local residents, carry the Tabla through the town of Sarhua along with goods such as corn, potatoes, fruits, and ichu, a grass from the highlands that is used for roofing.¹⁰Through the Tabla Apaykuy, the Tabla interacts with the entire Sarhuino landscape. More importantly, after the owners of the house attach the Tabla to the ceiling and celebrate with a great party, the Tabla gets in touch with the apus through a ritual called inchahuay, thereby acquiring the power to protect the house. During the inchahuay, guests walk and dance around the outside of the house wearing cloaks and conical hats made of ichu. Sarhuino painter Primitivo Evanán Poma indicates that through this practice, people invoke the apus for the protection of the house.¹¹Anthropologist Hilda Araujo points out that inchahuay is also the Sarhuino name for a layer of fog that, when it settles on the mountains on August 1, indicates a good year—that is, a year with a lot of rain. Thus, when the Sarhuinos wear these conical hats, they act as “mountains of good luck.”¹²

According to Andean concepts of animism, places and things are sentient entities that have the power to act. Further, as Bill Sillar notes, “Things that have had prior relationship, or evoke similarities, with other places, things or people may continue to have an effective relationship with their origin or referent.”¹³The Tablas de Sarhua, in fact, act like the apus or wamanis. Through their images and materiality, they are connected to and interact with the context surrounding them and have the agency to take care of the house and family, their goods, and their lands.

Shipibo-Konibo Textiles and the Power of Plants

The Shipibo-Konibo, an Indigenous community living in rural towns along the Ucayali River, in the Peruvian Amazon, have a different understanding of their territory and its visual representation in everyday objects. The Shipibo-Konibo consider themselves part of nature and the forest, trees, rivers, and land as entities with agency. Essential to the Shipibo-Konibo culture are the rao plants, or plants with power, which they consider to be intelligent beings.¹⁴Through ritual consumption of these plants, the Shipibo-Konibo connect with them and use them for medicinal purposes. They also use rao plants to guide them through their inner selves and to experience a deep communion with nature.¹⁵

Inspired by the visions formed when using rao plants such as piripiri (Cyperus sp.) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), Shipibo-Konibo women create and apply geometric patterns to bodies, clothing, ceramics, and other objects, materializing the koshi, or positive energy of the plants.¹⁶

Called kené in the Shipibo-Konibo language, these visual designs allude to the spots on the skin of the primordial anaconda ronin, who created the rivers and constellations as well as the paths that beings (animals, plants, spirits, and stars) use to travel and communicate.¹⁷Similar to interconnected labyrinths, they represent the river and the constellations that are central to the community’s worldview.¹⁸The Shipibo-Konibo’s understanding of the territory takes place through ritual and connection with the energy of plants, linking the territory with the cosmos and with human beings and their daily activities.

Among the objects that Shipibo-Konibo women cover with kené is the cloth they use to make traditional garments, such as the chitonte, or skirt for women, and the tari, or tunic for men. They construct these clothes from plain-weave fabrics made of a native variety of cotton that grows in the Ucayali region. Women used to grow the cotton, spin it, and weave it with a backstrap loom.¹⁹Once they have the cloth ready, they paint the kené using vegetal dyes that they make from the bark, fruits, leaves, roots, and seeds of local plants.²⁰Then they cover the cloth with gray clay sourced from the river’s edge and dry it in the sun. When they wash the cloth, the once pale designs are shown to have turned black and colorfast. Sometimes the women add bits of color derived from plants—such as red from achiote, yellow from the roots of the guisador, and purple from the ani plant.²¹ In other cases, they completely dye the new cloth using the bark of the mahogany tree to achieve a reddish tone or river clay, which results in a black fabric they then embellish with colorful embroidery and applied white strips.²²

As in the case of Tablas, Shipibo-Konibo textiles evoke the territory. This territory is not an alien space, as it is intrinsically linked to the body of the person who wears the garment made from the cloth created within it. The materiality of the clothing links the human body to local plants, water, and soil; and the patterns link it to networks—to the roots of plants, the paths of rivers, and the movement of stars.²³Moreover, the energy of the rao plants protects those wearing the clothing from various evils. The whole garment is testimony to a worldview in which the body is directly linked to nature and the territory on both cosmic and intimate levels.

Transitioning to a New Environment

During the second half of the twentieth century, when economic and social crises heavily affected rural regions in Peru, many people living in those areas had to migrate to the big cities, especially to the capital, Lima. There, migrants had to reshape their lives, fight for income and basic rights, learn Spanish, and negotiate the power structures in place. In the same way, they had to reshape their artistic practices to fit the market and the art system and to communicate with an urban audience.²⁴ In the 1970s, a group of Sarhuino painters in Lima began to produce smaller versions of the traditional Tablas and to depict costumbrista scenes of Sarhua for an urban audience. The new Tablas were a success, leading Sarhuinos to also depict social injustices and personal concerns.²⁵Shipibo-Konibo art followed a similar transition. Some of the Shipibo-Konibo who migrated to Lima in the 1980s shared the traditional knowledge of their people through figurative images describing traditional practices and rituals as well as their worldview and, more recently, their political struggles.²⁶In these new paintings, both Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists adopted Western conventions, transforming their engagement with the landscape. Although intended for other audiences and purposes, many of these pieces managed to refer in novel, clever, and creative ways, to the landscape from the perspective of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian ontologies and epistemologies.

The mountains form the background of many Sarhuino paintings produced in Lima—that is, they are shown as part of the landscape in the Western sense. Some painters, however, have taken an interest in evoking the agency, power, and sacredness of the apus. Since the 1970s, the painters of the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) have made several versions of Apu Suyos.

All of them feature the mountains of Sarhua, but in the form of men dressed in regal clothes. According to the inscription on the painting, the apus in the composition eat the offerings (fruits, wine, special bread, coca leaves, cigarettes, flowers, etc.) that the Sarhuinos have left for them on the table after a herranza, or cattle-marking celebration. A central figure, Millqa, receives the products, and invites the other apus to enjoy these “exquisite offerings.” All of them agree to protect the trusted sheep cattle.²⁷This portrayal of the Sarhuino landscape conveys the agency and power of the mountains to an urban audience, which is why the painters decided to use Western conventions and render the apus as human beings dressed like European kings.²⁸

In 1997, Carmelón Berrocal made Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, in which he represents the territory of his native town based on modern Western cartographic conventions.²⁹

However, this work exceeds the standard models based on precise measurements and instead highlights important places and elements for Sarhuinos—mountains, farmlands, roads, streets, chapels, canals, and rivers—whose proper names are indicated in writing. Also, the urban area is subjugated by the colossal mountains and the starry sky. This map, therefore, not only represents a territory, but also accounts for the power of the apus and nature over the life and culture of the Sarhuinos. Furthermore, Berrocal made the painting with colored soils collected from Sarhua. The painting is an intellectual depiction of the territory and yet also connected to it through its materiality.

In 2023, Venuca Evanán, the daughter of two Sarhuino painters who had relocated to Lima, produced La ofrenda de Francisca.

The composition of this work centers on the artist’s grandmother, Francisca, who is making a pagapu, or offering to the mountains, and giving thanks to the Pachamama, or the earth, for all that she offers. The four mountains in the background represent the four apus of Sarhua, which is Francisca’s hometown. In the foreground, Venuca has depicted the sea and coastal region where Lima is located and where she was born. The elements shown reference the relationship between humans and other natural beings as well as the migration story of the artist’s family. By including colored soils that she sourced from the mountains in Sarhua and sand that she collected from her neighborhood in Lima, Venuca reinforces this aspect of the artwork.³⁰

For Shipibo-Konibo people, the kené, the geometric designs that women visualize when connecting with rao plants, have been a means of reference to the context surrounding them, together with the concepts and knowledge to navigate it. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), born in the community of Roya, Pucallpa, learned kené from her grandmother and has applied it to both textiles and ceramics.³¹In Lima, she created her firsts paintings with materials and techniques like the ones she used before moving to the capital. First, she dyed the fabric with mahogany bark to obtain a reddish background, and then she painted the images with natural pigments she obtained from mud, plants, and soil from Roya.³²Onanya Baque Raoni (1990s) portrays an onanya, or traditional healer, who is using rao plants to cure a sick child and their mother.³³

Valera, who is also a traditional healer, speaks on different levels of the centrality of plants and their power in the Shipibo-Konibo worldview through the theme of onanya, the inclusion of kené designs in her subjects’ clothing, and her use of plants as a primary material.

Eventually Valera stopped using natural dyes and began painting with acrylic on cloth. She also began depicting the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people to Lima. In a 2011 painting, the artist addresses the natural environment of the Amazon Forest and the Andean mountains that the Shipibo-Konibo must cross to get to the Peruvian capital.

These places are rendered as interrelated environments, though some important differences stand out. While in the Amazon Forest, everything seems to work in perfect harmony, especially the relationship between women and plants, in Lima all the elements—three Shipibo women, a computer, the San Cristóbal mountain, and the tall buildings—are disconnected from one another. In this complex environment, while two Shipibo women learn new skills to succeed in an industrialized and globalized world, a third woman, dressed in traditional Shipibo-Konibo clothing, represents the connection to knowledge that their mothers and grandmothers learned from plants and transmitted through kené.³⁴

Harry Pinedo, son of Elena Valera and born in Lima, is also an artist. His painting El apu y la danza de Ronin (2022), characteristic of his work about the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo to Lima, shows two men and a woman performing a dance in honor of Ronin on the streets of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo in Lima.³⁵

Ronin is the mother serpent of waters, a primordial being who gave rise to the universe and whose skin is the basis of the kené designs.³⁶The Ronin dance and the presence of kené on the people’s clothing and the floor celebrate the harmony of the Shipibo-Konibo world. The San Cristóbal mountain, the main apu of the Lima area, a powerful being before the Spanish invasion and a sacred Indigenous space today reconquered by the Shipibo-Konibo, stands in the background.³⁷ Two big trees, located on either side of the mountain, are also prominent elements in the composition, highlighting the power and importance of plants to the Shipibo-Community in Lima.

These works question the Western anthropocentric conception of the landscape and allow us to conceive new understandings of landscape and territory. Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, therefore, constitute an effective approach to analyzing them. Produced in different contexts, however, they must also be analyzed on their own terms. Elizabeth Burns Coleman points out, in regards to Indigenous art, the importance of knowing “the kind of broad categories that are established in the society in which it [the object] was produced, as well as the category in which the artist that produced the work expected it to be understood or interpreted.”³⁸Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo people living in their rural communities are especially concerned with the vitality of matter and the interconnection of different beings in nature. They do not produce objects that represent the landscape or territory around them. Instead, these communities create, in collaboration with mountains and plants, acting entities that interact with their immediate contexts. Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo contemporary artworks made in Lima are no longer sentient given that they are made for urban, Western audiences. The artists have conveyed, through images, the power of the mountains and plants and their relationships with other beings. However, by using strategies such as representing natural beings with human traits and incorporating material elements from the natural environment and symbolic references to the knowledge of their respective communities, these artworks continue to be powerful objects that never cease to negotiate their Indigenous epistemologies.

Spanish

El presente ensayo de la historiadora de arte Gabriela Germana Roquez explora la importancia del paisaje en el arte de la comunidad Sarhua en los Andes y del pueblo shipibo-konibo en la Amazonia, ambos en Perú. En su análisis, Germana Roquez nos muestra el modo en que estas obras de arte representan, encarnan y reivindican el paisaje, destacando el papel activo que el mundo natural desempeña en el proceso creativo de los artistas. Al explorar la interconexión de los actores humanos y no humanos en la expresión artística, Germana Roquez nos invita a reflexionar sobre las dimensiones espirituales de la representación del entorno natural, tomando como casos de estudio tanto contextos rurales como urbanos de Perú.

El concepto occidental moderno de paisaje tradicionalmente ha supuesto la existencia de un sujeto observador y de un territorio observado. Esto responde a una perspectiva antropocéntrica, según la cual los seres humanos son superiores a la naturaleza y, por tanto, pueden controlar el territorio y extraer sus recursos. En el mundo del arte, este concepto generalmente ha llevado a representar la extensión del paisaje natural desde un punto de vista individual y distante. En las últimas décadas, mientras los artistas han propuesto diversas formas de representar el paisaje (o el territorio que les rodea), los nuevos estudios y teorías críticas han planteado también otras maneras de analizarlo.³⁹Tanto el desarrollo de la ecocrítica como del nuevo materialismo han sido particularmente decisivos a la hora de cuestionar la centralidad del ser humano en el contexto ecológico y de resaltar la agencia de los elementos no humanos.⁴⁰

Sin embargo, como han señalado Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo y Sara Garzón, debemos reconocer que estas ideas aparentemente nuevas en verdad surgieron en los grupos indígenas y han sido una presencia constante en su pensamiento milenario.⁴¹ Más aún, las obras de arte indígena que hacen referencia al entorno natural proponen estructuras de pensamiento alternativas.⁴² Para comprender la noción de territorio desde las perspectivas indígenas, tenemos que abordar diferentes epistemologías y ontologías indígenas. Un tema muy importante para los diversos grupos indígenas es el concepto de materialidad vital y la interconexión entre los distintos seres y elementos de la Tierra. Las comunidades indígenas y rurales de las regiones andina y amazónica de América del Sur consideran que, en la naturaleza, todas las entidades son interdependientes y, sin embargo, cada una posee agencia e intencionalidad propia. Es más, muchos de estos elementos revisten un valor sagrado.

Basándose en las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, el presente texto explora el modo en que los habitantes de las comunidades rurales de Sarhua, en los Andes, y shipibo-konibo, en la Amazonia, conciben el mundo material que les rodea y cómo esa concepción guía su producción estética. En primer lugar, analizaré las tablas pintadas que se elaboran en Sarhua y los tejidos shipibo-konibo. Propongo que estos objetos son “paisajes encarnados” que interactúan con los elementos humanos y no humanos que definen sus configuraciones materiales, formales e iconográficas, tanto a nivel sagrado como no sagrado. Luego examinaré una serie de pinturas creadas por artistas sarhuinos y shipibo-konibo contemporáneos que se han trasladado (o cuyos padres se han trasladado) a la capital, Lima. Este análisis mostrará cómo estos artistas, aunque se han adherido a diferentes convenciones pictóricas occidentales tradicionales –en particular, al uso de imágenes figurativas, de reproducciones cartográficas y del paisaje como fondo o escenario de la actividad humana– siguen siendo capaces de invocar el entorno natural desde las perspectivas sagradas y animistas que heredaron de sus comunidades.

Las tablas pintadas y el poder de las montañas

Sarhua es una comunidad rural situada en la región de Ayacucho, en los Andes peruanos centrales. Los sarhuinos habitan un pequeño poblado en un valle rodeado por grandes montañas, y usan los terrenos aledaños para labores agrícolas y ganaderas. Las Tablas –largos listones de madera pintada que datan del siglo XIX– se encuentran entre los objetos simbólicos más importantes de la comunidad. Miden unos tres metros de alto por treinta centímetros de ancho, y normalmente se colocan en los techos de las casas recién construidas.

Su principal función es representar las relaciones de parentesco y mantener los sistemas de reciprocidad dentro de la comunidad. ⁴³Pero las Tablas también protegen la casa y a la familia que la habita, junto con sus tierras, animales, cultivos, bienes y enseres. La gente de Sarhua, igual que en otras regiones andinas, considera a las montañas –a las que llaman apus o wamanis– como seres poderosos y con agencia.⁴⁴ Planteo, por lo tanto, que las Tablas cuidan las casas de la misma manera que los apus cuidan el pueblo. Tanto la materialidad como la iconografía de las Tablas y su participación en los rituales son fundamentales para este análisis.

            Los sarhuinos hacen Tablas cada vez que una pareja empieza a construir el techo de una nueva casa. Las Tablas se leen de abajo hacia arriba, comenzando con una dedicatoria de los compadres,⁴⁵ seguida de representaciones de la Virgen de la Asunción (patrona de Sarhua), de la pareja propietaria de la casa, de sus parientes cercanos (que aparecen en orden de importancia) y del sol.

Los sarhuinos obtienen la madera para hacer las Tablas de distintos árboles –entre ellos el pati, el aliso o el molle– que crecen en los valles cercanos al pueblo, y usan las ramas quemadas de chillka o sauce, también provenientes del valle, para delinear las figuras. Las tierras de colores que usan para pintar las figuras las obtienen de las montañas que rodean Sarhua. Para aplicar los colores, los pintores usan varas de retama y plumas de aves locales, y para fijarlos, aplican qullpa, un tipo de resina que obtienen de piedras ubicadas en las zonas de más altura.⁴⁶ Así, todos los materiales necesarios para producir las Tablas proceden del paisaje sarhuino. La curadora de arte indígena Patricia Marroquín Norby ha señalado que, en muchas obras de arte indígena, el origen de los materiales, la forma en que son recolectados y el tratamiento que reciben reflejan la relación de los habitantes con su territorio. Por tanto, estas obras no representan el paisaje, sino que son el paisaje.⁴⁷

Cuando la Tabla está lista, el compadre se la entrega a los nuevos propietarios en un ritual llamado Tabla Apaycuy. El compadre y su esposa, familia y amigos, acompañados de otros residentes locales, transportan la Tabla a través del pueblo de Sarhua junto con otras mercancías como maíz, papas, frutas e ichu, una hierba de las tierras altas que se utiliza para techar.⁴⁸Mediante la ceremonia del Tabla Apaykuy, la Tabla interactúa con todo el paisaje sarhuino. Y lo que es más importante, luego de que los dueños fijan la Tabla al techo de la casa y celebran con una gran fiesta, la Tabla entra en contacto con los apus a través de un ritual llamado inchahuay, donde adquiere el poder de proteger la casa.⁴⁹Durante el inchahuay, los invitados pasean y bailan alrededor de la casa con capas y sombreros cónicos hechos de ichu. El pintor sarhuino Primitivo Evanán Poma afirma que, mediante este ritual, la gente invoca a los apus para que protejan la casa. La antropóloga Hilda Araujo explica que la palabra inchahuay también es el término sarhuino que se usa para designar una fina capa de niebla que, si se asienta en las montañas el 1 de agosto, es señal de que vendrá un buen año, es decir, un año con abundantes lluvias. Así, cuando los sarhuinos usan esos sombreros cónicos, están actuando como “montañas de buena suerte”.⁵⁰

Según las concepciones andinas de animismo, los lugares y las cosas son entidades sensibles que tienen poder para actuar. Es más, como señala Bill Sillar, “las cosas que han tenido una relación previa o que suscitan similitudes con otros lugares, cosas o personas pueden seguir manteniendo una relación efectiva con su origen o su referente”.⁵¹ Las Tablas de Sarhua, de hecho, actúan como apus o wamanis. A través de sus imágenes y de su materialidad, están conectadas e interactúan con el contexto que las rodea, y tienen agencia para cuidar de la casa y de la familia, de sus bienes y sus tierras.

Los textiles shipibo-konibo y el poder de las plantas

Los shipibo-konibo, una comunidad indígena que habita en pueblos rurales a lo largo del río Ucayali en la Amazonia peruana, tienen una forma distinta de entender el territorio y su representación visual en los objetos cotidianos. Los shipibo-konibo se consideran parte de la naturaleza y ven el bosque, los árboles, los ríos y la tierra como entidades con agencia. Las plantas rao, o plantas con poder, son fundamentales para ellos y las consideran seres inteligentes.⁵²A través del consumo ritual de estas plantas, los shipibo-konibo entablan una conexión con ellas y las utilizan con fines medicinales. También recurren a las plantas rao para que éstas los guíen por su interior y experimentar una profunda comunión con la naturaleza.⁵³ Inspiradas en las visiones que perciben cuando consumen plantas rao como el piripiri (Cyperus sp.) y la ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), las mujeres shipibo-konibo crean y plasman motivos geométricos en sus cuerpos, ropas, cerámicas y otros objetos, materializando la koshi o energía positiva de las plantas.⁵⁴

Estos diseños visuales, denominados kené en el idioma shipibo-konibo, evocan las manchas de la piel de la anaconda primigenia ronin, quien creó los ríos y las constelaciones, así como los caminos que utilizan los seres vivos (animales, plantas, espíritus y estrellas) para trasladarse y comunicarse.⁵⁵Similares a laberintos conectados entre sí, representan tanto el río como las constelaciones que son fundamentales para la cosmovisión de la comunidad.⁵⁶ A través del ritual y de la conexión con la energía de las plantas, los shipibo-konibo comprenden el territorio y lo vinculan al cosmos y a los seres humanos y sus actividades cotidianas.   

Entre los objetos que las mujeres shipibo-konibo cubren con kené destaca la tela que usan para confeccionar prendas tradicionales, como el chitonte, o falda para las mujeres, y el tari, o túnica para los hombres. Confeccionan estas prendas con telas de tejido liso realizadas a partir de una variedad autóctona de algodón que crece en la región de Ucayali. Las mujeres solían cultivar el algodón, hilarlo y tejerlo con un telar de cintura.⁵⁷Cuando la tela ya está lista, pintan el kené con tintes vegetales que elaboran con cortezas, frutos, hojas, raíces y semillas de plantas locales.⁵⁸Luego cubren la tela con arcilla gris procedente de la orilla del río y la secan al sol. Cuando la lavan, los diseños que eran pálidos se oscurecen y se fijan a la tela. A veces las mujeres añaden toques de colores derivados de plantas, como el rojo del achiote, el amarillo de las raíces del guisador y el púrpura de la planta ani.⁵⁹En otros casos, tiñen completamente la tela nueva utilizando la corteza del árbol de caoba para conseguir un tono rojizo o arcilla del río, lo que da como resultado un tejido negro que luego adornan con bordados de colores y apliques de tiras blancas.⁶⁰

Al igual que en el caso de las Tablas, los tejidos shipibo-konibo evocan al territorio. Este territorio no es un espacio ajeno, sino que está intrínsecamente unido al cuerpo de la persona que usa la prenda elaborada con la tela que se fabricó en él. La materialidad de la prenda conecta el cuerpo humano a las plantas, al agua y al suelo del lugar; y los diseños lo conectan a otros entramados: a las raíces de las plantas, a los caminos de los ríos y al movimiento de las estrellas.⁶¹ Además, la energía de las plantas rao protege a quien lleva la ropa de distintos males. Toda la prenda es el testimonio de una cosmovisión en la que el cuerpo está directamente unido a la naturaleza y al territorio, tanto a nivel cósmico como íntimo.

La transición a un nuevo entorno

Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, una serie de crisis económicas y sociales afectaron gravemente a las regiones rurales de Perú y muchas personas tuvieron que migrar a las grandes ciudades, sobre todo a la capital, Lima. Allí, los migrantes tuvieron que rehacer sus vidas, luchar por conseguir ingresos y derechos básicos, aprender español y negociar las estructuras de poder existentes. También debieron reconfigurar sus prácticas artísticas para adaptarse al mercado y al sistema del arte, y para aprender a comunicarse con un público urbano.⁶²

En la década de 1970, un grupo de pintores sarhuinos en Lima empezó a producir versiones más pequeñas de las tradicionales Tablas y a representar en ellas escenas costumbristas de Sarhua orientadas a un público urbano. Las nuevas Tablas fueron un éxito, lo que llevó a los sarhuinos a representar también las injusticias sociales y sus preocupaciones personales.⁶³ El arte shipibo-konibo siguió una transición parecida. Algunos de los shipibo-konibo que emigraron a Lima en la década de 1980 mostraron los conocimientos de su pueblo mediante imágenes figurativas que describían prácticas y rituales tradicionales, así como su cosmovisión y, más recientemente, sus luchas políticas.⁶⁴En estas nuevas pinturas, tanto los artistas sarhuinos como los shipibo-konibo adoptaron convenciones occidentales, lo que supuso una modificación en su relación con el paisaje. Si bien estas piezas fueron pensadas para otros públicos y con otros propósitos, muchas supieron referirse al paisaje de forma novedosa, inteligente y creativa, desde la perspectiva de las ontologías y epistemologías indígenas andinas y amazónicas. 

Las montañas son parte del fondo de muchos cuadros sarhuinos realizados en Lima, es decir, se las presenta como parte del paisaje en el sentido occidental. Sin embargo, algunos pintores se han esforzado por evocar la agencia, el poder y el carácter sagrado de los apus. Desde la década de 1970, los pintores de la Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) han realizado varias versiones de Apu Suyos.

En todas se pueden ver las montañas de Sarhua, pero personificadas como hombres vestidos con ropas de la realeza. Según la inscripción en la pintura, los apus de la composición comen las ofrendas (frutas, vino, pan especial, hojas de coca, cigarrillos, flores, etc.) que los sarhuinos les han dejado sobre la mesa después de la herranza o fiesta de marcación de ganado. Una de las figuras centrales, Millqa, recibe los productos e invita a los demás apus a disfrutar de estas “exquisitas ofrendas”. Todos se ponen de acuerdo para proteger el ganado ovino de los leales.⁶⁵Esta representación del paisaje sarhuino busca transmitir la agencia y el poder de las montañas a un público urbano, razón por la cual los pintores decidieron utilizar las convenciones occidentales y representar a los apus como seres humanos vestidos como reyes europeos.⁶⁶En 1997, Carmelón Berrocal hizo el cuadro Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, en el que representa el territorio de su pueblo natal según las convenciones cartográficas occidentales modernas.⁶⁷

Esta obra, sin embargo, excede los diseños estándares basados en mediciones precisas y destaca, en su lugar, los espacios y elementos importantes para los Sarhuinos –las montañas, las tierras de cultivo, los caminos, las calles, las capillas, los canales y ríos– cuyos nombres propios aparecen indicados por escrito. Además, el casco urbano se presenta dominado por las colosales montañas y el cielo estrellado. Este mapa, por tanto, no sólo representa un territorio, sino que también da cuenta del poder de los apus y de la naturaleza sobre la vida y la cultura de los sarhuinos. Más aún, Berrocal pintó el cuadro con tierras de colores recogidas en Sarhua. El cuadro es una representación intelectual del territorio, pero además está conectado a él por su materialidad.   

En 2023, Venuca Evanán, hija de dos pintores sarhuinos que tuvieron que reestablecerse en Lima, pintó La ofrenda de Francisca.

La composición gira en torno a la abuela de la artista, Francisca, quien realiza un pagapu u ofrenda a las montañas y da gracias a la Pachamama, o tierra, por todo lo que nos ofrece. Las cuatro montañas del fondo representan los cuatro apus de Sarhua, ciudad natal de Francisca. En primer plano, Venuca representó el mar y la región costera en que se encuentra Lima y donde ella nació. Los elementos representados remiten al vínculo entre los seres humanos y otros seres naturales, así como a la historia de migración de la familia de la artista. Venuca subraya este aspecto de la obra incluyendo tierras de colores que obtuvo en las montañas de Sarhua y arena que recogió en su barrio de Lima.⁶⁸

Para el pueblo shipibo-konibo, el kené –los diseños geométricos que las mujeres visualizan cuando se conectan con las plantas rao– ha sido el medio para referirse al contexto que les rodea, así como a los conceptos y conocimientos necesarios para desenvolverse en él. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), nacida en la comunidad de Roya (Pucallpa) aprendió el kené de su abuela y lo ha aplicado tanto en textiles como en cerámica.⁶⁹En Lima creó sus primeras pinturas con materiales y técnicas similares a las que utilizaba antes de trasladarse a la capital. Primero, teñía las telas con corteza de caoba para obtener un fondo rojizo, y luego pintaba las imágenes con pigmentos naturales que obtuvo del barro, las plantas y la tierra de Roya.⁷⁰Onanya Baque Raoni (década de 1990) retrata a un onanya, o curandero tradicional, que utiliza plantas rao para curar a un niño enfermo y a su madre.⁷¹

Valera, que también es curandera tradicional, plantea en distintos niveles la centralidad de las plantas y su poder en la cosmovisión shipibo-konibo, a través de la figura del onanya, la inclusión de diseños kené en la ropa de sus personajes y el uso de las plantas como materia primordial.

Con el tiempo, Valera dejó de utilizar tintes naturales y empezó a pintar con acrílico sobre tela. También comenzó a representar la migración del pueblo shipibo-konibo a Lima. En un cuadro de 2011 la artista retrata el entorno natural de la selva amazónica y las montañas andinas que los shipibo-konibo deben atravesar para llegar a la capital peruana.

Estos lugares están representados como entornos que se relacionan entre sí, pero se pueden ver ciertas diferencias importantes. Mientras que en la selva amazónica parece que todo convive en perfecta armonía, en especial la relación entre las mujeres y las plantas, en Lima todos los elementos –las tres mujeres shipibo, la computadora, el cerro San Cristóbal y los altos edificios– están desconectados entre sí. En este complejo entorno, mientras dos mujeres shipibo aprenden nuevas habilidades para triunfar en un mundo industrializado y globalizado, una tercera mujer, vestida con prendas tradicionales shipibo-konibo, simboliza la conexión con los conocimientos que sus madres y abuelas aprendieron de las plantas y transmitieron a través del kené.⁷²

Harry Pinedo, hijo de Elena Valera y nacido en Lima, también es artista. Su cuadro El apu y la danza de ronin (2022), característico de su obra sobre la migración de los shipibo-konibo a Lima, muestra a dos hombres y una mujer ejecutando una danza en honor a ronin en las calles de la comunidad shipibo-konibo de Cantagallo, en Lima.⁷³

Ronin es la serpiente madre de las aguas, un ser primigenio que dio origen al universo y cuya piel es la base de los diseños kené.⁷⁴La danza de ronin y la presencia del kené en la vestimenta de la gente y en el suelo, celebran la armonía del mundo shipibo-konibo. Al fondo se alza el cerro San Cristóbal, apu principal de la zona de Lima, un ser poderoso antes de la invasión española y un espacio indígena sagrado, reconquistado en la actualidad por los shipibo-konibo.⁷⁵Los dos grandes árboles ubicados a ambos lados de la montaña también son elementos destacados en la composición, ya que subrayan el poder y la importancia de las plantas para la comunidad shipibo en Lima.     

Todas estas obras cuestionan la visión antropocéntrica occidental del paisaje y nos permiten concebir nuevas maneras de entender el paisaje y el territorio. Las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, por lo tanto, constituyen un enfoque efectivo para analizarlas. Sin embargo, por haber sido producidas en contextos distintos, también hay que analizarlas en sus propios términos. Refiriéndose al arte indígena, Elizabeth Burns Coleman recuerda que es importante conocer “el tipo de categorías generales que rigen la sociedad en la que fue producido [el objeto], así como la categoría con la que el artista que produjo la obra esperaba que fuera entendida o interpretada”.⁷⁶ Los sarhuinos y los shipibo-konibo que viven en sus comunidades rurales están especialmente interesados en la vitalidad de la materia y la interconexión de los distintos seres en la naturaleza. No producen objetos que representan el paisaje o el territorio que les rodea, sino que crean, en colaboración con las montañas y las plantas, entidades con agencia que interactúan con sus contextos más cercanos.

Las obras de arte sarhuino y shipibo-konibo contemporáneas realizadas en Lima han dejado de ser entidades sensibles dado que fueron realizadas para un público urbano y occidental. Los artistas han transmitido, a través de imágenes, el poder de las montañas y las plantas y sus relaciones con otros seres. Sin embargo, al utilizar ciertas estrategias –como la representación de seres naturales con rasgos humanos, la incorporación de elementos materiales del entorno natural y las referencias simbólicas a los conocimientos de sus respectivas comunidades– estas obras de arte siguen siendo objetos poderosos que no dejan de negociar con sus epistemologías indígenas.

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In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

Cliquez ici pour lire la version anglaise.

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I spent my childhood in the hills or in the sea. I liked to listen to the fog. I ran cross-country, I ran through the woods, the grass, and the meadows; I ran all the time, so much I wore out my knees and now my knees ache at random. When my friends and I got our licenses, we often went to the Marin Headlands. By the time we got to it, the Headlands was a national park; it still is. First though, it was Coast Miwok lands. All of California is unceded. Later, the area was home to Portuguese and Spanish dairy farmers, and marked by all the violence of their arrival. Since the 1900s, it has been a federal military base, which swelled into a monster of an outpost in the 1940s to protect Americans from the perceived threat from the other side of the Pacific. Nobody came. Nevertheless, it was deemed appropriate to intern our own citizens and residents.¹ I remember mulling over this violence when I was still young: Why did that happen like that? It is funny to remember that sense of confusion, despite not knowing or having any of the knowledge then that I do now about the trinity of imperialism, racism, and colonization. Though it was nameless then, I still felt the ambient, unflinching whine of the accumulation of capital, among its cacophonous cohort of atrocities.

There are two ways to get to the Headlands. The way the tourists go, which involves traffic on the weekends and an incredible drop straight to the ocean. Or the way you go when you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge before: through a five-minute-long one-way tunnel that spits you out into a valley surrounded by gentle hills, rambling to the sea. Winding through and around and then down a little (if you drive fast, you can make your stomach flip), the beach unveils itself, a lagoon, a parking lot, the cliffs, dark sand; there’s a particular vibrancy and depth to the blue of the Headlands; everything is shrouded with it, the dark swirling, freezing ocean. The sand is so fine and on some days nearly black. The surf in its verticality is so strong, there is kind of a steepness imprinted in the sand, not quite an embankment, a steep slip to the ocean. Meters-high rocks, scale, scale, scale, wind, brush, sage, rumors of a helicopter landing for unknown reasons, and then back in the hills, which were filled with bunkers, deep, crazy caverns, cracking and dripping. I’ve never seen anything darker, filled with people, at least we wagered, kids from other high schools had tall tales buoyed by the traces; lots of jokes are based in fear, writing our names timidly near the entrances, never going much deeper. Rin was here.

Years later, on the street in the rain, Mad told me I was reserved, not quiet. I realized later walking home how I emulated the landscape of my childhood. I think of the darkness of the bunkers and the fog meandering across that big expanse of whatever you call gray when it’s blue, the city across the way and then the bowing horizon, and always a ship going out to the Pacific. Sometimes, I notice things really quickly, and other times, I’m so busy living inside of one thing, I don’t realize the illusion of the other. Like how those ships are so large, the city seemed closer than it was. What was in those containers? It did not matter then, we found the boat a kind of metronome. We’d be sure to see it, smoking somebody’s brother’s California medical marijuana out of an apple on that federal territory before going back to our cars to giggle, or if I was with a lover,² to touch each other until the sun was long gone and the great white lights of the federal police told us from their loud speakers to go home.

In a cafe, as a lark, I suggest to X—a curator who has invited me to do an exhibition in Shanghai—that I would like to cross the Pacific Ocean. I base this lark on the fact that yes, I will always be tied to the Atlantic for the accident of birth.³ However, in practicality, I feel far more tied to the Pacific, having grown up in it, around it, having visited family who had transplanted themselves to Hawai’i, and always, always swimming in it, even now, by chance, marrying a woman from the other side of it. That to cross the Pacific on the various highways of winds that flow across might provide an interesting exercise, one that might not be possible in the future. There were also things that made this act of crossing an American one, more specifically a colonial one. Obvious question: How much has my country irrevocably changed the nations of the Pacific? Besides that there was something about the fact that it matters how you get somewhere, and more in there too that I wasn’t quite sure about all of it; what is the point of this?⁴ It was something, though. In short, I talk myself into a knot and then look up at X. They smile, they think that’s the best idea I’ve presented and that I should indeed cross the Pacific. The Pacific grows in their mind too; it zigzags or maybe bogs up beside us both. So, I will cross. My next preoccupation: how?

Likely the last time I sailed was at age 13 off the coast of Pimu (Catalina Island). In the water I was focused, sharklike. I won my races; I got the gold star in sailing. The only phrase that has really stuck with me after these 20 years is “tacking into the wind,” that to go forward you’d have to do a dance in triangles to arrive at your destination, never being pushed backward, but never straight forward exactly either. This is around the time I think if I had been born a bit later, I would have come out as trans; I didn’t know what to call it then, even with trans adults floating near me in San Francisco. I was too afraid of them. On the water and in it, the changing of my form and its congruous incongruencies with myself were held at a remove. The sheltered bays of Pimu are not the open waters of the Pacific.

I settle on some sort of 40- to 50-foot boat, which I will rent or buy. I learn I’ll need to leave between January and April, and if I don’t stop, it will take me around 30 to 40 days, depending on how things go with the weather. I won’t go alone. I’ll need some companions. I search for them. Likely, we will go in a regatta, with some others who are crossing. This is safest. I begin to compile the tools I’ll need to properly sail. I spend hours on the internet, researching alone and chatting excessively with ChatGPT. I learn that, in addition to my boat and the various rations, I will need the following in both analog and digital forms:

1. A compass
2. GPS
3. Charts and maps
4. SSB radio and VHF radio
5. Weather-forecasting tools
6. GPS-enabled sextant
7. A logbook
8. Automatic identification system (AIS).

Each tool is familiar to me except for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is used for automatic tracking of large ships and passenger boats. It allows the operator of the vessel to receive and transmit information, such as the ship’s name, position, course, and speed, to other AIS-equipped vessels and shoreside traffic-control centers. Essentially, it transmits who you are to everybody and transmits who everybody says they are to you too. On the water, they say, see and be seen.⁵ Or that’s how it’s meant to be.

I increase my watching of sailing videos on YouTube, I focus on crossing. I watch other people cross in 15-20-30-60-minute bursts, families, solos, couples. I watch their tensions, boredom, the horizons, the fish they catch, their bodies writhing in pain, flipping, the humans grinning holding that transparent line, the flat eye of the fish narrowing in exhaustion,⁶ intermingled as if imbibed with hot sauce into the human, exhausted in the late hours, the sudden squalls, the choppy waves. I watch them stare at their digital charts, their compasses, and their AIS.

Every group I watch eventually struggles with readings on their devices and often on their AIS. Either there are ships that are spoofing—pretending to be larger or smaller than they actually are—or there are ships that have turned off their AIS altogether.

On their voyage to Uruguay, sailing couple Kate and Curtis of the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca, chronicle their run-in with an illegal fishing vessel.⁷ The episode begins, as most sailing vlogs do, with a teaser of the big event and then jumps right into their day-to-day. They explain how their dog, Roxy, uses the restroom on board the sailboat,⁸ breakfast is made, routes are planned, a day passes, things are fixed, wind is scarce until it isn’t. On the third night of their voyage, during heavy winds—and all the efforts it takes to move through those—the radar alarm⁹ goes off and they discover that there is something very close to them. Kate identifies it as a fishing boat, and it is less than a mile away. The drama of this moment is narrated and explained more than felt in a traditional dramatic sense. Visually, to a non-sailor; the moment feels somehow confusingly mellow. The fishing boat looks far away, just a white light splitting the darkness into horizon and sky. The stress level in Kate’s voice drives home a truism of sailing: distance on the water is very different from distance on land.

“Curtis has been battling him for at least the last half hour,” Kate explains. “He keeps changing direction every time we change direction, making a collision course with us, so finally we had to turn on the motor . . . and just try to get by him.” They try to radio the fishing boat, but there is no response. Kate turns the camera to reveal their view, the main sail, the ropes flexing, sailing in the dark, into nothingness, tool-dependent, tipped to the right, the wind is fast at 20 knots, there is spray coming over the bow, it’s wet.¹⁰ “What the **** is this guy,” Curtis says in calm frustration. He’s spotted another boat on the AIS and asks Kate to go down and take a closer look. It is a 91-foot fishing vessel going 3.5 knots. The boat’s AIS popped on and then off again, suddenly. While it is common enough for boats not to always leave their AIS on, in this circumstance, it is odd; in this weather, at night, usually you’d be in communication via radio with the other vessel, doing what you can to avoid one another. So now there are two boats. One directly behind the other. And suddenly, they’re closer. Still no response on the radio, the spray continues. Frustrated, Kate says, “We all have to respect each other, but I don’t know what this is, it’s just carelessness.” At this point, Kate and Curtis are going upwind using their motor and doing everything they can to avoid this second boat, which reads a mile away from them. It continues, their radar isn’t picking up the second boat’s location, and now Kate and Curtis must depend on their vision alone to figure out how to avoid them. They can see their lights and that’s it; they can’t tell which side of the boat they’re seeing, what direction the boat might be taking. These confusions have forced Kate and Curtis to continue to keep their motor on, going straight into waves that are beating their boat down.

Unbelievably, Curtis spots another vessel. Kate takes a look, “It’s almost like it’s two different AISs for the same vessel.” Curtis agrees, “He’s got a fake-out AIS. These guys are probably all illegal.” Kate gives us a further description: One AIS went off, another went on, they’re in the same position according to the charts. They’re spoofing. “God, it shows him pointing directly at us too, like he wants to hit us.” Kate and Curtis have all their lights on, they want to be visible, they are not trying to hide, they’re just trying to get through. Kate predicts that this will be a sleepless night for her and Curtis; the wind picks up. A week later, Curtis and Kate will find out that the Uruguayan navy caught a Chinese fishing vessel in the same location they had been sailing in.¹¹ Kate notes in her final narration that she and Curtis cannot say for sure if these boats were illegally fishing or not, but given their behavior, it seems quite possible.

The Uruguayan navy put footage of the capture of the fishing vessel on YouTube. The whining of a helicopter provides a heavy soundtrack as the large blue-hulled fishing vessel bobs in the water alongside the navy ship.¹² In another shot, two dinghies surround the fishing vessel. This dance from my view, the computer, seems static, like a painting; the charge is the matter.

Likely, when a boat does not come up on an AIS, that boat’s main job is to transship. I am trans, we must be related. (I’ve told this joke before.)

“Transshipment” is a term used to describe the transferring of cargo from one mode of transportation to another during its transit from point of origin to final destination. For example, this could mean transferring cargo from a ship to a train, or from one ship to another ship. In the Pacific Ocean, transshipment has a long history that isn’t worth relaying here. We can speculate that transshipment likely hit some sort of uptick with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.¹³ And that uptick at the Panama Canal then grew exponentially with the growth of the globalizing economy in the 1990s.¹⁴ In its innocent form, transshipment is used to optimize logistics and save on transportation costs. However, as obvious as this is to state, transshipment can also be used to bypass bottlenecks or trade barriers. 

Illegal transshipment can take many forms: smuggling, tax evasion, fraud. Transshipment is resorted to in order to avoid tariffs and quotas. To further avoid inspection, goods are mislabeled, paperwork is falsified, and certain circuitous shipping routes are taken. Transshipment can be used to smuggle goods like drugs and weapons, or live beings like rare wildlife and nolonger-living beings like fish and other dead sea creatures. These activities all live under the title of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU). IUU fishing vessels will engage in transshipment at sea, where the fish is caught by one vessel and then transferred to another (and sometimes even another) to then be brought to market.

To accomplish the first part of this IUU fishing, a ship will turn off their AIS to conceal their identity and location, or at the very least, confusing or, for lack of a better word, troubling it. This process of concealment is known as “dark shipping,” and it is this practice that Kate and Curtis found themselves caught in the middle of.

In Hakai Magazine’s article “Catch Me If You Can: The Global Pursuit of a Fugitive Ship,” writer Sarah Toy details the complex and intense process of catching the IUU fishing vessel STS-50 in 2018. The capture involved multiple governments and agencies all working together in tandem, often the effort coming down to one email or phone call. Before the vessel was caught, it operated for eight years under different names, with crew members coming and going, some knowing the legality of the ship’s activities, and others just passing through. STS-50, like many other IUU ships, sold its catch to many different middlemen.

As investigators began to close in on STS-50, Toy narrates:

“STS-50 tried to evade tracking by periodically switching off its AIS and using a generic Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a nine-digit code that is supposed to be unique to each vessel. With the generic identification number, the STS-50 was able to hide under other ships’ transmission signals, says Bergh, “a bit like everybody trying to talk on the same frequency on a radio.” Specialists at Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norwegian nonprofit that provides vessel tracking analysis to FISH-i Africa, were able to decipher the STS-50’s intermittent satellite signals and detect where the vessel really was. It was like playing a game of cat and mouse in an area larger than the Australian continent.”

STS-50 fled toward Indonesia, a nation whose task force to combat illegal fishing had blown up more than 400 illegal fishing boats since 2014. Since STS-50 only occasionally turned on its AIS, trackers found themselves predicting the ship’s location between each ping, assuming its course. Eventually it pinged in, likely to let the owner of the ship know its location, and the Indonesian navy was able to intercept it. The captain was fined and put in prison, but the owners cannot be prosecuted. “On the high seas, the bad guys have almost always gotten away—a frustrating reality of the seemingly Sisyphean task of policing lawbreakers in such a vast arena.”¹⁵

A vast arena, liquid and thus confusing, it can hold me yet—shipping, illegal fishing—whole ecosystems and beings we’ve never met and probably never will. Paradoxically, once something is nameable, it can be contained. Maybe it’s better to play the homophone and hear that it’s a parallax. The incongruities of trying to make an image when the lens is actually lower than where your eye composes the picture. Transshipment—in its evasion of being known by continuing to go across—sounds familiar. In the case of the shipment, an exploited group of beings taken and going from one state to the next.

What is a definition but an act mired in its traces? We know that transshipment is happening because we see the boats, the boats are caught, the fish are gone, but are we literally seeing the fish brought up onto the decks? Not often. Fragmentation by way of commodification. Confusingly, we have a lot in common—that is me, the act of transshipping, and the very things that are being transshipped. We are reliant on others to exist on multiple levels. We are full of legal and illegal missions and substrates. In IUU transshipment, there is the plundering of the oceans, and in transness, there is a liberation for the person bearing the label.

The self is a troubling political object. Its maintenance is a pawn to be trifled with, exchanged for a different person’s will, whether that is being in the world or what one ingests in order to live. Containment means not just the possibility to be incorporated into capital accumulation but the possibility to be obliterated because of lack of access to things that are basic to one’s survival. My lines of logic have me running toward myself as a commodity. Is that what I share with the shipment? Commodities are to be traded. I won’t be going to Tennessee or Kentucky any time soon. What does the marine life say? Let’s all trade places in this merry-go-round of exploitation.

Vexing statement: Trans is whatever the group needs it to be. In certain instances, nobody needs it to be much of anything; in others, it is the very structure upon which the entire artifice of social interaction is built; and still in others, it is the perfect scapegoat for the uncomfortable god-level truth, change. Trans is the demon, the liberator, the cocoon, the bear, the cave, the ship, the fisherman, the sailor, and me.

There is a phenomenon called “group random dance.” What happens is groups of people get together and play clips of K-pop songs, and if you know the dance, you go to the center and do it. These groups are large, young, queer, trans. Their vibe is good, diverse; there is an air of excitement, encouragement. They are showing off together. These random dances happen all over the world and are very popular. My five-year-old daughter and I watch these random dances while we draw in my studio. In one random dance in Frankfurt, we stop drawing for a long time to witness this group energy. As is custom, each clip is followed by a computerized voice counting down to the next clip, 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . There’s a collective pause as each song comes on; usually there’s a few squeals, a shout, a scream, and then always a mad dash for the center. Places! Then my daughter and I wait for the moment when they all, together, really do perfectly sync up. A lift of a leg, a hip pop, a head shake, a raised hand in a circular motion.

We also watch for a phenomenon we haven’t fully named yet, something like the confusion of the mirror. What happens is that some of the people dancing know the dance from one perspective, and others know the dance from another. So that means they’re doing the same moves, but one is going right while the other goes left. Elbows knock and concentrations are broken.¹⁶ Implied in these public random dances is that they all kind of know what’s going on, not enough to be the “real” thing, but they’ll try all together, kind of knowing the dance is enough; the point is to be dancing, to be giving it a go, to all be trying. Or at least that’s the point I’m seeing from it (we can only read so much of another person’s reasoning through the filter of our own logic). Trying is worth it at least.

Night in our corner of Berlin is quiet, mostly just footsteps and the occasional shout, and still I am unable to sleep. I give in, walk myself to my computer, I begin looking for 40-foot sailboats; there’s one in Providence that could be promising. My ears burn when I am afraid but I kind of like the feeling. I imagine myself reading charts at the shining table on this particular vessel. Poring over the lines, the weather. I bid on the boat; it will be my most expensive artistic endeavor. Anything to cross over. I walk to the window to hear the morning birds. I wait.

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In Take My Breath Away, the Guggenheim Museum’s 2018 survey of work by artist Danh Vo (born 1975), Death Sentence (2009) was displayed in a custom shelf wrapping the inner edge of the museum’s iconic spiral ramp. Visitors encountered a sequence of sixty white sheets of standard A4-size paper adorned in blue ink calligraphy (supplied by the artist’s father, Phung Vo) in a script that is at once precise, orderly, and quickly assimilated, as it is florid, flowing, and idiosyncratic. First produced in 2009, the piece is a collaboration between the artist, his father, and his close friend and fellow artist Julie Ault (born 1957). Across the sixty pages of paper, Phung copied a sequence of five texts selected by Ault, each of which meditates, in its own quirky way, on themes of death, mourning, and representation.¹

At the Guggenheim, the pages were placed face up on the horizontal shelf and exposed to the warm natural light flooding the atrium through the building’s oculus. Despite protective glass, the installation risked the work’s integrity since the sun pouring in through the skylight would slowly bleach the ink over the course of the exhibition’s three-month run. The willingness to court the potential destruction of an art object, appropriately titled Death Sentence, through its (re)presentation is a gesture that runs through much of Vo’s practice as he commonly curates, presents, alters, and rearranges objects that are sedimented with historical, cultural, and personal significance. Rather than treating the objects assimilated into his practice as rarefied objects of value to be preserved and protected for posterity, he approaches them as things to be worked with and used in the present.²

My approach employs a soft Marxian analytic regarding notions of use and value.³ For Marx, capitalist value is largely centered on the production of commodities, or things that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. The commodification of art within the art market reflects this position, as the fetishistic assignment of value to a given work is often organized around the work’s physical presence as an enduring art object: something that is to be preserved, rather than used. In Vo’s practice, there is consistent refusal to preserve the commodity/art object as he purchases objects on the market before converting them back into “use values” that he consumes within his own practice. This move doesn’t necessarily subvert or resist the logic of the market, but it does invert and queer these logics as, for example, he cannibalizes these works into his broader practice, before returning them to the market to sell at a dearer rate. But in making use of them, he may alter or even, depending on one’s perspective, destroy, if not kill, them.

To make the wall-mounted installation Lot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs (2013), for example, Vo purchased at auction two chairs that Jackie Kennedy had given to Robert McNamara. McNamara was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Kennedy gave the chairs to McNamara following the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy, the president who oversaw the war’s commencement. A refugee of the war, Vo disassembled the chairs and displayed their leather upholstery, padding, and desiccated wooden skeletons as a deconstructed sculptural arrangement. Refusing to freeze these historically overdetermined objects in time, Vo makes use of the chairs in a fashion that rescues them from becoming nostalgic, nationalist relics, while transforming them into a still-life spectacle of vengeful, anti-imperial critique, annihilating and exposing their previous form. By acquiring these historically and ideologically charged objects only to dismantle them, the artist coolly and violently confronts the equally destructive legacy of “Camelot,” before breathing new life into these objects for and in his critical present.

As Vo makes (new) use of and (re)presents objects that are tethered to converging sites of death and mourning (the abstract scale of the death and destruction of Vietnamese life during the war alongside the intimate grieving practices of the people who designed and executed the war), he confronts the spectator with the compresence of life and death and, similarly, a mutually implicated relationship between creation and destruction. These pairs do not form oppositional binaries, but instead are resolved into a state of constant, co-constitutive relation. Life with death, creation with destruction.

Exposing Death Sentence to the sun might have destroyed the work, but it was not the Guggenheim’s to destroy. The piece was on loan from The Museum of Modern Art, which, in 2010, acquired Death Sentence along with two of Vo’s other works. For that acquisition, Vo’s gallery supplied MoMA with an invoice doubling as the artist’s certificate of authenticity, a copy of Phung’s text, an appendix with a bibliography of the five texts comprising the work, and instructions for manufacturing the custom wood, glass, and metal cabinet to be used for its display.⁴

Through the certificate of authenticity, Vo cites the conceptual practice of one of his major influences, Félix González-Torres (1957–1996), who often supplied collectors with certificates of authenticity and instructions for assembling his work, thus forgoing the delivery of an enduring art object. The work’s life, in such pieces, need not exist as ossified commodity. It may exist instead, when it is staged or performed in a given time and place and in relation to a specific public.⁵ As a conceptual work, however, Death Sentence is distinguished by the presence of an enduring object as its central component: Phung’s text. Unwilling to risk the destruction of MoMA’s property via the artist’s ongoing use of the work at the Guggenheim, it was decided that for this particular installation, Phung would produce a new copy of the text, which would be subject to slow death by ultraviolet bath. MoMA would retain its “original.”⁶ By having his father produce another copy, one fated for destruction by way of the Guggenheim’s oculus, the artist quietly questioned where the work lives or even what MoMA has purchased. Does the museum own the concept for the piece, it’s schematics, Phung’s first sixty-page copy of the manuscript, the right to materialize the work, or some combination of these and other elements? Further, the solution worked out for the Guggenheim exhibition raised the question of whether the work could ever truly be possessed or destroyed. I am less interested in resolving these questions than I am in the way Vo’s practice consistently raises them. As he does so, he places pressure on a conception of “value” that is grounded in the preservation of the art object as commodity, and suggests instead a notion of art as a ceaselessly unfolding process/practice of mutually implied creation and destruction. One that appropriates objects and artworks to use and consume them in the making of new work. The impulse is not merely, or not always, destructive.⁷ Rather, it may be instructive insofar as it teaches a powerful set of lessons about living with destruction, if not the universal death sentence that accompanies all forms of living.

It is significant that Phung produced Death Sentence with the same ink and calligraphic style that he used for another ongoing collaboration with his son, 2.2.1861 (2009).⁸ For this latter work, which is also on paper, Phung reproduced a letter sent from French missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard to his father on the event of his beheading, having been condemned to death by the Vietnamese crown for illegal proselytization. In it, Vénard writes that “all [involved] regret that the law of the kingdom condemns me to the death sentence.”⁹ It is dated January 20, 1861. The artwork’s title refers to the fact that the letter was received by the father some days later, after his son’s death, on February 2, 1861. The piece is editioned, but the edition will only be defined by the conclusion of Phung’s own life. As Vo writes, “My father will write this letter repeatedly until he dies,” suggesting that the work itself is a kind of “death sentence.”¹⁰ The number of editions will be determined by the number of times the piece is purchased until Phung dies. MoMA acquired Death Sentence for its collection together with an edition of 2.2.1861. When displayed in relation to Death Sentence, as it did in the Guggenheim’s rotunda in Take My Breath Away, the two works offer a profound meditation on the compresence of a multitude of unfolding presents with the finitude of death: that is, not life versus death, but the mutual implication of life and death (as well as creation and destruction) with each other.

The origins of Death Sentence are based in Vo’s friendship with Ault, one born from the grounds of queer of color loss. González-Torres died in 1996 at age thirty-eight amid the first waves of the AIDS crisis. He has been a major influence on Vo’s practice, and the two share a set of formal and autobiographical similarities. Both are artists who deploy sculptural, conceptual, and performance dynamics in their practices, just as both are queer men and refugees of the Cold War (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively) who incorporate autobiographical matter into their work. But by the time Vo encountered the work of this queer ancestor, or Cold War cousin, González-Torres was already dead.

Ault was one of González-Torres’s dearest friends and collaborators. They worked closely together and, in 1987, Ault helped recruit him to join the conceptual art collective Group Material. In the early 2000s, Ault was briefly in residence in Denmark, where Vo’s family settled after escaping Vietnam by boat when he was a child. He sought her out with questions about González-Torres’s practice and process. According to Vo , she was interested in what the “next generation” of artists would do with González-Torres’s legacy. She was immersed in editing her 2006 compendium Felix González-Torres¹¹ and the two began a dialogue regarding González-Torres. This dialogue led to a deep and ongoing friendship.¹²

As he was preparing for his landmark 2009 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Where the Lions Are, Vo invited Ault to write a text for the exhibition catalogue. She was unsure at first, but they agreed to meet at a film festival in Argentina where they continued the exchange. Of the trip he remembers only the consuming nature of their conversations at the hotel and the films. Ault would later reflect that “the period was exuberant and exhausting; we thrived on and suffered from utter mental saturation.”¹³ From the exchange, Ault curated the five texts to be reproduced at the catalogue’s conclusion in lieu of the traditional catalogue essay, titling her contribution “Death Sentence.” Doing so, she sought to avoid the exegetical form that is the norm for the catalogue essay: “It didn’t ring true for me to interpret or explain Danh’s work. It didn’t make sense to have something like a unified narrative.”¹⁴ Rather, and in Vo’s own words, he “wanted a text that I could use for the future . . . something to learn from. That you can carry with you. I think that’s also what I mean when I think of artwork. No? It just sits there and you keep thinking about it.”¹⁵ Sharing the desire for a text that could be worked with and used over time, rather than explaining and fixing Vo’s work in time, Ault chose texts that “bore a kind of analogic . . . significance to Danh’s way of thinking and working . . . because of the way that they would, together, as a whole, configure, not diagram, but begin to configure, or suggest, a kind of unfolding of the cosmology of Danh’s practice.”¹⁶ Her hope that Vo would continue to work with the texts bore immediate fruits as he absorbed them into a new piece, also titled Death Sentence, which was first displayed at Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2009 before being purchased by MoMA in 2010.

Reading the five texts in sequence, one finds a wide range of resonances with Vo’s practice. In a lushly poetic fragment from a California land survey, for example, one catches descriptive language that seems presciently relevant to Vo’s conceptual approach. The author, John McPhee, lyrically narrates the earth’s story through the analogy of furniture housed in an attic, all in different styles and from different eras. Resonating with Vo’s practice of curating and (re)presenting objects amid shifting contexts and points of reference, McPhee writes that one tells such objects’ stories by moving “backward through shifting space to differing points in time,” before consoling the reader by telling them that “you can’t see the story whole. You cannot tell when each of these items has come, any more than its maker could have known where it would go.”¹⁷ This emphasis on subjective experience and contextual meaning making not only points to Vo’s methods, but also resonates with tactics deployed by Ault and Gonzalez-Torres (as evidenced in Group Material’s seminal AIDS Timeline of 1989).¹⁸

A fragment from an essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in turn, dissects the cinematic footage of Kennedy’s assassination. Reading the footage, Pasolini describes the way a sequence of cinematic shots form a multitude of unfolding, subjective presents. Through the effects of montage, he writes, “We obtain a multiplication of ‘presents,’ as if an action, instead of unfolding only once before our eyes, unfolded more times.”¹⁹ The act of cinematic editing (of editing the multiplication of presents into a single, streamlined sequence) will, in turn “render the present past”just as death provides a completed form for a life that is, until that point, unfixable and multitudinous potentiality.²⁰ The Pasolini fragment closes with the insistence that, “It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, because, so long as we live, we have no meaning, and the language of our lives . . . is untranslatable; a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations and meanings without resolution. . . Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives.”²¹ As curator Katherine Brinson has noted, Vo’s studied interest in questions of death, and his deconstruction of the binary that divides life from death, appear resonant with Pasolini’s conclusion. In her reading of Death Sentence, Brinson remarks, “In an oeuvre predicated on a belief in the incommensurable vagaries of lived experience and the flickering instability of the self, death finally arrests this ceaseless flux and is a perpetual, countering presence in the work.”²² Death functions in two competing ways here. Death is that which arrests the arc of a particular life, but it is also a kind of continuance: what Brinson describes as this “perpetual, countering presence” of death in the mix with the living.²³

By refusing to provide a “unified narrative” of Vo’s practice by way of an exegetical text for Where the Lions Are, Ault sought to avoid the trap of fixing or killing the work. Instead, she provided Vo with a text (or a sequence of five texts) that could continue to live and work for him: “My hope is that ‘Death Sentence’ is something that Danh continues to read and delve into” as the text’s meanings transform and take on new life across different spaces, times, contexts, and utilizations.²⁴ So doing, it is inevitable that old meanings might be destroyed or killed off, making way for new points of connection and entry to emerge. This is a process of living, where death and destruction are not anathemas to life, but “a perpetual, countering presence” within it. ²⁵ This might suggest that when Vo exposed Death Sentence to the destructive rays of the sun, his aim was not to slay the work. In some ways, by becoming a rarefied art object acquired by MoMA and held in its collection, the piece had already been killed. By exposing it to the sun, giving it a new purpose, and giving it away to a new public, Vo sought to give it a new use, to find new life, as his work often does, in a seemingly dead and inert thing.

Vo once remarked to me, “The art world thinks I destroy things.”²⁶ He didn’t finish the thought, but I inferred that he understood this particular “unified narrative” of his practice as incomplete, if not inaccurate. Death and destruction are not, within his work, finite or conclusory. They are not the period delimiting the end of a (death) sentence. They are, instead, a part of the ceaselessly unfolding project of living. Rather, and in keeping with something Sigmund Freud once argued, death here does not run counter to life, so much as it is the realization of life’s aim.²⁷ That is, living is, always and at the same time, a process of dying, and all living matter ultimately comes from, and returns to, the pregnant nothingness that we sometimes call “death.” To put a work of art to use in the present, and presence of the living, as Vo often does, is to risk altering it and wearing it out, if not rendering it vulnerable to death and destruction. But Vo’s work is often an invitation to experience a shift in perspective. Seen otherwise, what appears to be destruction might be an invitation to come to terms with the fact that destruction and death are perpetual companions to creation, life, and the art of living on. As we are all sentenced to die, a death sentence need not necessarily be the opposite of living. As Death Sentence reminds us, it is the art of living with death that gives the act of living on meaning, substance, and stakes. A death sentence, in other words, is a precondition for More Life. It is the negotiation of this contradiction that gives life, and perhaps art, its force of power in the world.

(Boundless thanks to Danh Vo, Julie Ault, Marta Lusena, Binghao Wong, Susan Homer, and Daisy Matias (for excellent research support).

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Born in Kampala, Theresa Musoke began her artistic practice in the early 1960s, and to this day, continues to make art with the tenor, range, and mastery of many African modernists of the postwar era. Her work can appear synonymous with postwar African art and has been described by scholars such as Margaret Nagawa³ and George William Kyeyune⁴ as engaging fauna, wildlife, and abstraction. Musoke’s reputation as an artist has rested on the academic training she received in various institutions in Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Arguably, the dominant theme running through literature on Ugandan and East African art more broadly is the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts and its aesthetic pedagogy.⁵ It is easy to see Musoke’s excellent draftsmanship, which has been described as her art’s “sweeping brush stroke,”⁶ but when we step away from the academicism of her art, it is clear that her investment in and concept of the wild are more broadly inspired than merely an academic exercise would suggest. Her visual treatment of wildlife, in its illuminating and vociferous activity, recalls the interiority of postwar artists in Uganda, particularly through what I refer to as her imaginative and surreal imagery. While I do not subscribe to a singular definition of surrealism, I claim the imaginative, meditative, poetic, animist, and psychological as descriptive of Musoke’s surrealist art.

In this short paper, I challenge the claim that Musoke began working with nature and the concept of the wild during the mid-1970s in Nairobi, Kenya,⁷ clarifying their presence in her aesthetic trajectory and artistic practice as early as 1963. To give a concise biography, Musoke entered the Makerere Art School in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962.⁸ Makerere University was widely known at the time (and in subsequent years) as the “Harvard of Africa.” Between 1962 and 1965, Musoke made waves at the art school and larger university campus by winning a painting prize, and working on a public mural commission for the old girl’s dormitory at Mary Stuart Hall, which was completed in 1953, and extensions made in 1958 that include a common room.⁹ She went on to earn a diploma from the Royal College of Art in London in 1967. By 1970, Musoke was in the United States pursuing an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Uganda in 1972. Upon her return, she taught at the Makerere Art School for two years before leaving for Kenya, where she taught at Kenyatta University. Musoke permanently returned to Uganda in 1997. Since then, she has maintained a studio-gallery in her home, where she continues to practice painting, drawing, and printmaking.

During World War II (1939–45)

The prevailing dark mood in East African art emerged in the 1940s within the context of World War II. For example, several works made in 1941 by Gregory Maloba (1922–2007), a pioneer modernist in East Africa, clearly reflect the mood of the time.¹⁰ This mood lent itself to folklore. Maloba used the myth of walumbe (death) in his 1941 wood sculpture Death, and similar references to mythology can be traced in the work of many Makerere artists. The emergent Makerere style is evidenced in the work of Maloba and his contemporaries—including Sam James Ntiro (1923–1993), whose 1956 oil painting Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride at Night is in MoMA’s collection—who are considered the first group of Makerere Art School artists. The emergence of the Makerere style was no doubt inspired by the teachings of Margaret Trowell and her pedagogical focus on folkloric myth. However, during and after World War II, artists working in the Makerere style generally chose somber, mournful, or terror-filled myths as sources for their imagery.

Early Years at the Makerere Art School

Theresa Musoke is no exception to the prevailing dark mood expressed in the postwar by artists in East Africa. Her earliest works, such as Anguish (1964; fig. 1) and Cat Ghosts (1962; fig. 2) reflect this somber state of mind. Although Musoke’s work in the 1960s was created in a moment of optimism, and indeed of transition, her much-discussed turn to animal imagery is consistent with the deeply meditative. For instance, her visions of birds and the wild are not “realistic” but rather taken from the imagination. In this sense, her concept of the wild is complex. Such is the case with Guinea Fowls (1963; fig. 3), which was featured in 1963 in Transition magazine. The three birds in this image all face different directions and move across the entire plane of the woodcut. Musoke’s use of space creates the impression that there is no horizon line. Her tendency to break the horizon and create compositions in which much activity takes place but isn’t fixed by a foreground and background, or sight lines, has persisted throughout her career.

In contrast to the dominant discourse on twentieth-century art in Africa, in which artists are measured by their proximity to “modern life,” artists like Musoke have produced a different picture of their experiences. If the urban is absent in Musoke’s art, and further, if her concept of the “wild” tends to be misplaced by Ugandan historians in a lineage of British or American Romanticism and its view of the sublime,¹¹ then her early 1960s Cat Ghosts (fig. 2) suggests that her concept of the wild has an affinity with a certain temperament. “Cat Ghosts” translates as emiyaayu in Luganda, and is used in this context to mean roaming or hostile spirits. Effectively, Musoke’s works confront the postwar anxieties of East Africa as it was coming out from under the clutches of British colonial rule.

The atmosphere at the art school had changed by the time Musoke was admitted as a student, when Maloba and other former students were already teaching there. She encountered a changing department, one that reflected the optimism of Ugandan independence from Britain in 1962. One may ask how the zeitgeist of transition influenced her art, and yet by her second year at the Makerere Art School, she was working with nature. In addition to Guinea Fowls, she produced Cat Ghosts in the style promoted by the art school at that time, that is, the style of artists such as Gregory Maloba, whose innovative aesthetic centered highly emotive subjects such as death and horror. The Makerere Art School, which had been in existence for almost two decades in the early 1960s, emphasized the use of myth, and these artists pushed the aesthetic further by creating aesthetic innovations that foreground the dark atmosphere of the postwar era in East Africa. While Musoke’s Guinea Fowls may not give an accurate depiction of these emotive aesthetics or the somber state of mind of the era, her later surrealist sculpture Anguish (1964; fig. 1), which was featured in 1964 in Transition magazine, does.¹² The sculpture depicts a figure whose body is visibly contorted, its face looking up into the sky and its hands loosely folded together. Its two legs are either rested or kneeling, and the work bears several hollow spaces or voids that cast shadows in sharp light, evoking the traumatic dimensions of the era. Musoke’s turn to nature in 1963 shows her resolution in establishing her own path.

After Makerere

When Musoke was at the Royal College of Art in 1967, she continued her engagement with nature and natural imagery. In The Crested Cranes, a startling beautiful print from 1967 (fig. 4), she depicted the national bird of Uganda. In this lithographic print on paper, her use of color is extravagant. The composition includes a trio of crested cranes, all of which are dancing or flapping their wings. The background is serene, depicting what could be either a clear sky or a calm sea marked by horizontal lines that extend across the plane in a way that appears more forceful. The marshland on which the cranes dance has a more rugged terrain. This work can be contextualized in the history of Ugandan art, which includes oil paintings of crested cranes by Harry Johnson, founder of the Uganda Museum (a Greek temple on Mengo hill), and more recently, works such as a large watercolor drawing of crested cranes by Taga Nuwagaba (born 1968). These works signal to the viewer that Musoke cannot be separated from the social and political history of Uganda, and that as an artist, she understands the visual iconography that has produced Uganda’s history and narrative. If, as art historian Angelo Kakande argues, Musoke did not depict politics in her art,¹³ and as art historian Margaret Nagawa states, she isn’t interested in “social issues,”¹⁴ perhaps this artwork shows us that Musoke embraces the “national” as a paradigm for art-making. Some of the other prints she produced in 1967 also incorporate birds—for example, Feed (1967; fig. 5), which depicts what I view as a reed bunting with thick brown plumage whose mouth is wide open as it reaches out for a circular piece of food. Reed buntings occur year-round in the United Kingdom and would have been a common sight when Musoke studied there.

Indeed, Musoke does not easily fit into neat boxes of social realism that depict feminist art or the incumbent postcolonial regimes. And thus, anyone turning to her art in hopes of finding a clear illustration of either postcolonial or anti-colonial political struggle, or of women’s experience and feminism will be disappointed. I believe that Musoke began to challenge realism fairly early on as a student at the Makerere Art School when, in 1962–63, she enrolled in anatomy classes. In this setting, she favored the peculiar “beautiful ugly”¹⁵ aesthetic of Gregory Maloba and Ignatius Serulyo (1937–2018), and evolved from this position to inject her own personality into her art. This includes her turn to nature as a source. It also includes her opposition to a particular brand of formalist aesthetics under the baton of Scottish artist Cecil Todd (1912–1986), who was dean of the Makerere Art School in the 1960s when Musoke was a student there.

1980s to the Present

Musoke’s art has been included in a range of important exhibitions from the 1980s onward,¹⁶ and questionably positioned within a modernist and primitivist trajectory.¹⁷ Her work of the 1980s incorporates dense imagery suspended in space. In this period, Musoke’s visual language matured to what has become her recognizable style. Her paintings from 1982 to 1986 reveal an almost complete revolt against the notion of a stable horizon line, and in Zebras (1983; fig. 6), she pushed her concept of space even further by depicting the animal figures suspended in midair. Her output from the 2000s onward has been similarly prolific.

In closing, Musoke is an artist who has carried out active intellectual opposition to dominant aesthetic ideologies, such as to the particular human anatomical pedagogies of the Makerere Art School during Todd’s tenure (although she would occasionally return to portraiture in the early 1980s and after).¹⁸ This view might be contested by art historian Kyeyune, who wrote that her rigorous formal training in subjects such as anatomy is a dominant force in her art.¹⁹ Art historian Nagawa has argued that this kind of intellectual opposition could be contextualized within the “artistic, social, and intellectual issues” that have preoccupied Ugandan women artists, who have forged largely independent careers within a patriarchal field.²⁰ Lastly, Musoke’s surreal imagery continues to be sweeping and densely psychological. Her work may parallel twentieth-century post–Independence Uganda in its breadth, and it shows an artist who has innovated her own style and aesthetic sensibility. With this innovation in mind, Musoke’s influence on East African artists, particularly with respect to the surreal landscape, is towering.

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In the festival’s affiliated exhibition of South African art, held at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana, Jantjes showed five works—including a print dedicated to Cabral alongside other images responding to the turmoil of apartheid. For Jantjes, these struggles were not unrelated, despite differing geopolitical conditions. Indeed, his early practice was clearly influenced by the ideas espoused by anti-colonial thinkers and leaders like Cabral—and Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Mondlane, and Kwame Nkrumah—whose writing, in turn, influenced the Black Consciousness movement and other anti-apartheid coalitions in South Africa. Exploring such connections through the artist’s work and writing, the present essay focuses on two screenprints that he created while in exile and presented in Gaborone—Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1) and It is our peoples (1974; fig. 2). The impact of Cabral’s theories on culture and revolution is evident in Jantjes’s multifaceted campaign in these years for what he termed “art for liberation’s sake.”⁵

Born in District Six, Cape Town in 1948, Jantjes was one of the only non-white students to attend the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where he studied graphic design in the late 1960s. However, as a student, he was subjected to increased surveillance and threats of punitive action—not just by educational authorities but also by officials of the apartheid state—on account of his outspoken politics. In the last year of his studies, Jantjes began to urgently seek asylum outside of South Africa. Finally, in 1970, he received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship and secured a spot at the prestigious Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg.

In Hamburg, Jantjes was mentored by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), Joe Tilson (born 1928; fig. 3), and Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Throughout the 1970s, he produced a prolific oeuvre of screenprints that combine archival and reportage photographs with quotations drawn from political theory, poetry, administrative records, and news articles. In each image, visual and textual passages are arranged as if torn from the pages of books or magazines and placed in dynamic juxtaposition to colorful Pop graphics. While reminiscent of the flatbed compositions common in much postwar art, Jantjes’s work departs from seemingly precedent works by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) as well as Andy Warhol (1925–1987) in its expressly communicative purpose. Indeed, he wanted to make a tangible political impact, to educate viewers on the effects of colonization across the Global South. In his writing of the era, as in his art, Jantjes frequently argued that the times simply demanded that African artists directly engage with their political condition. He claimed in 1976, for instance, that “one cannot speak of form and colour when one’s environment speaks of poverty, hunger, and death.”⁶

These values were first demonstrated in A South African Colouring Book—his earliest, and still most celebrated series of screenprints. Created in 1974–75, the suite consists of eleven images that convey different facets of the history and brutality of apartheid. It was motivated by Jantjes’s astonishment at his German peers’ lack of knowledge about the situation in South Africa. Deploying a motif evoking children’s educational materials, the prints capitalize on multiple associations implied through the use of the term “colour”—a reference to the legislation of racial identity under apartheid, for instance, or to his own designation within this system as “Cape Coloured” (evidenced by the inclusion of his own identification card in one print; fig. 4).

While living abroad, Jantjes had new access to information about anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist movements beyond South Africa. (Any speeches, news, or publications affiliated with such campaigns would have been censored by the apartheid state—although materials were still exchanged covertly among Black activist networks). In 1971, during his first year in Europe, Jantjes visited London, where he attended a public rally for Cabral. The artist was previously unfamiliar with Cabral’s revolutionary activism, and the speech made an enormous impression on him. Jantjes recalled, in particular, Cabral’s comments on the importance of language, and his democratic approach to providing political education to rural communities in Guinea Bissau. Cabral addressed individuals on the level of their own experience, rather than relying on the often-alienating parlance of academic theory. “When we began to mobilise our people,” he explained, “we couldn’t mobilise them for the struggle against imperialism—nor even, in some areas of Guiné, for the struggle against colonialism—because the people didn’t know what the words meant. . . . We had to mobilise our people on the basis of the daily realities of suffering and exploitation.”⁷

Jantjes took to heart the importance of communicating, plainly and simply, the brutal daily realities of colonized people across the world. After Cabral was assassinated by a political rival in 1973, Jantjes produced a print dedicated to his visionary leadership. Entitled It is our peoples, the work’s collagelike composition draws quotations from Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, a then-recent English-language publication of Cabral’s writing and speeches. The titular phrase, for instance, which appears in large type against a sky-blue banner, could have been lifted from any number of repeated incantations in a lecture that Cabral delivered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: “[Our] fundamental strength is the strength of the people. It is our peoples who support our organisations, it is our peoples who are making sacrifices every day to supply all the needs of our struggle. It is our peoples who will guarantee the future and the certainty of our victory.”⁸

In the print, Jantjes has nestled this text alongside photographs of both daily life and military camps in Guinea. Among these images is a portrait of a PAIGC militant in uniform, screenprinted directly from the pages of Cabral’s publication Our People Are Our Mountains (1972)—in which an English translation of the London speech that Jantjes attended is reproduced.⁹ These fragments surround a larger, solarized double-portrait of Cabral wearing his signature beanie and sunglasses. According to Jantjes, this is a photograph that he himself took of the television screen during a broadcast feature on the Guinean revolution. As such, the work is not simply an homage to Cabral’s leadership, but also a testament to the circulation and intermedial re-translation of material related to African politics—filmic negatives, for instance, that traveled from West Africa to the British press, as well as televised images made static through photographic capture, or the circulation of printed translations of words originally spoken impromptu before a crowded gathering. At the same time, Jantjes’s double-portrait of a recently-assassinated public figure clearly resonates with Warhol’s use of repetition to signal matters of real and symbolic death (or adjacency thereto) in his homages to Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Elvis Presley (figs. 5 and 6), or to the victims of car accidents, penal execution, or riot police in America.¹⁰

In the spring of 1976, this screenprint was among several shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in what was Jantjes’s first major solo exhibition.¹¹ Included works drew content from a range of geopolitical contexts, from resistance efforts waged in Namibia to the American civil rights movement (fig. 7). But again, the artist cites Cabral. In his artist’s exhibition statement, Jantjes asserts that “we have to acknowledge through our creative expression that we are prepared to participate in the kenetic [sic] processes of culture and history,” before going on to quote Cabral, who once claimed: “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived in Africa they put us into history. You are well aware that it’s the contrary—when they arrived in Africa they took us out of our own history.”¹²

Jantjes was in London when the shocking news of an event now known as the Soweto uprising was relayed across the world. For several weeks, students in the South-Western Townships near Johannesburg peacefully protested the enforcement of Afrikaans as the mandated language of instruction in South Africa—a law that further disenfranchised the country’s African populations. On June 16, 1976, demonstrators were met by a militarized police force who opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding countless children. For weeks, the front pages of international newspapers circulated the horrific photograph of the uprising’s first victim: thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson, carried in the arms of a frightened classmate. Captured by Black South African photojournalist Sam Nzima, the iconic image swiftly became a symbol of apartheid violence. In a matter of months, Jantjes produced several screenprints about the Soweto uprising, including No More (1977; fig. 8), City Late 26 June 1976 (1977), and Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1).

The latter is among the most impactful of these works. Featuring a cropped and doubled detail from one of journalist Peter Magubane’s photographs of the event, it depicts students fighting bullets with stones and wielding the lids of trash bins as shields. While conveying, in part, the futility of the students’ defense against police artillery, these photographs also demonstrate their resilience in protesting the discriminatory society into which they were born. Set against a bright red backdrop, with an image of barbed wire bisecting the composition, Freedom Hunters communicates a sense of urgency and pleads with audiences to recognize and protest the violence of apartheid.

Such works resonate with the media-critical Pop practices of Joe Tilson and Richard Hamilton, with whom Jantjes studied, while demonstrating the artist’s own belief in the political responsibility of post- and anti-colonial artists.¹³ As Cabral explained, the fight to reclaim one’s culture, history, and identity was as crucial to liberation struggles as the fight for legal rights. The students of Soweto demonstrated this same desire when they petitioned for an equal education. In fact, these protests were orchestrated by the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), an affiliate of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement—and Biko is well documented as having been impacted by Cabral’s activism.¹⁴ Jantjes’s familiarity and alignment with such political and intellectual networks is evident in the boldly didactic style of his early practice, and in his attention to globalized circulations of political theory. In documenting the South African struggle in connection to other struggles being waged across the continent, Jantjes raised awareness and helped galvanize support for anti-colonial causes worldwide.

It is our peoples and Freedom Hunters were both on view in Gaborone during the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival—a gathering of cultural workers invested in parsing matters of art, education, and activism. The event drew delegates from every region of South Africa, and from exile across the world, to Botswana; leading voices such as Mongane Wally Serote, Hugh Masekela, Nadine Gordimer, David Goldblatt, and Keorapetse Kgositsile were among those who debated the role of culture in the ongoing struggle for liberation. Most participants, like Jantjes, believed strongly that art would remain intertwined with politics as long as the freedom struggle remained urgent. Gordimer declared, for instance, that “if you are a committed artist you are committed to using your talents to service the cause of justice,”¹⁵ while actor Zakes Mofokeng told peers that “trying to avoid politics in art is like trying to dodge raindrops on a rainy day.”¹⁶

While the symposium and festival lasted just a week, the event was accompanied by a two-month-long exhibition of South African art at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana. Entitled Art Toward Social Development, and like the symposium and festival with which it coincided, it was one of the first and most significant occasions in which the work of both exiled and South African–based visual artists was displayed together in a “non-racial” exhibition—which, in the era’s parlance, meant it included work by South Africans classified as “black, coloured, or white” by the apartheid state. The organizers sought to represent the “entire spectrum of South African society” and to reflect a “panorama” of the nation’s creative activity.¹⁷ Significantly for Jantjes, who had not lived in his home country for more than a decade, the exhibition marked his inclusion within an emerging canon of anti-apartheid art, alongside compatriots Ezrom Legae (1938–1999), Lionel Davis (born 1936), David Koloane (1938–2019), Durant Sihlali (1935–2004), David Goldblatt (1930–2018), and Sue Williamson (born 1941), among others.

By the time of his participation in Art Toward Social Development, Jantjes was at the precipice of a major shift in style, artistic focus, and professional milieu. He moved to the United Kingdom in August 1982, and began to paint. His Korabra series, completed in 1986, comprised several large-scale acrylic paintings—texturized with sand embedded in pigment—that ruminate on the history of transatlantic slavery.¹⁸ Jantjes became increasingly interested in ancestral arts of Africa, including West African sculpture, Egyptian monuments, and Khoisan rock paintings (fig. 9). His interest in the latter, for instance, gave rise to a series of prints, paintings, and mixed-media works that overlay esoteric prehistoric imagery with indigo night skies shimmering with constellations and galactic haze. Mixed-media works such as Untitled (double canvas with sculptures) (1988; fig. 10) are remarkably enigmatic; the mystical imagery of stylized masks, natural materials including twigs, and abstracted ceramic ovoid and cubic forms make this piece virtually unrecognizable in relation to Jantjes’s polemical print practice of the 1980s. In an untitled painting from 1989 (fig. 11) , the artist paired the same mask motif—whose sharp, elongated contours are reminiscent of art produced by the Fang peoples of Gabon—with a female figure from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Such works aim to uplift the status of African art, which has so often been pushed to the peripheries while European modernists appropriated their forms.

The seeds of these later artistic inquiries are, indeed, detectable in the speech that Jantjes delivered in Gaborone, in which he made the case for centering African art in Western art education. In this presentation, he echoed Cabral’s reminder that the colonists in Africa “took us out of our own history” and honored the Soweto students’ aspirations for an Afrocentric pedagogy: “Visual art education must work to eradicate the interiorization of the western evaluation of our contemporary art. It should instil [sic] in our people a meaningful interest in their culture and art and move them to recognise these as an integral part of the nations [sic] struggle against racist domination.”¹⁹

In his practice both in and out of the studio, Jantjes fought for the decolonization of culture and education, so as to ensure that future generations would have access to African history and identity. Drawing from references to Cabral and Biko, Warhol and Tilson, he grounded this effort in his faith in the power of collectivity and global solidarity.

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Wong Binghao: In your artworks, you imaginatively congregate a diverse, cross-pollinating, and ever-changing array of intellectual and countercultural references (Black feminism, Haitian anti-colonial histories, permaculture, music, pop culture, queerness), media (sculpture, photography, video, installation, text, sound), and sensorial experiences (smell, hearing, taste, touch, emotion). You’ve described your work as a “kaleidoscopic prism with multiple entries of meanings and signs.”¹ You are an architect or facilitator of these permutations. How are these creative connections and networks important to your practice? What do they do or manifest?

Gaelle Choisne: This kaleidoscopic artistic prism is, of course, influenced by postcolonial cultural studies, where action and thought are open to a multiplicity of domains through which one can interconnect truths and experiences that will be authentic to historicity. I see this as a way of embracing the world and its complexity. I am especially interested in soliciting our wide range of cognitive and sensorial capacities. Before the Enlightenment, there already existed visions of the world that were less cut, chopped, and fragmented; science embraced astrology, chemistry, and divinatory arts. As beings belonging to a larger universe, we already exist within a network, in which all branches learn from each other. I work in a very large field of social and cultural experimentation, transmission, learning, imitation, and reproduction, and I translate it through my prism—a wide array of creation and encounters that always mixes with my intimate and personal stories. What interests me is, of course, how universes meet, dialogue, or reject each other. Everything lies in the experience. I am on the ground, I talk to people, I am interested in them, I listen to them, and I let them deploy their own creative field if we decide to work together. For instance, Temple of Love—Attente (Waiting; 2020) is a project I proposed for La Villette in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I invited students from École des Actes, a French language school for newly arrived immigrants, to produce the set design for an upcoming video work. Partnering with them during one week of a paid workshop allowed us to create a moment of intense collaboration, apprenticeship, and solidarity. Another example is Temple of Love—Atopos, presented in 2022 at MAC/VAL (Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne) in Vitry-sur-Seine near Paris, where we invited people with reduced mobility and young people from the neighborhood to attend and get involved in somatic dance sessions with choreographer and voguing yoga dancer Emanuelle Soum. I personally will be part of one of these sessions to offer moments of energetic healing and meditative relaxation.

I also create in deep relation with my spirituality and my shamanistic learning, which is growing more and more, and opens doors related to a more omnipotent intuition. In a more concrete way, I build and realize these networks with the Temple of Love project. My primary intention has always been to talk about political issues, but also to open up these issues as much as possible through forms, or situations, or devices as various as dance floors, a massage table, projection rooms, furniture . . . I put forward formal devices dealing with postcolonial and racial issues, social injustices, or issues of minoritized people, such as queer communities.

WBH: Temple of Love (2018– ) is your long-term, ongoing series of immersive and sprawling installations, each inspired by various chapters in Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). There are currently thirteen iterations. In what ways has Temple of Love changed (or not) since you first embarked on it, and why?

GC: Here is the manifesto of Temple of Love, which I wrote in 2018:

“Temple of love is an inclusive ecosystem around the notion of love.
It seemed essential to put forward the concept of love as a new political deal and to make it predominant in a heterosexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic society dominated by an authoritarian and predominantly white patriarchate. This radical, inverted communitarianism must be quickly challenged by cultural and governing institutions.
The “Temple of Love” project began in 2018–2019 in Bétonsalon in Paris, as a preface to a geographically indeterminate cycle.
It takes shape as an uninterrupted, multidisciplinary, systemic space.
The temple must be considered as a sacred space, i.e., linking the spaces of men and Gods and spiritual entities. This implies a questioning of our way of thinking about the world, the universe, the Nature that surrounds us.
It is of public utility.
It contains its own rules and customs.
It allows the questioning of the museum space as an entity coming from the colonial heritage.
The temple of love is ecofeminist by embodying a queer and therefore inclusive empowerment.

T.O.L is a space of resistance. It activates itself through meeting and sharing.

Temple of Love is defined through its modes of appearance and its genesis according to its invitations and its location. It is adaptable.

Roland Barthes’s original essay on love, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, in 1977, will guide us through each new chapter of the Temple of Love. I will adapt each chapter of the essay from the private to the public sphere.

T.O.L is a tribute to the invisible bodies, to minority and fragile souls and to dispossessed hearts.

I act as an artist and in very close collaboration with the curators to create a set of invitations for Russian dolls.
As an artist, I propose already existing works in the corpus of this project, new works produced for the new chapter, sometimes a new video referring to it.

The works correspond to functional sculptures acting at the crossroads of design, art, and architecture.
The functional aspect of the sculptures refers to a desacralization of art through the possibility of touching and using it.
What I like to highlight in the project—when possible—are the punctual or permanent invitations within the exhibition, of living or dead artists to whom I pay homage, who inspire me and whom I love: they are my “Luvs*.”“

Temple of Love is a backbone that allows me to generate all kinds of sculptural forms, design, and architecture, and above all, to create a real system of invitations, always according to geography, budget, institutional context, etc. The project has evolved considerably. The first chapter, which was presented in 2018 at Bétonsalon in Paris, was an ode to love and a response to racism in an overly burdensome, heteronormative, patriarchal system. The exhibition was sort of a preface to the project that allowed me to instill a system in which new ideas would be created with new invitations—in this case, artists, structures, philosophers, and activists such as Tarek Lakhrissi; Nadia Yala Kisukidi; Karim Kattan; or The Cheapest University; Carmen Brouard; Hessie; my mother, Marie-Carmel Brouard; Crystallmess; Eden Tinto Collins; Yu Araki; Arghtee; and more. The chaptered structure provides me with an axis of reflection, commented and completed by the invited figures. These figures are sometimes ghostlier than others—but they remain very important to me. It’s a way of highlighting my own creative process, which has always been done through tributes. Chance is also significant in my process, since each chapter exists by chronological iteration. I only read a specific chapter of Barthes’s book when I deploy a new T.O.L. iteration. I also never take the intimate context of Barthes’s love duo at face value, since I always retranslate it for a more social and political context—and at the end, the idea remains the same. Of course, Barthes is an important figure—the way he treats the emotional status as a white, homosexual man is revolutionary. But that being said, bell hooks is also a matrix figure of this evolving project. The way she speaks about love in the African American/Black community in the US is a major statement for me, which makes me consider her like a mother. So, Barthes is definitely not alone in Temple of Love. For instance, in 2019, for my reinterpretation of the “Adorable” chapter of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, I proposed a tribute to Haitian classical pianist and composer Carmen Brouard and invited the students from the Colburn School of music to re-perform her pieces. I like to mix eras and styles in order to provoke third spaces of thought and creation.

WBH: Could you describe the elements in your multisensory installation Temple of Love—Love to Love for the recent New Museum Triennial? Why did you choose a refrigerator as the “main” structure for this installation?

GC: I came up with and interpreted the statement “love to love” as an expression of the ego. In the installation, I sought to embody the destructive voice of the ego inside us—which sometimes appears to be the origin of racism. I imagined a whole journey, an initiatory route, where one would shift from the raw state of an oversize ego to a state of gratitude and unconditional love. For this peregrination, I imagined a corridor interspersed with grids and barriers that represent the imaginary obstacles of our own limiting beliefs. These were only imaginary and didn’t physically protect or block anything or anyone. Other symbolic elements also appeared. Some CNC–milled sculptures made of walnut after Paleolithic Venus figures guarded the “temple”—the future joins the past to state a time that no longer exists. From time to time, perfumed smoke is emitted from one of the shipping crates in the installation. The fragrance is about unconditional love. It has a really light and fresh smell composed with some prominent spice notes, a beautiful balance between the sky and the earth. I made it in collaboration with Morgan Courtois and called it “Corps Subtiles” (Subtle Bodies). It cleanses souls and nourishes them with unconditional love. On the shipping crates, there were images from my various travels to Haiti, Brazil, and China, which were mixed with photographs from lesbian feminist archives sourced from the Internet. These crates were functional: they once contained the entire installation, and were then transformed into artworks themselves. The ghostly Madonna, a mysterious hooded sculpture dressed in chains of black roses with many balloon-like appendages, was placed opposite the refrigerator and acted as its mirror. It is the embodiment of a wounded faith, of both a masculine and a feminine energy. This installation is very spiritual. The sage branches for purification, which I wrapped myself and stuck between the grids of the fences, act as a reminder of this. They are also a tribute to the traditional use of plants in Haiti and elsewhere.

The talking “LSD” refrigerator appeared as a strange figure from the human unconscious, fed by our emotions and fears. It spoke through an androgynous voice—my own voice, which was altered—so that gender identification would not be obvious. This sculpture speaks to our anxieties, what the media feeds us, and what feeds hate—whether it be racial or not.

It is a funny and endearing but toxic character who sees a possible door to healing. My voice also acted as a collective energy healing. This is the text “spoken” by the refrigerator:

“EAT ME EAT ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

E. G. O.  E. G. O.  E. G. O.  EGO

I don’t want to say my name. I prefer to stay anonymous.

I can be everyone and nobody.

I can’t describe myself. You know me already haha, yes, I’m those energy-consuming thoughts. I can’t feel the pain of your soul. I live for myself and only for myself.

I live for myself and only for myself. I’m satisfied when I’m right. I help you wear masks. I’m sure it’s the only way to protect you. I know it’s also a way to feed your wounds. The more you ignore me, the more I exist in you. Of course I love to be complimented and to be recognized. I’ll use every method to get more compliments hahaha hum hum hum . . . Hum, I am a stranger who has lived in your soul for so long that you have forgotten about me. You have become homeless in your own home.

You feed me easily when someone hurts you. I’m so proud, not humble at all, I love comparing everything and judging everything. Hahahaha that’s my funny game.”

WBH: How does your relationship with Haiti and the diaspora influence your work (or not)?

CG: My relationship with Haiti is quite complex. I discovered the country really late. The only connection I had to it was through my mother and my aunts, their expressions and behaviors, the Creole language used sometimes at home, and most of all the food. I went to Haiti for the first time in 2012, and it came as a double shock.

The first shock was my understanding of how my work was connected to this country without even knowing it. This organized chaos, this baroque and variegated way that I create forms and installations; the fragility of things, their ghostly presence, suspended in time and ready to disappear, in a place where elements vibrate singularly before our eyes. Colors, odors, landscapes, ways to do things and know-how—everything felt so close and yet so far.

The second shock was to discover a country still standing up after an earthquake that tore cities and families down. Haiti is brave. She never has time to recover: dangers and disasters are always at her front door. Despite multiple jeopardizing scenarios, the country has a strong and intense philosophy of life based on the importance of existence.

I’m also inspired by Haiti’s history and its stories, from urbanism to Haitian and voodoo culture. One can see these themes and topics in many ways in my work. Photography took on a new meaning when I went there for the first time. I wanted to offer images of the country that were deeper than the journalistic and touristic points of view used in Europe. Sharing and re-creating bonds between my personal, fragmented life and this Haitian life brought a lot of answers. It’s a concentrate of world diplomacy, in which one can quickly and intensely witness the direct consequences and repercussions of capitalism, international corruption, and political dishonesty. Haiti is also the embodiment of cultural blending. It is a country invented by colonization, where cultures and customs interwove themselves through slaves who came from all across Africa—but, most importantly, from Congo and Benin. This diversity and cultural interweaving take root in my work.

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