Presence of a Fundamental Absence
The synchronicity of the events that shape our lives is absolutely impressive if you think about it. Everything is connected. The common thread, the pattern of relationships between circumstances, things and people in space and time, goes back much further than we usually think. For example, if in September 1997 I hadn't gone to Côte d'Ivoire to take part in the Daro Daro international artistic residency (organized under the aegis of a collective of Ivorian artists), the Senegalese that i'm would never have met the African-American artist Muhsana Ali. If I hadn't come to Philadelphia, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to be introduced to alternative mosaics by Isaieh Zaggar in 2004. We wouldn't have been able to create a large mosaic work on the wall of the Center d'Art Kër Thiossane in Dakar during the 2012 biennial. It was during the inauguration of this mural that I met Gabriela Salgado, an art historian from Argentina, who invited me to take part in an artist residency at Más Arte Más Acción in Colombia.
It was a Colombian contemporary art magazine that allowed Professor Tukufu Zuberi to interview me in 2014.
I answered these questions in the hangar of the Center for Art and Holistic Development that Muhsana and I have been running since 2005 in Mbodiène on the small Senegalese coast. It was a particularly interesting interview in the sens that, in response to questions that were asked, consistent answers were given. We talked a lot about the work we're doing in our part of the world. As a result, Tufuku called me again at the beginning of 2019 to ask me to contribute a proposal to the exhibition he was putting together for the Penn Museum's African gallery in Philadelphia.
As a couple of artists, we proposed to create an installation that would establish a multi-dimensional conversation with the collection of traditional African objects that will be in the African gallery. Our proposal had the advantage of coming from two artists who came respectively from the continent and the African diaspora. t's clear that moving ancient African objects obeys the same logic that has seen Africa despoiled of all its resources (human, material, cultural and spiritual).
The idea behind this exhibition is how to show, in a different and more timely way, objects that have been taken out of their original contexts and presented with narratives that are mostly creations from the minds of Western intellectuals to reinforce the image of an Africa that has nothing to do with the reality of the essence of its existence, of its intrinsic specificity. Like information, which is only a data when taken out of context, the creation of traditional African objects found the full meaning of the justification for their existence in the actual role they played in the lives of the people who gave them form, and enabled them to sacralize and witness an important moment in their community life.
To participate in this exhibition, with a collaborative work of contemporary art, is to work to correct and refine the perception that has been theoretically perverted by generations of intellectuals and academics who, often in good faith, have perpetuated an erroneous image of Africa. It's about objects, territories, mobility, displacement, dubious transactions, the mark of time and space (of origin and of reception), paternity and paternalism - in short, all the ingredients that make globalization a space of hegemony, economic domination and intellectual enslavement. The accumulation of objects is one of the essential hallmarks of so-called "advanced and progressive" societies. We are invaded and submerged by a tide of objects whose lifespan is deliberately limited, while the planet that gave birth to them is an inheritance we can't be sure of bequeathing to future generations.
We're trying to establish a visual conversation between truly ancient objects that are truly priceless, and recent objects that are worthless, destined to age and become obsolete very quickly, with no chance of surviving the test of time, despite their great capacity for proliferation on every continent, especially our own. The circulation of objects and ideas is much more guaranteed by so-called globalization than that of human beings. When people move around with their habits and customs, their natural specificities, this becomes problematic. Differences are normally enriching for others.
​
What about the spirit that prevailed at the time of the creation of traditional African objects, captive to the truncated narratives that made them prisoners of prestigious Western institutions? If we had access to this spirit, it would tell us a lot about the rhythm of life and the context that prevailed at the time. The young/old or old/young objects in our installation, as well as the objects in the exhibition collection, have something in common. They all carry traces of the energy and spirit of the place (context) in which they were born, and where the rhythm of life has manipulated them for various reasons (spiritual, cultural, economic and commercial).
We try to make present a fundamental absence.