New spaces for art and artists in Africa.

While new spaces and exhibitions of contemporary African and diaspora art are sprouting throughout the northern hemisphere, this globalizing phenomenon has had a certain spillover in Africa. But what is the nature of these new spaces down south? What messages do they project and whose visions of the world do they embody?

In Luanda, a place where I spent much time between 2000 and 2003, there were many who called themselves artists of various types. Exhibitions and performances were sporadic, poorly advertised but inevitably recorded on camera by the national TV network. Whether in a restaurant, cafe-bar, the beach, a private abode, or some official cultural venue, the glaring lights were everpresent, tracking potentially significant figures for history. The civil war was waged until 2002 and Luanda was a city characterized by oil-wealth ostentatiousness, on the one hand, and devestating impoverishment, on the other.

Within this fragmented urban milieu, the petrodollar opened the doors to a few flashy, privately owned spaces where only a small portion of the elite came to admire whatever was the flavor of the moment, as well as themselves. But these slick, lifeless venues were not the sites of particular action. Dialogue, exchange, confrontation, and even conflict resounded behind Luanda's crumbling walls, the ruins of the past. Among these, UNAP (National Union of [Plastic] Visual Arists), founded in 1977 on the Soviet model, and Elinga, a multicultural alternative space, are cases in point. Both are housed in the types of decaying places ravaged by time, neglect, and socio-political circumstance (Fig. 1) that Jean-Loup Amsell claims fuel and nourish the Western imagination (2005:39). These, he says, are the places of exploration and adventure that contrast to the museified, sterile, and lifeless Western settings (ibid.).

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It is of little surprise that the editorial team of the Revue Noire emerged from the exploration of this context with one of the stars on their list of Angolan artists, namely, Paulo Kapela (Fall 1998), who was subsequently sent orbiting by Njami with the "Africa Remix" blockbuster. In 2007 we even found one of Kapela's installations carefully assembled at the "Luanda Pop" African pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

From the outset Kapela was identified as a self-made "artist" and recognized for his so-called multimedia "installations" that include religious images, political posters, plastic flowers, candles, etc. (Fig. 2). Like other visionaries such as Georges Adeagbo or Zinsou (Fall and Pivin 2001:130, 140), and in keeping with the trend of aesthetisized recycling of scrap, Kapelas work was exported from the underworld of Luanda, framed within different spatial perimeters, and recontextualized for Western museum consumption. It is strange that Njami and Pivin were at odds atone time precisely with those "curator-experts" (i.e., Jean-Hubert Martin and Andre Magnin during "Les Magiciens de la terre") who magically transformed craftsmen into artists (Amselle 2005:141).

Njami was also the one who reacted, more recently, to the "fictionalization of reality" by the media; but what about the fictionalization of Kapela (2005:13)? The Kapela I knew, or Maitre Kapela, as we called him, lived in the dungeons of UNAP, with cracking floorboards and walls, mildew, and the total absence of modern facilities. His quarters were accessed via a side door leading into a small courtyard full of debris and the stench of urine. From there, a wide staircase led through a series of vast spaces in an advanced state of decay and full of all manner of accumulation. Among this assortment were Kapela's installations, and in the smaller areas, walled off with cardboard, cloth, corrugated iron, and other salvage materials, his mattress. Yes, this was indeed the place where he slept and not a part of an installation or any other aesthetic construct of his "studio-sanctuary," as Revue Noire editors speculated (Fall 1998:15).

Kapela was certainly a well known figure in central Luanda. He provided hope and guidance to young aspiring artists and musicians; he sheltered the street boys who came to sleep off their drug doses as well as the policemen from the nearby station who flopped out to smoke or sniff whatever.

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So who was this man before the arrival of Revue Noire? He was, in fact, a fugitive, a displaced person in his own country. He is a Mukongo from Uige, in the north of Angola, and as such an "undesirable" to the Dos Santos regime. He is principally Francophone and speaks and writes Portuguese with difficulty. Kapela's installations are private altars, as noted correctly by Revue Noire (Fall 1998:15), but they are also, and more importantly, protective devices that have allowed him to survive and to stave off harrassement. They are accumulations of diversified and opposing images and objects that combine past and present, official and unofficial, re-ordering and re-creating another, personalized and safe spatio-temporal "elsewhere".

Lenin, Che Guevara, Aogostinho Neto, and even Dos Santos picture among stars such as Julio Inglesias (Fig. 3); biblical imagery is set alongside representations of the kianda mermaid cult figure (Fig. 4; see Hersak 2008:344-48). Even Kapelas discourse is similarly disjointed and ecclectic in keeping with the visual display. (1)

Kapela's world is not a utopia; it is a real place but its private geographical configuration exists outside territory and is something like a "non-place" or "out-of-place" of supermodernity, as Auge might say (1995:111-13). Perhaps better yet, it may be considered a "heterotopia" a term coined by Foucault (1967) and discussed in relation to places in Kinshasa by De Boeck (2004:254-57). As the latter explains, heterotopias are "places where it is possible to think or to enact all the contradictory categories of a society simultaneously, spaces in which it is possible to live heterogeneity, difference, alterity and alternate ordering" (ibid, p. 254). Such counter-places stimulate the imagination but they are all different, socioculturally specific, and therefore, I believe, not transposable.

Paulo Kapela has graciously accepted the slicing up of his private world and its exportation. In truth he is somewhat bemused by this, as he attributes more importance to his Poto-Poto style painting that depicts emblematic imagery of African villages, markets, masks, and animals in geometric or stick-like configurations. (2) As for Luandans, all this is of little significance, and I suspect that it is simply an embarrassing exposure of misery.

In the last few years much has happened in Luanda, largely due to the internationally renowned Angolan artist and curator Fernando Alvim. A triennial took place in 2006, the Sindika Dokolo collection (formerly that of Hans Bogatzke) has been relocated to the Angolan capital, and the new Museum of Contemporary Art is soon to open. The emergent new spaces are intended to give Luanda visibility and as such will, no doubt, be the antithesis of Kapela's underworld, providing trendy Western models to behold. What effect will this have on the already existing multi-tracked, divided Luandan world? Will art be a unifying factor as is hoped or will it simply mirror further social fragmentation and inequality?

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References

Amselle, Jean-Loup. 2005. EArt de la Friche: Essai sur l'Art Contemporain Africain. Paris: Flammarion.

Auge, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso. Work originally published in French in 1992.

De Boeck, Filip, and Marie-Francoise Plissart. 2004. Kinshasa: Tales of an Invisible City. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa; Ludion: Vlaams Architec tuurinstituut Vai.

Fall, N'Gone. 1998. "Luanda, Artes Plasticas/Fine Arts." Revue Noire 29:2-27.

Fall, N'Gone, and Jean-Loup Pivin (dir). 2001. Anthologie de l'Art Africain de XXe Siecle. Paris: Editions Revue Noire.

Foucault, Michel. 1967. "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias" www. foucault.in fo/documents/heteroTopia/Accessed March 14, 2007.

Hersak, Dunja. 2008. "Mami Wata: The Slippery Mermaid Phenomenon." In Sacred Waters, Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Henry J. Drewal, pp. 338-48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mount, Marshall Ward. 1973. African Art, the Years Since 1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Njami, Simon. 2005. "Introduction: Un Autre Monde/ Another World". In Vies Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie. Bamako: Ministere de la Culture du Mali and Afriqueencreation.

Roberts, Allen, and Mary Nooter Roberts. 2006. "Voire la Ville Invisible." Politique Africaine 100:177-97.

Notes

This short paper was presented during Museum Day at the z4th Triennial Symposium on African Art, March 28-April 1, 2007, at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

(1) As Allen Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts (2006:182-84) have shown, this ecclectic juxtaposion of heroic "messengers" in an "unofficial," personalized re-ordering of social history is also conspicuous in the murals of Pape Samb or "Papisto Boy;' a Senegalese Mouride visionary. Papisto's painting on the walls in the public spaces of Dakar is a devotional act to Sheik Amadou Bamba which emerged with the "Set-Setal" youth movement in the 1980s that sought to deconstruct and reinvent an alternative heritage through its street art.

(2) Poto-Poto is the naine of a suburb in Brazzaville as well as that of an art school begun there by Pierre Lods in 1951 (see Mount 1973:83 89).

DUNIA HERSAK is Associate Professor of African Art History at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Overseas Exhibition Review Editor for African Arts. [e-mail]