HOME collective contemporary art exhibition

HOME

“One day there will be a place for us, a place called home”. – PJ Harvey – Home is a departure. Change is a beginning.

By essence, we are not born to live enclosed in one identity and in a way, the idea of the self is a dellusion as the construction of one’s personnality is evolving through encounters to become a synthesis of what has been given, received and taken. But if we elevate the debate, in reality, what we call identity is not essential if we are all passers-by.

For children, the curiosity is inate and should be fed all along the life.

Nothing should impede the will to know and discover. But when we grow up, breaks and set ideas start to hold up the impulse to venture into the unknown and the undiscovered. It is as if something powerful and frightening inhibits our aim to go for something different and nothing is as constant as change.

Migratory flux is a metaphor of the inner travel to the other in the personal construction of self. A culture, similar to an individual is naturally evolving and enriching in the contact of others. But the more we close the borders, the more people will settle. The more we open them, the more we free the natural circulation of migration and the possibility to rise.

But we have to be conscious of the complexity of our modernity because to live with others supposes shared origins in vulnerability. This vulnerability has to be understood as a way to weave links and create solidarity, not to destroy. The history we have been given relies on ignorance, omissions and failures. Now we have to stitch all those discontinuities and breaches to create a common world, however fragile and precarious it may be – that depends on the will, choice, imagination and creativity of humanity.

Despite growing demonstrations of protectionism, nationalism and racism, there will always be only one world. We are all interested parties and it is time to redefine what is common between us. I am, you are, we are… travelers, still on the way, we don’t know when we will arrive. Change is our home, change is THE beginning. And the reality of our new community with the same destiny will overcome the cult of difference.

Paul Ndunguru Paul’s art work is derived by the current issue on immigrants. In Tanzania, immigrants has been an issue for over 30 years now. The country receive refugees from Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. It has been a big challenge for a underdeveloped country to host thousands of immigrants but yet the country does. The theme of immigration carries the whole idea of creating dialogs and platform of communication for humanity. There is a saying in Swahili which is “mgeni aje mwenyeji apone” meaning “hosting a guest can bring you a good reward”.

Cold Feet, is an installation work using stiffened socks, displayed as if walking somewhere, and intended to deal with the unpredictable and challenging, yet beautiful, joyful and rewarding character of migration. The Word Immigrant has a different perceptions now to the extent that it change its meaning from immigrant to refugee. The homophobic behavior we have towards the immigrant is caused by the fear of the unknown and this is due to a luck understanding of others personalities. It is the fact that each one of us have tresses of many generations that we have immigrate from one place to another, to find a better place or better life, it can be for instance one moving from village to the big city or from one country to another Immigrating it is our nature.

Rehema Chachage A whisper for Nankondo Nankondo, my great grandmother, I never met you. Nor did your grandchildren.

But this I know. If your spirit was released from your physical bondage as I believe it did, you must have joined the army of my ancestral spiritual guardians. Thus, I can rightfully commune with you as I do now. I am sure your spirit made its way home, for if spirits earn their release after departing from the bodies they are twinned with in life, where else would yours rather be than among your people; where you are still remembered by offspring of the only daughter you left behind, my grandmother Demere.

I don’t have to tell you Demere is my namesake, I being the first daughter of her last born son. Unlike your daughter, I grew up wrapped in the care and guidance of my mother. In contrast, growing up without your motherly guidance your daughters spirit withered, constantly hungry for news, any news that could help her make sense of what took you from her at such a tender age. She was ready to believe anything people told her, good or bad. In the process, she fed into fable given with evil intent. Don’t take it the wrong way, she was only five, poor thing.

What they said to her stuck to her, gnawing her heart and generated a loath for herself and the very memory of you. How cruel!

This adage that every cloud has a silver lining makes sense however, because the little I now know of you comes from a seed of doubt she planted in my mind, leading me in a quest to get to the bottom of whatever it was that made her think of herself and you the way she did. I figured out that there must be a real

story masked beneath the story they gave her as the reason for your abduction.

I writing to you now about it so that in your spirit form you may cleanse us from its shame; release us from its guilt; and if you can find it in your heart to forgive us, then heal us from its pain; not the physical one, but its emotional and psychological pain that is leading us to self-loath and spiritual abyss. But I am writing to you not only about that‌ I am also writing you about the brutality of whatever social system it was that snatched people from their families at gun point, severing the bond between mothers and their children, forcing spirits to take flight from their shrines, and uprooting people from their ancestral lands. I am writing to you not only about that, but also about the cruelty with which it created an episteme and generated a corpus of knowledge and a spiritual realm that made it look, feel and sound natural for a certain kind of people; my kind of people to languish in servitude for centuries to enrich another kind of people; for a promise of salvation in the thereafter. A system that has continued to pervert the collective psyche of the modern world like an insignia of a heretic world order built on a hierarchy of hues, beliefs and deity; with structures and relations changing only in name and tactics, refusing to relent no matter how much blood is spilt. I am not only writing to you about all that‌.I am also writing to you about the grave silence with which those you left behind coped with that inhuman episode in their cultural history. The manner in which they tried to distance themselves from it hoping it would cleanse them from its stigma; and the depth with which they sunk into a spiritual chaos expressed in such madness no diviner seems capable to exorcize.

I am also writing to you about the five years’ old daughter you left behind amidst a cowed and defeated people; who made an effort to cope with the shame of

their disrupted life by manufacturing lies that set them apart from those they sacrificed to the hungry monsters named Valungwana. These are the people who roamed the plains of Asu land and captured any woman, man and child that crossed paths with them alone and unarmed. The fable created for you is that you caused your own captivity. This may be unpleasant news to you I know, but I am compelled to tell you anyway that your daughter grew up believing you could have dodged your captors had you not been a woman of low morals. Why, because you decided to sell beer in a room full of men, refusing to leave until it is sold out. This was in Kimunyu, a weekly market, twenty miles away from your home village where you and your mountain folks battered farm produce for manufactured goods. Like a rape victim blamed of enticing the rapists, you became a scapegoat and your daughter had to bear the brunt of collective shame as the only memory of having had a mother.

Your daughter survived even if her spirit did not thrive. For a five years old made to doubt the moral integrity of her own mother; her ngasu and form of worship disparaged and the very sense of belonging as equal and rightful occupants of planet earth questioned, I would say she was resilient. You will be proud to know that she did not forsake her indigenous form of worship to the very end.

Conniving agents of the foreign spirits gave her an ablution and a baptismal by emersion in a bathtub week before her demise. As a skunk stalking its pray, they pursued her to the very end. By then however, she was too far gone, only body and not her spirit partook in the ritual. Since your departure, our forms of worship has been suppressed and our way of being obliterated. Some of its oracles crossed over and have embraced the new forms; but without the cloak of rootedness they are leading their flock adrift. Š Demere Kitunga, 2016

Cloud Chatanda In this project the work of Cloud focus on the rural migration and the struggle between people and the city. How can we afford to stay in our home environment when there is a necessity to feed a family or an obligation to obey to the laws ? Our decisions sometimes depend on external factors but touch us in our personal lives. ÂŤMy work relfects the difficulties to find ways to protect the family unit while respecting the combination of individual needs. I want to create a dialogue about imaginary places and affordale living spaces that would encounter the needs, duties and desires of the people and the community.

Retirement Nyumbani ni pale moyo wako ulipo. Hali hii imetokea kwenye maisha yangu pale baba yangu alipostaafu nakuamua kuludi kijijini wakati watoto tulitaka kubaki mjini. Sababu kwa kukaakwetu mjini moyo wetu tayari ulitekwa na maisha ya mjini. Hii inanikimbusha mwanzo wafamilia yangu kugawanyika.

Home is where your heart is. This has happened in my life when my dad retired and decided to go back to the village while the children wanted to stay in the city.

The reason was our heart had already been captured by city life. This remind me the beginning of my family split. Retirement check.

Taken to capital Nyumbani kwangu nako kuliguswa na maamuzi mgumu ya serikali kuhamia Dodoma. Nibaki na familia yangu Dar es salaam tutazamane ama niende Dodoma Nilete chakula mezani. Nyumbani ni pale mkono unapoenda kinywani.

My home was also touched by the difficult government decisions to move to Dodoma. I had to decide whether to stay with my family in Dar es Salaam looking at each other or to split and leave to bring back food on the table. Home is also a place where we get our basic needs.

Byram Tunez Byram Tunez’s work lies on a crossroads of cultural and humanist circumstances, choosing an aesthetic of abstract and geometrical scheme, both bi and tridimensional, in an ambition for an universal level of understanding. Lined shapes along constructional elements are main aspects of this work, concentrating optical illusions and a constant rhythmic vibration.

As a suggestive extension in public space, these works depart and put us in front of a radical plastic formulation: drawing, sculpture, architecture and urban design combined in a bold interpretation of geometric abstraction. Principally observed in his sculpture, it produces interference between different artistic systems achieving a surprising fusion through sinthetic Cubism, Constructivism and Pop Art. The amazing shape and color distribution in an area previously analyzed, with its components derived into triangles and other volumes distributions is the result of the artist’s flirting with reality. Towards a kind of expanded view, these threedimensionality linear constructions encourage the consciousness of space.

Configured with a language that translates abstractized references to planetary cultural imaginary, theirs is an art in which his sculpture merges natural and parallel with drawing, painting, jewelry and textiles. Byram Tunez’s concept and aesthetics materializes in a style and identity that structures this late series of sculptures and installations.

It could be said that Byram Tunez’s disciplined approach to their «objects» considers negative space (lines, shades) in a way to give added value to another formal properties like transparency, or the pure void. Along this optical and sensitive estrategy, the spectator is introduced in the management of spatiality, dealing with concepts like proximity and distance, out and inside, or the perception of air or heaven.

Tunez’s hermetic simbology distinguishes lately in the city of Cologne. A book focused in recent manifestations of street art, edited by Die Kunst Agentin, presents his sculptures signed in the city’s landscape. Part of a bigger project, this modular and expanded shapes choose post-industrial areas like Mßlheim or Ehrenfeld to reinforce an open dialogue with the urban space of the german city.

These modular forms seem to make use of a sort of neural-pathway due to its mathematical and geometrical own logic which repeat patterns displayed at every scale. They are engaged with the optics of perception as to pure visuality, revealing to be inclusive and emphatic to all publics, growing spatially and poetically through its communicative and vitality potential at both sides of the Rhin river.

Fernando Moure

Ephrem Solomon and Jan Van Esch (P)RESENT When Ephrem joined Jan at his Artist Dis-Placement residency at the Red Cross in Berlin, they visited a clothing donation, collection and distribution centre. People bring their old clothes, they are selected and then handed out to those in need. Some clothes are further recycled, and put in bags labeled: ‘Shop,’ ‘Further Recycling’, ‘Summer, ’Winter’ and ‘Africa’ This last bag caught both Ephrem and Jan’s eye; what does it mean to send clothes for Africa? Although both Ephrem and Jan wear second hand clothes, and are strong supporters of recycling, there was something uneasy about the labelling. That was the start of (P)RESENT. Jan had already started drawing clothes for his residency project and even took up the activity of drawing his own garments. What he had noticed was that in every country he lived over the past twenty years, his clothes were almost like a uniform: ‘the only constant were my clothes, they are my home.’ Ephrems outfit similarly identifies who he is while travelling across the world. As both mostly wear second hand clothing, this creates a multi-layered understanding of home and belonging.

So why were these bags labelled ‘Africa’ a little unsettling? The artists went through the bags, looked at the contents and learned more about their background and they focussed on the discussion of second hand clothes donation and sales in Africa. Shortly after, Jan and Ephrem did a participatory performance where the audience dressed them from a pile of clothes from the ‘Africa’ bags, surrounded by slogans for and against second hand clothing import to African countries.

Ephrem had come to Germany with a series of eleven portraits on ten meters of paper. Together they looked for eleven garments out of the ‘Africa’ bags to ‘donate’ to each one of the portraits. That is where they noticed the foundation of the unease. The ten men portrayed are unspecified, while the clothes are specific. The donor gives a specific item to an anonymous person, an idea, an ‘other’, probably ‘the African in need’. While the receiver is in fact a person and not just a concept, and therefore neither automatically poor nor in need. And because the receiver is anonymous, he or she has no way to return the gift. And by not being able to reciprocate a gift, the receiver will be ‘in debt’ with the donor. This one direction-giving creates a power imbalance and forms something as positive as recycling and re-using in a supremacy game.

‘The Exchange of gifts and the obligation to reciprocate’ as Marcel Mauss famously wrote about, is broken in a system where the receiver cannot give back. This is typical for many forms of (development) aid, and this imbalance created the unease with Ephrem and Jan. It is not the fact of wearing second hand clothes that lowers the esteem of the person wearing it (as some of the arguments against import of second hand clothes claim), but the fact that the gift cannot be ‘re-paid’. The ‘home’ is not chosen, but given and an unchosen home can never be a real home. So, is this PRESENT really a welcomed gift or something to RESENT? GraceFruit Project is a collaboration between Ephrem Solomon and Jan van Esch.

Their work evolves through an associative method, of presenting the other one a pre-finished work without explaining and letting the other react. (P)RESENT was created in Ethiopia and Germany between June and September 2017.

Delphine Buysse ÂŤ Last year, I had a very precise idea in my mind of where I would be in the next few years until the news came out. We have to leave what I consider as home Âť.

Recently, Delphine Buysse has started working on a new subject about the adaptation of migrants to the global culture of fast growing cities. She embarked on field to listen to the infinity of singular migrants stories and choose the specific pictures in their stories that capture her attention (to be engraved in glass). She is interviewing and filming people settled in Dar es Salaam since one or several generations to try to understand how they integrate parts of the new environnement while preserving their own cultural particularisms and singularities from an assimilation by a new global culture and how do people flows enrich culture?

But this universal topic whose main concern is where and what is home, became suddenly very emotional with the recent events in her personal life. While she is continuing her research, she also decided to go back to her first love of patterning by observing maps (urbanistic changes, migratory flux, old maps) especially of Dar es Salaam because this megolopolis, between tradition and urbanistic anachronism had fascinated her since she arrived eleven years ago as a pure symbol of migration. The abstract finally seems the best way for her to synthetize her research and other questions she had already approached as time, rooting and uprooting with a philosophical and psychological point of view. We all deal with the call of somewhere else and the need to feel our own roots, but what is our heritage and our identity if we are on the move? How do migrants keep on transmitting their culture? Can roots and traditions vanish with memories? What is the effect of time on belonging and attachement? Is the nostalgia of places innate or learnt? Is our soul destined to be divided?

Nicholas Calvin What is home? I don’t know, really, but I have a hunch.

Maybe home is, more than anything else, a feeling. Is it a feeling of safety, or is it of a sense of belonging? Maybe a feeling born of just knowing where things are, familiarity with the geography of a house, a street, a stream or a stream. Maybe it is these memory links tethering us to stories, a culture and common cues that marks our geography or the passage of time. A link to spatial/temporal cues of orientation. Through images and text my work tries to imagine what these links are.

O Rehema Chachage (Tanzania, 1987) is a Mixed Media artist working mostly in video and sculptural installations as well as performance. She graduated in 2009 from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art degree. Themes explored in her work are very much determined by her situatedness, but the most prominent ones are ‘rootedness’ ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ explored in her earlier works from the point of view of a stranger, the outsider, the other, alien and often voiceless - a feeling gathered from the social alienation she experienced in the four years spent as a ‘cultural foreigner’ and a non-South African, black female student in a predominantly white middle-class oriented institution.

Of late, her interest in these themes have steered her in the direction of exploring rituals as valuable tool for reading into social norms and tensions, including the woman’s identity, gender relations and subversion.

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Born in 1974 in Njombe, Tanzania, Cloud Chatanda (Tanzania) is a visual artist specialized in illustration and paintings. Born the second child from a family of eight of the late captain and solider, Augustino Chatanda, his family was reluctant to him pursuing a career in art. With encouragement from his teachers, he started doing illustrations and finally took the leap into working as an artist full time. Chatanda received his artistic training from Kinondoni Young Artist (KYA) in 1990. His largescale hand drawings of daily life in Tanzania are portrayed from his daydreams and imaginary worlds he creates. His illustrations have been used in Tanzania in several schoolbooks, magazines and newspapers, social campaign and comics. He has exhibited his works at National Museum of Tanzania, Nafasi Art Space and Alliance Française in Tanzania and at Circle Art gallery in Kenya as well as the East African Biennale. Chatanda has participated in residencies at Kuona Trust in Nairobi and Zku in Berlin. In 2013 Chatanda won the Best AC cartoon award amongst other awards.

Paul Ndunguru (Tanzania) is a renowned visual artist, performer, and educator in Tanzania. He has shared his work across Asia, Europe, and Africa. He also works for the Tanzania Books Project publishing companies as an illustrator he also does comics, sculptures ,puppets, paintings.He is a lead singer and a composer for Wahapahapa Band.

Paul is an executive director for Alama Art and media Production Ltd, work with several project in creative concept ideas developing, designing and producing radio drama, story boarding for TV, promotion material on radio and printing materials. Currently he was honored as EU year for Development champion 2015. He is a member for Nafasi art space.

Born in Belgium in 1982, Delphine Buysse has shown a very early interest for art She has a predilection for engraving and screenprinting but she does experiment also other techniques of mix media.

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She is interested in the very abstract concept of time and she explores it from a scientific, psychological and philosophical angle. As a visual artist, she approaches time through very patient and precise work in repetitions and series. She arrived in Tanzania 10 years ago. Since 2013, she has been part of 10 exhibitions in Tanzania and Kenya. Recently, she has started a research for a new project which is about ‘the adaptation of migrants to the global culture of a fast growing cities’.

Nicholas Calvin (Tanzania) is a freelance photographer based in Dar es Salaam. With he’s most famous sayings “I am who I am, of which I don’t know much of, or rather each day I am discovering more what I am”. Curiosity for photography in his teen years drew him in the local library, reading and learning about the subject and later turned into a real passion.

Further inspiration comes from observing people in their daily life; their expression, the context they live and move in; the scene of their work, dwelling and play.

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GraceFruit Project (Holland – Ethiopia), a word play of the origins of its creators’ names Ephrem and Jan, is produced in Tanzania at Nafasi Art Space during Ephrem’s residencies in 2013 and 2014.

Ephrem Solomon, a graduate from Entoto TVET College in Addis Ababa, is one of Ethiopia’s most talented and international successful artists and Jan van Esch is a visual artist and Managing Director of Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam.

‘In and Out Side Life Stories’ is a passionate exchange that tells anonymous stories as if fragments of preciously kept correspondence had been rediscovered years later. It depicts the ambivalence of emotions and questions us on the contradictions between depth and superficiality, the communal and the intimate, extraversion and modesty, in a world where overconsumption leaves very little room for aging communications under the rule of the image and the instantaneous. Knowing how to do nothing is a forgotten pleasure. To experience la dolce vita will perhaps soon be a forgotten skill that once allowed us to breathe and apprehend our beliefs. Are we afraid to face silence and to listen to the metronome of our free will?

Besides to his virtuous drawings Belgian artist Byram Tunez is well known for his extraordinary installation works. Strongly influenced by 1980s-New York’s grafitti styles, he quickly evolved into a protagonist on the Brussels street art scene, before turning to other media and motives.

Especially geometric shapes such as the ever-recurring tringles from key structural éléments of his highly versatile œuvre.

Thus, for instance, as part of his « straw grafitti » project, Byram created a massive, spac e-consuming installation by way of sticking together masses of straws. Apart from sculptures, clothes, and children’s toys, he also designed a jewelry collection that involves plexiglas triangles in various colours. He also uses carpet as a medium and weaves his drawing of triangular forms.

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