African Body Painting, Workshop by Rita Doris Ubah

AFRICAN BODY PAINTING, WORKSHOP BY RITA DORIS UBAH

On October 18 at 5 p.m., Nigerian artist Rita Doris Ubah offered a workshop at Casa Azul Cultural Center. Sixteen people between the ages of 9 and 39 were enrolled, in addition to some of the passionate artists and judges of the Flood exhibition. The purpose of the meeting was the exchange of experiences between the culture of the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria –to which Rita belongs– and the Antofagasta´s group Afro Union, which highlights the Afro-descendant roots through expressions of Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Chilean music and dance, especially in the area of Arica. In the opportunity, the artist taught a traditional ritual technique of textile painting developed by Igbo women, which also used it to mark the walls of huts and houses. The workshop included the generation of paper patterns and uli-style body painting. This kind of design comprises figurative and abstract elements based on the color blue or indigo, plus earth pigments.

To the sound of drums and dancing, jumping, and arms raised, Rita encouraged the creation of territorial symbols, which were turned into stencils, to be engraved on a large yellow canvas, along with African symbols, all this while the artist painted the faces of those present. Different types of iconographies emerged from this process. On the one hand, universal symbols such as the sun, water and some spirals; on the other hand, symbols of the Andes such as the Chacana cross, hills and cactus, also pictograms of the Changos culture, even the Antofagasta monument of the inverted anchor. The artist also motivated inquiries aimed at understanding African symbols such as the lion’s claws, the lizard as friendship and the spiral of concentric circles representing the python snake –agwolagwo–, characteristic of vital energy.

The workshop helped to highlight the artistic expressions of Afro peoples both national and international, who have historically been oppressed and excluded from official narratives. The emotional and collective work helped to lessen the previous tensions due to the demonstrations and police deployment related to the commemoration of the second year of the social uprising in Chile on October 18, 2019. Filled with moving bodies, laughter and color, the shelter allowed two persecuted cultures to embrace each other. Perhaps the most touching was the culmination, as the dialog from south to south, bypassing the value judgments of ancient empires, ended with Rita saying a prayer that also avoided colonial languages. Spanish and English, the languages that allow us to communicate, lost their protagonism to remind us that languages are not just meant to inform. Everyone seemed to understand what her words in Igbo summoned, as when reading some expressions of the now famous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with whom Rita shares that origin.

Gratitude was the general emotion of the workshop, sharing the Igbo mystique at the hands of the joy, simplicity and warmth of Rita, a person who, with her advice and presence, transforms the spaces. It was widely commented among the attendees that by the way in which energies, reciprocity and collective gratitude flowed, this workshop was a celebration of ritual character. As Dagmara Wyskiel mentioned, “we felt a deep fraternity energy, in which we drew by dancing and danced by drawing.” This is the first time that an African artist participates in SACO, consolidating the efforts of international dialog from a critical and post-colonial perspective, thought from the margins.