Ana Hupe FOOTNOTES TO TRIANGULAR CARTOGRAPHIES
In Footnotes to Triangular Cartographies, the notes become the body of the text. A detail observed along a boulevard of imperial palms in Havana connects the gardens of the Portuguese court in colonial Brazil to an ancient currency in West Africa. In her travel writings, Ana Hupe maps historical relationships as she immerses herself in Yoruba philosophy. The book thus relays an intermittent incursion into the universe of invisible and poetic forces, which teach that some apparent coincidences can also be recognized as synchronicities that re-enchant worlds and increase speculative capacities. As an encounter between the visual arts and the disciplines of anthropology, art history, literature, photography, and philosophy, this volume in the Processing Process series of artists’ monographs moves through Brazil, Cuba, and Nigeria on its way to other destinations, and other destinies.
Em Notas de Rodapé para Cartografias Triangulares, as notas tornam-se o corpo do texto. Um detalhe observado ao longo de uma avenida de palmeiras-imperiais em Havana conecta-se aos jardins da corte portuguesa no Brasil colonial e a uma antiga moeda na África Ocidental. Em seus relatos de viagem, Ana Hupe mapeia relações históricas ao mergulhar na filosofia iorubá. O livro narra, assim, uma incursão intermitente no universo de forças invisíveis e poéticas, que ensinam que algumas aparentes coincidências também podem ser reconhecidas como sincronicidades que reencantam mundos e aumentam as capacidades especulativas. Como um encontro entre as artes visuais e as disciplinas da antropologia, história da arte, literatura, fotografia e filosofia, este volume da série Processing Process de monografias de artistas percorre Brasil, Cuba e Nigéria a caminho de outras destinações, e outros destinos.
FOOTNOTES TO TRIANGULA R CA RTOGRAPHIES
NOTAS DE RODAPÉ PA R A
CA RTOGR AFIAS
TRIANGULA R ES
A Conversation between Ana Hupe & Anna-Sophie Springer
ANNA-SOPHIE SPRINGER Let us begin by unpacking the figure of the triangle and through that process talk about the set of displacements you are performing in your work Triangular Cartographies—as Maykson Cardoso also emphasizes in his essay when he distinguishes this concept from the idea of an origin.
First of all, can you share how you conceive of the triangle? For instance, I noticed that by considering the figure of the triangle as you do, in order to map the diasporic spiritual flows between the Yoruba in West-Africa, and Afro-Latinx practices of Candomblé in Salvador de Bahia and Santería in Cuba that survived the slave trade, we nevertheless immediately still associate the form with the so-called Transatlantic Triangle, or the “triangular trade” that European colonialists orchestrated among Africa, the continents in the western hemisphere, and their imperial capitals of accumulation in the centuries of transatlantic chattel and plantation slavery. The figure of the triangle is normally evoked to map or investigate the coercive and violent circulation of bodies, commodities, currencies, and capital with Europe and North America as a coercive axis of accumulation. Your move consciously displaces that figure of the cartographic triangle to direct attention elsewhere: instead you emphasize the connections among Nigeria, Brazil, and the Caribbean to foreground postcolonial diasporic realities. So yours is a different, a diasporized triangle. Could you expand on your particular strategy of triangulation, but also say more about circumventing Europe?
ANA HUPE It is indeed a dislocation of the traditional historical triangle dotted on the map of the Atlantic as a mark of violence. Along this other axis, I propose we look at this triangle from the side, focusing on the beauty of resisting domination: it is a celebratory triangle existing despite and in defiance of violence. It is one centered on the recognition of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, and autochthonous cultures that have survived and are surviving not least through cultivating and caring for the knowledge afforded by the invisible. These epistemologies
of the invisible confront our domesticated bodies as they evoke the dimensions of the sensuous through things such as dance, music, and the sharing of food, which I understand as methodologies of creation, or poetic forces that are learned on a trial-and-error basis. That is something we also find in conventional science. In spiritual contexts, one must know which food to serve, what color to wear, and which drums to play if you want to invoke an entity. This knowledge is practiced, kept alive, and passed on from generation to generation, whether in Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, or elsewhere. Despite racism—an inheritance from the slave system—and despite religious intolerance, these practices and belief systems resist.
I am interested in establishing and tracing the crossing that emerges from the dialogue between these philosophies and the Greco-Roman ones. In this context, the Brazilian translator and writer Muniz Sodré, an expert in “transcultural” communication and Candomblé cultures, speaks of “modulations” running between one system and another—hereby understanding trans in the literal sense as a running “through.” The resulting exchange is not one of reconciliation or even harmony, but rather opens the way to new meanings arising from friction and resistance.1
In Triangular Cartographies, I trace the triangles through modulations between one mythology and another, by associations between historical events and encounters with people, things, or entities in the passage through these countries in question. The relations between these cultures have always developed through circumventing an exploratory intermediation by Europe. I am here thinking of the many movements of bàbálórì à from Bahia to Benin or Nigeria in the nineteenth century, which occurred despite all the control exercised over Black bodies. It was a historical circumvention. The triple connections I trace also pass through Europe as they bear historical inheritances. Europe, more precisely Berlin, where I live these days, is the starting point for my travels. Surely, if I were not supported by having access to the art system in one of the richest countries in the world, I would not have been able to cross the Atlantic so many times. But I have been financed by research grants. I don’t like to reproduce the binary logic of center and periphery, yet for a more direct and didactic understanding, the distinction fits here. It is my form of circumvention.
This aesthetic mediation of the triangle that connects diverse spatialities and temporalities—historical events from the past to the present—has the critical role of confronting
the ghosts that European governments insist on leaving in the dark as they continue on with destructive international treaties. This aesthetic of spectral associations is a return to the past and at the same time a speculative journey into the future; connecting the myriad violence of the colonial past to the failures of the present is a way of practicing a critique in order to actually re-invent a postcolonial condition today.
AS It is definitely relevant to reflect on your own displacement from Brazil to Berlin. You eloquently capture the subjective experience of defamiliarization and site-sensitivity, including more poetic interpersonal and social relations, thanks to not living in your home terrain. At the same time, your project takes place at the intersection of anthropology, lensbased documentation, and imagination, storytelling, and travel writing. I was reminded at some point of Maya Deren’s work in Haiti (originally with a Guggenheim Fellowship grant), where, among other things, she filmed Voudoun dances, mystical rituals, and ceremonies in the late 1940s. She was enraptured spiritually with the lifestyle and even became a mambo priestess. She was interested artistically in the pursuit of alternative realities and hoped to de-exoticize Voudoun as “black magic.”2
Departing from this historical reference—and considering your itinerant perspective regarding insights you’ve gathered about Yoruba and Candomblé cultures—what techniques have you used to navigate the problems of “voyeurism,” knowledge extraction, and exoticization that haunt projects like Deren’s? 3
I am curious about how you cultivate non-consumptive and non-extractive relations in the various sites you are working in, but also the techniques related to your practice as a visual artist.
AH The images shot by Maya Deren are more direct than the images I made, probably because of the different historical eras—we are almost eight decades apart. By “direct” I mean that in Deren’s work we see close-ups of the possessed, transformed faces of people in trance whose choreographies are also filmed in full length, etcetera. In the late 1940s, sacred rituals restricted to initiates were only beginning to be recorded by cameras and Deren must have been the first one to film in Haiti. It was during this same period that photos of Candomblé initiation rituals were published for the first time in the Brazilian press (in the magazine O Cruzeiro that I also write about). The òrì à worshippers were still only starting to face
the problem of how to deal with photography and film entering their spheres. For a visual artist like Deren, filming was a form of offering, of devotion, honoring, and serving Voudoun religion in her own fashion. Today it is different. Cameras are everywhere and the most traditional terreiros in Bahia have more or less explicitly defined rules about how and what can be recorded. During my visits, I almost always had the camera with me, but only rarely took it out of my bag. The traditional houses of the Ketu nation have a strategy to demystify Candomblé. It includes the possibility of filming public festivities to establish connections with civil society. Even so, there is a clear convention of turning the camera off whenever a deity or another entity “mounts” a person. These “divine horsemen” are referenced in the title of the film made with Maya Deren’s footage. Whatever the case, possessions happen in this film at various times, and every detail is explained, that is, we find out who the incorporated entity is, their role in the Voudoun pantheon, their dance. It’s all very informative, but I followed a different path. In my videos, I chose not to narrate anything, but instead to let the story run at the rhythm of the activities and experiences; the explanations that do appear are part of these scenes themselves. One example of this documentary narration is when Pai Pote, one of the organizers of the 2018 Bembé do Mercado [at Santo Amaro da Purificação in the Bahian Recôncavo region], introduces the Nigerian priestess to the devotees in the central market. I filmed two trance moments unintentionally as the camera happened to be on. But as soon as I realized what was happening, I immediately switched it off. It was an automatic ethical impulse. I was concerned not to invade the limits that I perceived to exist. I felt like a visitor in the house of a person with whom I had no intimacy and was careful not to make any gaffes in my role as guest. This relates to other experiences about conduct I made, for instance at
Casa Branca, a very traditional terreiro where until recently trance was reserved for women, while men were not allowed to participate in spirit possession or embodiment. When I learned about this gender division, I wondered how it would be possible to control the negotiation of this type of contact between men and the divinities so as not break the rules of the house.
Little by little, I understood that even this—to a certain extent—could be a code of behavior.
I wonder if Maya Deren’s move from Ukraine to New York may have served as an impetus for her to discover Voudou in Haiti. Living inside the “belly of the beast,” as Stuart Hall (the sociologist who migrated from Jamaica to the UK) would say, gives us this urge to better understand economic and political imbalances, because migrating gives us new access to social conflicts. I also realize that Maya Deren went to Haiti two years after the Second World War, at exactly the same time that Susanne Wenger went to live in Nigeria. They must have felt similar to how we feel today: yearning for alternatives to this clearly bankrupt, genocidal system. To be drawn to other ways of dealing with the world is a romantic impulse that is also dangerous because the search for what has or can resist capitalist standardization can carry with it, despite all the best intentions, the baggage of coloniality and facilitate new forms of knowledge extraction.
However, I believe—and this is what I try to exercise—that there indeed are non-extractivist forms of communication, ones that are aligned to the principles of solidarity, accompanied by historical analysis and political education. Based on this, encounters can generate exchanges: I bring information, I receive, I give back. Here, there is no behavioral rule of what is allowed and what is not allowed, it is not about laws, but about an ethics of conduct attentive to sensitivities, a subjective communication. Ethics is a listening movement, it cannot be put into a formula. Just because I am a white artist, it does not mean that I am going to defend the majority interests of the group to which I apparently belong. Maya Deren, when writing about her relationship with the Voudoun communities in Haiti, jokes that artists living in large industrial cities are exoticized all the time (celebrated, displayed as tourist curiosities, seen as picturesque, forgotten, elevated to scientific study, revisited), and therefore have the capacity for empathy and non-hierarchical dialogue with other cultural groups.4
One of my exercises was to return an experience of generosity and beauty, lived in a spiritual language system that blew
me away, by translating selective parts of these experiences into another type of mixed language made of historical frameworks and, as you put it well, storytelling, as well as images and their own records. I wanted to share the richness of having encountered the Yoruba sacred cities and, yes, I do hope, not unlike Deren, that my stories contribute to a destigmatization of the religions of African matrix. The Haitian Voudoun deities were the moral force of the Haitian Revolution of 1804—of course they would be stigmatized as a form of retaliation and control. Destigmatizing is a slow process, not achievable by one single work, nor by one single artist. We live a moment in art where we must contribute to changing the collective subjectivity in relation to racism and sexism. Artists carry a responsibility towards their historical times. The Triangular Cartographies are the way I found to underline the survival of non-hegemonic spiritualities as proof of a latent spirit of revolt that can guide us.
AS Some scholars maintain that there are no coincidences in capital-h History, not least since the category of the contingent ultimately destabilizes causality and connection. You, however, identify and follow serendipity as an epistemic method in this project. It brings us back to something we previously discussed while editing your writing, namely, that serendipity and contingency don’t simply mean that everything—or better, anything—just leads to anything or everything else. Instead, I am curious to know more about how you have navigated working with contingency as your compass for developing an ethical and aesthetic artistic approach. How, for example, do you formally decide or distinguish which process or form to pursue as the “appropriate” path in particular circumstances? For instance, when to take out a camera or not, and if so, which format to select. Or, with regards to composing or relaying your written stories, what do you consider is the role of connection as well as intuition in this work?
AH I think serendipity is the word that defines paying attention to the unmentionable and this is what guided me at many moments, like an invisible arrow. It is a bit abstract and difficult to define this path without being mystical. It is really a path full of uncertainties and sometimes intuition misses the mark. The important thing for me, first of all, is to recognize that unexplainable things are just as important as explainable things; that is, we don’t fit neatly into certainties. Every day,
poetry can appear where you least expect it. Synchronic events happen to us all the time. I call a synchronistic phenomenon, for example, a dream that foreshadows an event, or a friend who has been absent for years suddenly showing up just after a conversation about them. For me, transforming these significant coincidences into another language, through art, is a way to extract meaning from this very fragile bridge that is formed between the unconscious and reality, or between the spiritual dimension and the physical world. Sometimes it takes years for a synchronistic event to be deciphered, each one can find their own way to open the cracks of perception. Writing and searching for a suitable language in art to unravel these synchronicities is my way of elaborating. Most of the time, to arrive at a possible meaning of a synchronicity, I need a lot of invention, and this atmosphere of exploration interests me, makes me look for historical information, fingering bookshelves, dialoguing with people.
I like serendipity because it breaks the classic construction of the discipline of History with a capital H, which organizes facts in a linear fashion, as if one event were the consequence of another. It illuminates circulating events in a fluctuating atmosphere, becoming an allied tool of this “epistemic project” that wants to join scientific thinking with magic, disobeying causalities.
A natural unfolding of this “civil disobedience” that I pursue is to make counter-hegemonic aesthetic choices. Instead of printing in real size a well-lit and well-focused photograph of an African woman elegantly dressed in her colorful fabrics and bold hairstyle, I decide, in order to deal with such delicate and intangible issues, to use a fragile image printing technique like the homemade transfer. The largest image I printed is fifty-five centimeters wide. The idea is to think through this false seduction that photography can cause and to leave more space for the reading of the stories. By writing I have tried to connect one event to another: an object found in Nigeria with a reminder of Brazil’s history, or building a copper labyrinth that leads to a stone from the un river.
AS I am curious about how you have situated yourself in your writing as an outsider, observer, guest, and traveler—and, perhaps a tourist as well? I did not know about the Osogbo Forest before, let alone its UNESCO status, and the history that led to its protection. But when you first told me about it in the context of your engagement with the formation of your
work cycle, I was immediately reminded of my Brazilian friend and colleague, the architect, curator, and researcher Paulo Tavares. Embedded in local activist decolonial struggles for land rights, he developed the forensic method of mapping the concrete “botanical footprint” of Indigenous cosmologies and silviculture as a way for groups to claim their ancestral territories. A few years ago, we commissioned Paulo for an installation in the context of Reassembling the Natural and he invested in the possibility of drafting a petition with the Böu Xavante for UNESCO to recognize their ancestral land as cultural heritage—the critical distinction from nature conservation being here a highly significant and politicized one.5 In Germany, we presented an installation, while on the ground in Mato Grosso, Paulo was helping advance a major political action. With these activist-art practices in mind, I am wondering if you could expand a little on the contemporary role of a forest like the Ò ogbo Grove in terms of hosting a variety of political ecologies. How do you conceive of the responsibility of the artist or cultural worker in the face of undeniably real struggles for survival and survivance in the ruins left by late capitalism and settler colonialism? Here, I am not only thinking of your own perspective but also wondering if you could unpack a little more about the figure of Susanne Wenger, this local resident and artist, who also arrived as a white European.6
AH I think it is very important to cultivate this close relationship between art, social, and ecological realities, because it is difficult to measure the impact of an exhibition on a community or a region. The petition that Paulo Tavares organized with the Xavante reminds me of photographer Claudia Andujar’s involvement with the Yanomami, who fought in the Brazilian and international political sphere for the recognition of their right for land. In 1978, she created, together with anthropologist Bruce Albert and the missionary Carlo Zacquini, the CCPY [Commission for the Creation of the Yanomami Park]. Against powerful forces, the Yanomami land was only recognized in 1992. Another artist who works with direct impacts and who inspires me is Maria Thereza Alves. In 2010, she translated the German-Krenak dictionary (made by the German Bruno Rudolph, who visited Brazil in the early nineteenth century) into Portuguese/Krenak and Krenak/Portuguese. In many cases, the language of art, in territories like Latin America, needs to be didactic (even though sometimes it is not enough). It is through these type of works that we broaden the very sense
of contemporary art. I think that art is not the only social sphere where the subjectivity of a people is worked on—there are so many ways to treat the sensitive. Spirituality is one of them. Another way is to get involved in the encounters one has. The relationships I establish when making an artwork are not just circumscribed in the art, but the alliance is part of life, there is not a separation of life and work or an ethnographic distance.
As I think about the activist engagements of artists I admire, I am also reflecting on my own practice. For the exhibition Reading to Move the Center at CCBB in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, I interviewed immigrant women living in Rio and in Berlin, who were from African countries, from Haiti, and internal migrants in Brazil. Ever since doing this project—when I expected the participants would believe in the project’s ideas (of de-stereotyping through their stories the negative image attributed to immigrants and contemporary Africa, Haiti, etc.) in a similar way as myself—I have been thinking about better ways to “give back” more fairly to those directly involved in the process. In the process of this 2016 work, I talked to these women about their lives in a foreign country and asked them about their favorite books. The books they responded with in most cases related to their particular cultural contexts, and we included them in the exhibition space. I also photographed the women with these books and printed the images on a “CTP” plate, the matrix for analog printing machines if you want to make one thousand reproductions. It was a metaphorical way of inserting these marginalized voices “in the books,” so to speak. This is because I came across some people who were in very vulnerable situations and these encounters made me reconsider and change my own behavior. I realized that if I work with people I had to pay them. You see, I have a degree in journalism, where you learn that you cannot remunerate interviewees; I was also imprinted with this romanticized idea of not “buying” stories. Then, in 2017, I did a residency in Pernambuco, another state in the Northeast of Brazil, further North than Bahia. During my research, I visited the quilombo Conceição das Crioulas in Sertão Central, a very arid hinterlands area where water is extremely scarce. I lived with a woman called Maria de Lourdes da Silva (Lourdinha), who at the time was the president of the Quilombola Association, and was learning about things such as the division of the community’s lands, medicinal plants, and Lourdinha’s plans to improve the public image of the hard work of farming. I learned so many things and
understood that the greatest need of the place was a water well in the plantation, whose construction would cost 3,500 reais (about 1000 euros at the time). Although it wasn’t a lot of money, I didn’t have the budget for it. However, I decided to take the well idea into the exhibition that I would do in Recife, the state capital, by organizing a crowdfunding campaign. Within three days we had the funds for the fifty-six-meter artesian well, which was built and gave water. It was very exciting. Since then, I have been in contact with Lourdinha, and we did another artistic collaboration in 2021. Art will not save the world, but encounters and bridges have real potential.
Susanne Wenger’s relationship with the Sacred Forest of Ò ogbo went far beyond art; she lived a daily life of Yoruba habits for more than fifty years. She even adopted several children, a local custom. The priestess Adedoyin Olosun and Sangodara Gbadegesin Ajala are two of them. In a pre-internet era, Wenger was a reference to the few foreigners passing through the interior of Nigeria. The photographer Pierre Verger (1902–1996) was one of her many European guests. When I went with Adedoyin to the Pierre Verger Foundation in Salvador, we checked its photo archive. We typed “Osogbo” into the database and found more than 500 photos Verger had taken in the 1950s and 60s. Going through them one by one, Adedoyin recognized some people who had already passed away. Three photos of a specific ritual especially caught her attention. They show a man wrapped in a kind of white sheet around his shirtless body holding a large ceramic sculpture that looked like a male doll in front of his belly. Adedoyin said this ritual no longer existed, that there was no visual reference to it in the community, and wanted to take the images to the grand-son of the man in the photo, so that the ritual could be revived. She eventually got the Foundation to give her a copy of the photos, which she took back to Ò ogbo. It was very impressive to witness the direct importance of a historical photo archive. Wenger’s role therefore goes far beyond her work with the artists’ group The New Sacred Art, which she initiated to save the forest. There are so many other indirect legacies. Unfortunately, as Jumoke Sanwo describes well in her text, Wenger’s “white savior” image eclipses so many other important local artists and agents. This is a problem tied to institutional racism. The local stories of the Ò ogbo artists and the direct intervention of the deity un in safeguarding the forest will begin to gain more weight in the public sphere if the histories surrounding them continue to be rewritten.
AS In his new book Scorched Earth, Jonathan Crary analyzes the disruptive, ecocidal consequences of monopoly capitalism, including the contemporary role of eye-tracking technology— the means for tech and data mining companies to harness
information about our behavior and attention by recording and analyzing the movement of our eyes over the information on the screen. A passage in which Crary questions the possibility of deducing thoughts and meaning from the way our eyes move struck me with regards to your project. He writes:
In one sense, eye tracking is part of the persistence of what William Blake called “single vision,” which he linked to the narrowness of a Newtonian understanding of physical reality and a Lockean model of sensation. One of his best-known images depicts Newton using the two-pointed arms of a compass to trace a geometrical diagram. Staring fixedly at the confined space of what is “encompassed” by the instrument he holds, Newton sits blinkered from the overwhelming sensory plurality of the world, tragically cut off from the visionary powers inherent in all human beings. For Blake, single vision was the merely mechanical activity of the eye, isolated from interplay with other senses and the imagination. The separation of the senses, which Marx was also to describe, became an integral part of the industrialization of perception that took off in the later nineteenth century.7
Crary reminds us of the most recent exploitative condition inherent in colonial modernity’s privilege of the sense of vision over other senses. As a visual artist, you are naturally invested in the production of images and you obviously spend time reflecting on their politics. As you say in your introduction to this book, you question the binary/hierarchy between the visual and the invisible and follow many paths that reaffirm this “sensory plurality,” not only of noticing, but of knowing. I would like to hear more about the concrete sites, encounters, and experiences you address in the project, as well as about some of the connections to your decision to experiment as a writer. In this latter context, how would you unpack the roles of the story, language, and the written word for relating and remaking the world?
AH One of my art schools was OPAVIVARÁ!, an art collective in Rio, which I was part of for five years, before leaving it in 2013. The works were classified as “relational art,” they needed to be used, touched, or otherwise experienced by the public to exist (for instance, be baked, fried, kneaded, etc.). The works were also an invitation to enjoyment, an ode to the exchanges that happen in moments of relaxation, a criticism of the pace of productivity and social inequalities. The performative installations—I think they can be defined like this—took place in public spaces, squares, and gardens in the middle of the cities, but also in commercial art galleries and art fairs. So they implied diverse situations of exchange with different social classes and posed many good challenges for the collective. The history of art from Rio carries this heritage of experiencing life with the whole body—think of the works of Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica, to stay with examples better known by a European audience.
I trace this kind of genealogy of a certain art nucleus that is part of my history to arrive at the “counter-production” of images that the Triangular Cartographies propose. Maybe I have been too attached to Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image.” She concludes that low resolution images, with practically zero production cost—memes, gifs, etcetera—today have a much greater power of circulation and reach many more people than traditional photographs. Especially if these need to be enlarged at high cost and in perfect quality and focus or are exhibited in museums to a much more restricted public. Halfway between the art fair and social networks, there is everything that can be invented in relation to image production.
Right now, I am working with Super 8 film shot on the Copacabana beach by my family in 1971, during the Brazilian dictatorship. I am enlarging some frames of the rolls in the darkroom to redraw these scenes. They are detective images. In the Triangular Cartographies, I chose to use the homemade transfer, an imperfect technique, which leaves stains, traces, and blurs. The result are images that demand a will to look closely. You can face them like a detective, wondering where and when they come from (they can belong to both the past and the future); some are made from found books or documents from historical archives.
The challenge of telling a story without words, of translating it into a format that you have to confront, to experience with your body, is the beauty of the arts. The works—even if sometimes unintelligible, incomprehensible by reason, like my reel sculptures—leave a memory in the body (sensory reason), if there is some affective interest there, of intrigue, anger, or commotion. Each work built from associations after trips to the three countries of the triangulations carries a huge story with it. Every time I show a work to someone, I tell them about the preparatory plot that led me to that result. And each time this happens the stories gain more layers. For instance, in this process I have continued to discover additional historical facts, which then continued to expand my elaborations. So, even after the works were done, they still kept growing—so much that I thought they could no longer carry so many footnotes. If there is one medium of expression in which I feel comfortable, it is writing: I always start a new idea with research and text. I like to compose words and in my day to day studio, most of the time, I write. I thought it was time to share stories in a less enigmatic, non-academic format. Mainly because I see a political sense in the book format, the hidden stories become a documentation, and, accumulated with other works by other artists, they rehearse a beginning of a re-writing of history itself. I knew I wanted to make a book, but it wasn’t defined in my head, it was defined while I was doing it, it is not a history book, it is not an art catalog, it is indeed a processing of the process.
AS I also think that the contrast between the geometric triangle in Blake or Newton as a universal, yet also as a figure constructed from straight and intersecting lines, and your use of the triangle as a portal to cosmic, spectral ecologies is worth reflecting on. Can you talk a little more about the displacement of the assumption of universal perception in your project?
Also, your pieces make clear that the practices and knowledge you have encountered only survives because it has been practiced as ancestral, intergenerational memory passed on over centuries. Yoruba aesthetics are a foundation in Black culture and imagination—even Beyoncé, in her album Lemonade, for instance, has paid homage to the Orishas, such as Oshun in the song Hold Up. 8 As I was reading about this, I also came across the hypothesis that Beyoncé’s costume in that particular water-goddess scene might be referencing Swiss artist Pipi Lotti Rist in Ever is Over All (1997). There is a productive, transversal heterodoxy in such combinations, which makes me want to ask you, as our final exchange here, about your own position on ancestry, futures, and the dream of feminist and spiritual reinvention.
AH There is a Yoruba aphorism that says “È ù killed a bird yesterday with the stone he threw today,” an apparently perfect paradox. It points to a form of cyclical time, which is the time of crossing, that I try, through art, to apply in History, as a politics of reparation. Because it is possible to alter the past, rewriting it with new lenses, focused on the stories of the vanquished. The Newtonian triangle cannot exist in opposition to the triangle I invent, which works as a cosmic portal; they can only work as complementary figures. È ù connects the orun (heaven) to the ayê (earth), he breaks the separation between one plane and the other. Pop, like art, can also be a tool for destigmatizing religions of African origin. Pop is a tool much more committed to a certain industrial order in force, it uses all
the tools of the entertainment industry and therefore reaches a broader audience.
These concepts of ancestry, future, dream—I don’t think they are good or bad, they can all be relativized, depending on the angle. Through spirituality, we can discover a bodythat-knows that is ancestral. However, this may not be a pretty process; if one is tied to an ancestry from a family of enslavers or with a Nazi past—to pull in the German context—it can’t be easy to deal with, but you can’t paralyze yourself in the face of guilt: you have to break this chain and act. The same goes for the future: we can’t resign ourselves to the discourse of an imminent apocalypse, of the end of humanity. Instead, we have to operate in the gaps, within the fight that is achievable for each one of us. Succumbing to pessimism is turning into one more zombie. Dreaming has a less relative connotation, more positive, for me. If a person has nothing, but is full of plans, she is on the move. The fight for me is against a subjectivity orchestrated by the structure that organizes the world, which is capital. The reinvention goes through feminism, allied with other movements against oppression, such as those against racism and non-hegemonic spiritualities.
Notes
1 Muniz Sodré, Pensar Nagô (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Vozes, 2017), 21.
2 See B. Ruby Rich, “Voodoo Verité: Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen,” in Chick Flicks (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 52–56.
3 Maya Deren’s film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti was edited posthumously in 1977 by the artist’s third husband, Teiji Ito, together with one of his later wives, Cherel Winett Ito. Deren herself would probably have made a different film.
4 Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson & Company, 2004), 8.
5 Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest, reassemblingnature.org; paulotavares.net /trees-vines-palms. Maria Thereza Alves was also an artist in this exhibition cycle.
6 Interestingly, while editing our interview, the German newspaper taz published an article on Wenger, and especially her former husband Ulli Beier, that questions the extent to which their work in Nigeria classifies as colonialism: Fabian Lehmann, “Die Schätze afrikanischer Patienten,” taz (23 August 2022), taz.de/Debatte-um -Sammlung-Beier-in-Bayreuth/!5873058.
7 Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth (London: Verso, 2022), 100.
8 Annie Earnshaw, “Our Goddess Beyoncé: Yoruba Goddesses in Lemonade,” Medium.com, 22 January 2019, medium.com/beyonc% C3%A9-lit-and-lemonade/our-goddess -beyonc%C3%A9-yoruba-goddesses-in -lemonade-921ab922bc89; Kamaria Roberts, “What Beyoncé teaches us about the African diaspora in ‘Lemonade’,” PBS, 29 April 2019, pbs.org/newshour/arts/what-beyonce -teaches-us-about-the-african-diaspora -in-lemonade
Images
p. 232
Photo by Maya Deren, Department of Special Collections, Boston University
p. 239 William Blake, Newton, 1795/c. 1805. Color print with pen, ink and watercolor. Courtesy of Tate Britain, London
p. 242 Still from Beyonce, “Hold Up.” Directed by Jonas Åkerlund. 4 September 2016. Music video, 5:16. youtube.com/watch?v =PeonBmeFR8o
Photo by Alena Schmick
