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REVEALING FOR HEALING with Isabel Katjavivi
REVEALING FOR HEALING
With a father as an ambassador to Namibia, Isabel Katjavivi was exposed to politics early on in life. This is what led her to study international relations, before visual art called to her – the unspoken conversation that needed to be had.
Drawing from her cultural history, her family history and a past that needs to be seen, looked at and thereby healed, Isabel developed a narrative art piece. Created with the blessing of her elders, it speaks of the damage, burial and lack of memorialisation of the Herero genocide. The installation piece, titled “The Past is not Buried”, won her first place at the 2017 Bank Windhoek Triennial and is a demonstration of how art can reflect society’s scars, opening a conduit for dialogue.
“My dad’s always been very involved with the genocide, getting the story out and also dealing with the reparations, so it’s always been a topic in our household. That sparked an idea. We went on a journey to different locations and it’s just shocking. If you go to places where things happened, you see graves of the ones who were fighting instead of the indigenous people.”
It was these visits to sites of horrific acts of violence against Namibian people that sparked Isabel’s idea to create a piece of art that speaks to the unearthing of these pieces of our history. Collecting sand from the Waterberg Ohamakari, the poisoned water holes at Ozombu Zovindimba (where the Hereros gathered before crossing the desert to Botswana) and Ondunduvahi (the manmade hill where the extermination order was read out 2 October 1904), Isabel used nature intertwined with history to tell the story so needing to be told.
The story is that of a woman, buried and her body being uncovered. According to Isabel: “This woman represents all those who have died during the
uprising and genocide and have never been laid to rest. She is one grain of sand in the process of memorialisation of this history that needs to take
place. Across East, Central and Southern Namibia there are sites of slaughter where battles took place, where water holes were poisoned, where people were hung, imprisoned and exterminated between 1904 and 1908. Most of those who died were not buried and their bones still litter the land.
WITH ISABEL KATJAVIVI
“As an artist I’ve got two processes: times that I dig for inspiration, to figure out what I’m going to do, then moments I have a vision. With this I just saw.”
Isabel explains that while at the Waterberg she realised that she would translate this message with a grave. “She’s buried, because
it is in the past, but she’s revealed because everything about it is just left undealt with.
It’s revealing the past. In order for us to move forward, we have to go back, understand exactly what has happened. This is one grain of sand in the journey we have to take for us to heal that wound and move on, because it’s just going to be a constant. And it’s not only for the Herero and Nama communities – it’s the whole psyche of Namibia. This is what we are all living with, this sort of weight.”
Knowing that keeping the past hidden away means you cannot get to a place where you can heal, Isabel is challenging us through her art to question what we memorialise and why.
Isabel’s piece was unanimously chosen by the judges as the overall winning work for 2017’s Triennial. One of the judges, Maureen de
Jager, noted of the piece: “We believe that the use of materiality to evoke the weight of unspeakable trauma is incredibly sensitive and astute, especially for a young artist.”
Speaking of the prestigious competition, Isabel notes that, “this whole journey has awoken my creative spark – and with a purpose. So many artists I admire have told me they are proud of me and I feel like that was her purpose [the woman in the grave]: she needed to shock us. Give us a little shake, if you like. We need to deal with this and people have been really proud and glad that someone’s doing it. So we can actually get to that place where we can heal.”
In 2018 Isabel had a solo exhibition, They tried to bury us, at the National Art Gallery of Namibia. In 2019 she spoke at “Colonial Repercussions V: the Namibian case”, a conference organised in Berlin, Germany, by the Akademie der Kunste and European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).
