The third issue of Town engages with the Paramaribo SPAN project, a survey of contemporary art and visual culture in Suriname.

TOWN ON SITE ( PARAMARIBO )

Perched on the shoulder of the South American continent, Suriname is in the zone of intersection between the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and Latin America. It is home to the descendants of indigenous Amerindians, Dutch and English colonisers, enslaved Africans and free Maroons, indentured Indians and Javanese, and immigrants from China, Portugal, and the Middle East. The cultural collisions and collusions of all these peoples have been often fruitful, sometimes anxious, and occasionally violent.

Co-curated by Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier and Dutch curator Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern, Paramaribo SPAN is conceived as a bridge: between histories, social groups, countries, cultures; between realities and aspirations.

This issue of Town is also a sort of bridge, or the fragments of a possible bridge of imagination and understanding. It connects poems by a writer from Guyana, Suriname’s neighbour to the west; images by a Dutch artist of Surinamese ancestry, which reflect on the ironies of colonial history; a self-portrait by a young Surinamese artist, a work of both self-representation and self-assertion; and a deliberately mysterious photograph of the monument memorialising one of the most tragic events in Suriname’s recent history. The three Afaka characters atop the Moiwana Monument spell out “Kibii Wi”: Sranan for “Protect Us”: a hope, a wish, a lamentation, a charm, a song.

The broadsides for this issue will be posted first in Paramaribo, later in Port of Spain — making another bridge, this time between two cities.

Follow the links below to read the contents of Town 3 online, and to download PDFs of this issue’s six broadsides.

Contents

3:1….Call Me the Need for Rain, by Mahadai Das

3:2….Lucky, by Mahadai Das

3:3….The Dream of a Thousand Shipwrecks #33 of 144 (2009), by Patricia Kaersenhout

3:4….The Dream of a Thousand Shipwrecks #40 of 144 (2009), by Patricia Kaersenhout

3:5….Self-Portrait (2009), by Dhiradj Ramsamoedj

3:6….Kibii Wi (“Protect Us”), based on a photograph by Christopher Cozier of the Moiwana Monument, designed by Marcel Pinas

Notes on contributors

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD THE eMAGAZINE

Produced by Richard Rawlins, Draconian Switch publisher/designer, the limited 5 issue monthly ROCKSTONE & BOOTHEEL eMAGAZINE for the exhibit runs from November 2009 – March 2010 . Look out for a new issue by the 14th of every month.

Click here for exhibition information.

In my time in the “arts” in Trinidad & Tobago, I‘ve come to notice an interesting shift in the power and pursuits of artists. According to artist, Christopher Cozier, “artistic enterprise was about rendering or representing an inventory prescribed as Caribbean”. Consequently, artists produced works that were also intended to be inventory – made for sale. Today, however, in ‘e’ environment where the www has forever altered the transactive processes of the arts landscape, artistic practice has become more than just paints and canvas and exhibitions. Additionally, given the widely perceived shrinking of ambitions and voices of journalists, social scientists, teachers, priests, shrinks and operatives in every other social institution, artists are stepping in and filling the void.

The work of 23-year old, self-taught graphic designer, Rodell Warner is no exception to this shifting reality. One of the must-sees, or more like “must-do’s at Trinidad & Tobago’s inaugural Erotic Art Week was his interactive photography installation. This was like a quick, free visit to a sex therapist.

Warner’s installation employed high-tech, albeit, simple technology. From my observation, the work explored the uncanny social networking phenomena that gives the average Ben the psychotropic ability to manufacture, and share his image with as many people as he’s willing to find on the www. Ben becomes his own, self-representing publicist. And while many have the facility to do this in the privacy of their own homes, Warner gave this power to those who entered his public-private space of his “Photobooth”.

Mounted at the Alice Yard in Woodbrook in the heart of what you might call T&T’s red light district, the project entitled Photobooth gives the participant/viewer the isolation and all the possibilities of his/her own private studio. In this tiny white cocoon, that Warner shrouded off from the rest of the small Alice Yard annex by draping yards of white fabric from the ceiling, participants were given room to take their own full-body photo portrait. Here, Warner rigged his close-circuit still camera and handed solo or small groups of visitors the control of the remote trigger.

As you click away, your portrait instantaneously appears on the computer monitor placed on the white floor across the room. In addition to its high-tech elements, participants also have at their disposal and discretion, a blind that could be raised or lowered to cover or reveal as much of their faces/identity as they chose. Of course, you only entered the room after having agreed to and signing a release form, which clearly states that your images may be subsequently used for exhibition, including reproduction on the web. In the context of an Erotic event, the freedom, interactivity and potential for exposure laid the ground for a certain sexual inevitability.

Full nudes, frontal, rears, with and without faces, couples, gay, straight, groups, young, mature, fit, and the not-so-fit, people flocked as the word got around. And they didn’t come to gawk or maco, they came to get in. The images that came out of Warner’s Photobooth are truly beautiful in their naiveté, innocence and the liberation – the kind of liberation and innocence that resembles the abandon that our Trinidad Carnival seems to be affording less and less. And like masking at Carnival, this work allows us to engage the futile, and counter-intuitive searches for anonymity and popularity in a small society.

Every day throughout the nine-day run of the Erotic Art Week, Warner’s album of photos from the night before was exhibited in the adjacent house. This was in stark contrast to the privacy of the embryonic cocoon in which the images were born. Nevertheless, night after night, visitors left their inhibitions at the door and shot themselves. Few, including myself, could resist the cathartic draw of a romp in the Photobooth.

We sometimes easily forget the power society has in driving conformity and that beneath our conformed personas lay very intuitive and free beings. In the Photobooth, Warner provided a trigger that allowed us to release control for a few moments and to capture our own images of these playful beings. It’s interesting, but once the face and the head were hidden, in a way, separated from the physical image, and people lost their heads, sexually powerful beings were allowed to appear.

The cathartic relevance of Carnival and masking to our small, conformist society is legendary and might be somehow necessary to our survival. How we deal with our understanding of these connections before we totally lose it should be equally relevant. As a social experiment, Photobooth raised more questions than it provided answers, but maybe that’s how art works. And maybe sometimes solutions come in the form of new questions.

You can see more of Warner’s work at www.rodellwarner.com and freepaperblog.blogspot.com

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adji Gilas ( photo Christopher Cozier )

Notes from Paramaribo Span September 2009

A few examples of Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adji Gilas cups are placed on the red-oxide-coloured floor of his studio. This is a typical painted floor for a house in Kwatta, west of central Paramaribo, and this looks like a typical cup. We could be in Trinidad or Guyana. He is explaining to me that “adji” means maternal grandmother, and that these aluminium mugs were from her once-active business renting wares for festivities and other events.

Dhiradj points out that the cups still have an “R” written in enamel paint underneath. There are approximately forty of them left. The artist has transferred onto them graphic images derived from early photographs of his grandmother. So this is not just a typical house, or a typical cup: it is Dhiradj’s. We are looking at this work in his grandparents’ home, which has now become his studio or site of investigation. This is a very personal navigation of his experience — his own memory and relationship to family and place.

We are on the inside of his process, and this location is not just a sight to be rendered — not just an image to take to the market, as we see in local art galleries throughout the Caribbean. Most forms of representation in the Caribbean would render the house and the location from a viewpoint across the street, for the touristic or cultural brochures, saying that this is the typical Asian household of this part of the country. It would be a static silenced sign of national diversity or of cultural otherness, accordingly.

But this is Dhiradj’s active site of investigation, of developing personal vocabularies towards sovereign ways of articulating his own lived experiences and stories, from the inside looking out.

I ask him if the work should even leave this site, as the work, the process of minding (caring for) and mining (investigating the symbolic agency of) these intimate elements, this series of actions, resonate within this actual space. They transform the space, which both contains and amplifies their intent. They take on a site-specific implication, and the artist’s actions become differently performative and enabling — not just to me, the viewer, but also to other artists like himself working in places like this everywhere. This is more than just cultural display. This about the artist working his way through what he knows and can understand.

I would like to argue that within this transactional space or moment of exchange we are all transported or altered. So where is Kwatta now within this moment?

Is it in the critical space shaped by his intent, his investigative process, dislodged from narratives of nation, of culture, of cultural display and otherness? Is it an action within the critical space we call the Caribbean, which is just another space where an artist, a creative individual, struggles to understand the world around him- or herself?

After I meet with Dhiradj, he sends me an image by email, in which he arranges the cups — “gilas” — on the internal structural beams of the wooden house, often used as shelves in traditional Caribbean homes. In that single gesture, he weaves together the structural investigations of Remy Jungerman with, of course, Mondrian’s. They are all fair game within his investigative moment.

It is not my intention to create an imbalance, but more to look at the work of Dhiradj as someone whose approach is derived from the current range of influences available to him. This processing and reconfiguring defines the current moment in which many contemporary Surinamese artists are proceeding.

Christopher Cozier

‘tongue’ 2008. Porcelain wash basin, leather, tongue. Dimensions variable.

I initially saw Tonya Wiles’s work at her first solo show, which opened at the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown on June 7,  2009. One week later, I attended her talk at which, according to Tonya, she wanted to “explain” her body of work to the Barbadian audience.

Her exhibition Hide and Seek played with established local norms about viewing art in a gallery space. I asked Tonya how different it was for her to locate her work in Barbados versus situating it in the UK, where she had spent the last three years. She felt that given the greater exposure of a UK gallery culture predisposed to understanding contemporary work, returning to Barbados forced her to ask the question, “Is art viewing universal?”

She wondered if the work made sense in a Barbadian context, and we spoke about how the work functions differently in the two spaces. UK-based viewers might be well exposed to, and therefore more comfortable interacting with, objects like Tonya’s in a gallery space, whereas in the Barbadian context the work reveals a tension. Hide and Seek exposed the conformity of a small, conservative, insular island society that prefers to know the rules of the game before playing.  Members of the audience, Tonya told me, not sure what to do with her work, sought explanation from her before engaging or participating.

On opening night I observed the audience checking out familiar objects rendered useless by Tonya, who had also engaged performers to stick their wet tongues through porcelain dishes at the audience…. A nervous cacophony of giggles echoed throughout the space.  Moving past the anxious laughter begged the question, what’s the value of these porcelain objects from Swan Street, glued onto wallaba posts, tightly wrapped in upholstery fabric, or soft leather-lined dishes waiting for us to press our selves into them? What are we to do with these objects? Tonya wants us to play with them, interact with them and even look silly while doing so?

And while Tonya asks if she can make an object useless, the viewers are wondering how to respond to the inverted equation of others looking at us, as objects ourselves to be viewed.

Sit 2009. Wood, fabric, buttock. “Nanny nanny boo boo (1)” 2009. Wood, leather, gloss paint, tongue. “Count to 10” 2009. Wood, found ornaments, leather, gloss paint, head.  Ginger 2009. Oil on Canvas.

Imagine the relief when the audience happened upon Ginger — a lovely, heavily patterned painting. Ginger was created, Tonya told me, to create an atmosphere for the rest of the work. I would have called it “Oxygen” — it offered breathing space to an audience that kept gathering around it, relieved to see something they could relate to in terms of repeated patterns, familiar notions of beauty, and the well-known medium of oil on canvas. Here was a painting one could safely stand in front of, call it a thing of beauty, and no one would laugh at us for doing that.

In contrast, the expectation that the viewer would stick one’s elbow, nose, and tongue into familiar objects lined with leather and metamorphosed into interactive sculptures, was a bit too strange. The audience was obviously perplexed by this work … not to mention aware of the potential of contaminating the Influenza A – H1N1 virus by sharing space with other wet tongues in Nanny Nanny Boo Boo 1 & 2!

Tonya’s “explanation” took place one week after the opening, and in contrast to the inversion of role playing, she too conformed to the convention of doing the accepted thing by carefully explaining her work. (It reminded me of Kadooment … revelers playing at abandonment — safely cordoned off behind rope barriers.)

In speaking to her work, Tonya asked a number of questions: Can an object have a useless purpose? Can an object be about the people who see it? What does a work look like that has a useless function? How can we use it, touch it? How does an artwork make a person look ridiculous? She spoke about her interest in having a dialogue with the gallery space, and inverting the relationship between the viewer and the performer. In some cases, the viewer becomes the performer (unwillingly, perhaps), invited to touch the work and interact with it and play in the space. In others, the viewer may become traumatized as a result of feeling that the performers are viewing the viewers, while talking and playing with the audience through the works.

Hide and seek 2009. Oil on Canvas

For the moment, Tonya tells me of her plans to return to the UK, attend graduate school, and spend some time there before possibly returning to the Caribbean. She told me that her influences and current conversations are still rooted in the European environment where she spent three years at art school, and cited influences from Marcel Duchamp to the more contemporary Rebecca Horn. Noteworthy was when she told me that she did not have any Caribbean references.

This statement made me pause. One might imagine education for two years at a tertiary-level Barbadian art institution would have included exposure to contemporary Caribbean work and sent Tonya off with some understanding of her critical environment. Although the Anglophone Caribbean does not have museums of contemporary art like those in Havana and Santo Domingo, there have been significant artist-led initiatives taking place from the Bahamas in the north of the region to Suriname in the southern Caribbean.

Born in 1986, Tonya was awarded an island scholarship in 2005, and went on to graduate from Wimbledon College in the UK in 2008. Although keen to eventually attend graduate school in the UK, she recently returned to Barbados where, like many contemporary Caribbean visual artists, she has a full-time day job at a local upscale boutique as Retail Visual Merchandiser — dressing windows and decorating shop interiors for five hotel outlets.

For my part, seeing Tonya’s work for the first time made me think, not of Horn or Duchamp, but of Osaira Muyale from Aruba. It was out of curiosity that I asked Tonya if she ever heard of Lips, Sticks and Marks, an exhibition I helped coordinate back in 1997, and which included Muyale’s work back in 1997. Her response was, “Nope, I had no idea about Lips, Sticks and Marks.” I shared the catalogue of this exhibition with Tonya, who flipped to the page with Muyale’s work and words, and said to me, “Listen to this…” and read Osaira’s poem “A letter to myself”.

“I know you for a long time
We were playing hide and seek…”

Although I see a clear link between Tonya’s work and Osaira’s — two Caribbean women rendering common objects in an uncommon way — it is clear that Caribbean references are not in Tonya’s peripheral vision. Her sources, she says, are the same for her whether she is in Barbados or London. Tonya looks to Eve Dent, Tino Sehgal, Marcel Duchamp, Zoe Mendelson, and Rebecca Horn.

“Count to 10” 2009. Wood, found ornaments, leather, gloss paint, head

On a related note, I recently had in my studio four 2009 graduating students from the local five-year Fine Art degree programme. They were also unaware of regional enterprises such as Alice Yard, Small Axe and CCA7. Surprisingly, they were also unacquainted with the Art Foundry, a local gallery space which, although closed in 1999, was the first gallery in Barbados to make a critical regional reach and importantly, left an archive of catalogues with critical texts to document their exhibitions. (The Art Foundry is also to be credited with providing a path for local writers to join AICA – having published reviews in the gallery’s exhibition catalogues.)

The Anglophone Caribbean is witnessing an unprecedented expansion of artists, bloggers, curators, and writers keen to, as Christopher Cozier writes in the blog Paramaribo SPAN, “participate in questions about the role or value of visual practice in the wider Caribbean.” These independent projects are continually developing outside of national institutions and agendas and in response to the needs of a dynamic regional art community.

“Playing our selves” through words, images, the internet and via collectives is forcing potent spaces to develop, and confirms that critical work is being produced and written about, in an expanding archipelago, in conversation with itself and others.

These regional networks and discourses are redefining the archipelago’s reach, far beyond the insular spaces we inhabit physically. Tonya’s current lack of awareness about her regional colleagues is not a critique of her choices, but more a reflection of the inertia in the region’s higher institutions of learning, as noted by Barbadian writer George Lamming, who recently spoke of the University of the West Indies fast becoming a suite of national polytechnics.

I am refreshed by Tonya’s peculiar collection of objects, her confidence, and her articulate nature. I am curious to see where her hiding and seeking will lead both her and us.

June 2009

 Gun – Hemoglobin tastes like hate, that’s what demons love / Mixed media on paper, 38″ x 50″, 2008

“Concerned with the growing violence among youth occurring in the city I approached spoken word artist Joseph Daly and asked that he write a poem inventing an imaginary world where similar problems occur. These drawings depict a confused world searching for answers. Through strange and suggestive imagery they share the various emotions felt upon hearing that another young man has been killed by gun violence.” Sandra Brewster

One would assume, from reading published reports in the Canadian press and from watching news reports on television that the Canadian public had reached the apex of its outrage and tolerance over gun violence in December of 2005, the year that Jane Creba was killed. (Creba was a white teenager who was fatally shot while out shopping with her family on Boxing Day after being caught in the crossfire of gunplay between warring gang members). While we remember the name and face of Jane Creba, the names of countless racialized others who have been felled, injured or traumatized by gang-related violence have disappeared from public memory.
When the media reports on escalating gun violence and its related gang activity the perpetrators of these crimes are rarely commented on, except to be demonized. This is not unusual for we do not often identify with those who commit crimes. We tell ourselves that they are unlike us; the fact that they are criminals is the result of bad decision making on their part or because they could no longer contain the evil that existed inside them all along. This is easier than considering the possibility that perhaps these individuals are the victims of circumstance or critiquing the systemic structures that forced these individuals along the paths to their collective dead end. In doing so we ignore the humanity that exists within these people and dismiss the devastation that their actions have; not only on their own individual lives but the lives of others – namely their families, peers and other members of the communities to which they belong.

Filmmaker Frances-Anne Solomon’s 2007 work A Winter Tale was inspired in part by this phenomenon. Based around the fictional character of Gene Wright, a “forty-something social worker whose immigrant father answered former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s call for a just society” , the film explores the “inner worlds of black men living in Toronto amidst reports of escalating ‘black on black’ violence within the city” . Toronto-based multimedia artist Sandra Brewster’s series Strip from 2008 arose from a similar nexus. The body of work carries a stark commentary not only on youth  led astray by guns and violence but on the dynamic of internalised racism that plays out amongst many blacks living within the GTA overall. Within these bleak monochromatic works, Brewster features three main prototypes: ominous silhouettes and masked figures rendered in charcoal meant to represent the perpetrators of gang violence and faceless figures with newsprint faces and afro hairstyles who are the silent witnesses to their crimes.

Holes – Misery untold created holes where souls used to dwell, Charcoal on paper, 38″x 50″, 2008

In the work, Hemoglobin Taste Like Hate, That’s What Demons Love (2008), we see a fallen figure above who stands a masked character holding a gun. Behind is an array of figures, all appearing to be witnessing the scene which has unfolded before them. Within this scenario the only figures who appear to have any agency are those with arms; namely the black silhouettes. With the exception of the lone masked figure with the gun, none of the other figures seem to have any ability to act: in fact, it is questionable as to whether they are able to bear witness at all as their faces are without eyes or ears and are shaped from remnants of telephone book pages.  The figures exemplify the tendency of those who are outside of black communities to assume that there is one monolithic black community which is represented by a few individuals. In these earlier works, these faceless forms appear in the background, almost as filler, and their presence was offset by the placement of another figure in the foreground whose features were rendered in detail. When these figures appear in Brewster’s works they reference the erasure of culture, history and individual identity that has plagued members of the African diaspora since colonization.

In interviewing men in the black communities in the GTA Solomon discovered that many had parents who immigrated to Canada lured by Trudeau’s promise of the “Just Society”.  Both Solomon’s film and Brewster’s drawings illustrate the failure of that promise. Still bearing the marks of attempted cultural (and physical) erasure born of colonization, the figures within Brewster’s desolate landscapes are unable to stem the threat of permanent erasure that some in their communities wield through visiting violence upon one another, nor are they able to withstand the violent negation that stems from existing within a culture that renders them invisible. The masked and silhouetted figures have swallowed their rage against the society that has deemed them inconsequential, internalizing the threat to their survival which was once external and other but is now contained within. The masked figures have snarling mouths where their eyes should be, threatening to consume themselves and those around them. The form of the supine figure in the foreground resembles a puddle, one can easily imagine that it will continuously expand and will eventually envelop them all, be they predator or innocent bystander.

Solomon stated that the winter in the title of her film “became a metaphor for a community under siege in the cold, seeking strategies and ways to out of the violence of racism” and that there were none to be found . With Hemoglobin Tastes Like Hate, That’s What Demons Love Brewster seems to presents us with a similar conclusion. Her fictionalized portrayals present us with harsh observations that ring only too true for many of us in Canada who are the descendents of immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa: caught between the painful place of having broken ties with our countries of origin and forced to face the reality of living within a society that still has yet to truly recognize or embrace us. Though we might wish to turn away from the truisms within the work, what Brewster presents us with is best confronted – lest we all continue to suffer the consequences.

Sally Frater  2009

Artist Statement from  STRIP

 Don’t Know, And evil eyes can’t even see their own hell , Charcoal on paper, 38″x 50″, 2008

Concerned about the growing violence among youth occurring in the city I approached spoken word artist Joseph Daly and asked that he write a poem and invent an imaginary world where similar problems occur.   These drawings depict a confused world searching for answers.  Through strange and suggestive imagery they share the various emotions felt upon hearing that another young man has been killed by gun violence.

Among these drawings: Silhouettes of young men depict the “holes where souls used to dwell”.  A herd of lamb suggest the insignificance of another young life.  A disconnect from a rooted ancestry is felt in wilting African flowers.  And the acceptance of love and a feeling of self worth is kept at a distance in a crystal ball.

Demons spy with evil eyes across my city
Misery untold created holes where souls used to dwell
And evil eyes can’t even see their own hell
Hurt smells like waste when mixed with blood
Hemoglobin tastes like hate, that’s what demons love
Sacrificial lambs leave stains on clean hands
That’s why love is all you need but fear is all they understand
Demons spy with evil eyes across my city
Seeking recruits for their devious deeds
They bleed from the need to understand and feel
And they baptize their subjects through shards of steel
- by Joseph Daly, 2008

Everywhere we go, it seems that advertisements are progressively invading our public and private spaces. We are constantly being bombarded with messages trying to persuade us to consume a certain product or brand. Billboards hovering over crowded highways are a perfect example of this effort in mass consumption. According to Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, “the concept of the spectacle, taking the form of advertisements or propaganda, is a social relationship among people mediated by images.” The image consequently becomes the propulsor of urban conversations and discussions. The artist Jason Mena tries to do just that. In his photographic series Urban Landscapes, Mena appropriates the billboard, a space usually pertaining to advertisers, and transforms it into an active platform for the promotion of  ideas.

As the image continues to substitute social interaction in contemporary society, the role of art seems all the more important in everyday life. Jason Mena’s images are nothing but forceful, as they display urban scenes where advertisments spaces are replaced with carefully chosen texts that make the viewer think. Photographs such as Todo es mentira (It’s all lies), depict a billboard with these words towering over a busy avenue during rush hour traffic. These images, alhough conceptually concrete, are merely proposals for actual urban installations. Some other examples of texts include Blah! Blah! Blah! or This Space Was Intentionally Left Blank. What is the artist really trying to say? Perhaps the space in the billboards is left open ended for the viewer to formulate their own suppositions. What seems important is that the artist is using the medium of the billboard against its very purpose. Instead of trying to condition the masses to think alike, to take part in the mass consumption of products, he is attempting to provoke in them critical independent thought.

By using the structure of the billboard as a support for artistic expresion, is Mena trying to make a statement regarding the relationship between marketing and art? It certainly seems that way. Not only is Mena promoting his work with the medium most appropriate for this purpose, but he is also branding a very particular ideology. The concept of branding is a practice commonly used in contemporary marketing. Branding or “burning” a product into the consumer’s mind is a strategy by which the corporate world markets a product to potential consumers, turning the critical public into a passive consumer public. This concept seems all the more relevant as art is linked ever more with its commercial aspect.

The revolution of the art fair has also played an influential role in transforming an artistic concept into a valuable thing-in-itself, as art dealers sell artwork just as trade shows sell products. Gallery spaces are increasingly becoming just another store where you buy just another product for your consumption and instant gratification. You can go in, pick what you like and take it home. There are no visits to the artist’s studios or any conceptual interest of the sort. Art becomes just another commodity that people acquire to gain prestige or decorate their homes. Consequently, the ideas that motivated the work eventually get lost in the commercial transaction. The next step is inevitable. The gallery space as we know it has begun its demise, as art is taken out into the public realm.

Just as Jenny Holzer uses posters and large scale public spaces to develop her artwork, Mena also takes art out of the gallery and into the public space. One project that resonates with the concept of public art is Making it Public, an intervention where the artist gave away t-shirts at the 2009 CIRCA Art Fair. Using the art fair as a stage, people wore t-shirts displaying messages such as Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes and It’s all lies and bluff, texts taken from German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Taking into account the current economic and political climate, these messages take an appealing twist. If we start to think about these texts in its political context, we begin to question (as viewers and participators of the work) our immediate political environments. Are we aware of the illusory nature of political discourse? Do we need to take on a particular political cause to be actively engaged in our social and economic destinies? And if we do, which ones are worthy of our involvement? As public space is ever more dominated by the mass media, be it through T-shirts, billboards, or gas pumps, we have become passive consumers of the prevailing ideology. By the evolution of Jason Mena’s work we see the emergence of a new public space, one where ideas and concepts can be freely discussed.

On the whole, Jason Mena’s images can be thought of as mediascapes, as they directly influence the way we perceive our surrounding realities. Although Mena’s advertisements remind us of political or commercial slogans due to their rhetorical nature, their purpose is actually very different. Instead of trying to make us concerned with consumption and the capitalist drive of the mass media, we become implicated in the construction of new ideas. The concepts behind advertising are destroyed to lead the way to the branding of ideologies. Jason Mena’s imposing images remain not only a spectacle for our eyes, but one for our minds as well.

 Carla Acevedo 2009

Photo courtesy Wendel Fernandez

“…Walk Into the Night was inspired by the history of the Cape Town Carnival and was intended to obliquely tell the story of the forced removals in Cape Town. It was billed an “invisible masquerade” – a processional shadow play, with various elements worn or carried by a multitude of participants, casting shadows onto horizontal and vertical planes along the itinerary of the procession, from hand-held white screens, to buildings, the sidewalk and the ground, participants and audience.”

Photo courtesy Wendel Fernandez

I recently caught the train from Johannesburg to Cape Town for the launch of CAPE09, a citywide festival of contemporary art events, which aims to transform Cape Town into an African art hub for almost two months, until 21 June 2009.
This year’s programme looked promising, seeming to have evolved out of an authentic impulse to connect and jump social borders. With art projects ranging from explorations into the late cult pop singer Brenda Fassie’s roots, to interventions on city transport routes, the programmers of CAPE 09 seem genuinely committed to art as a catalyst for social connectivity across class and geography. Far from taking place in the standard white cube gallery venues, events have been planned to open doors into new spaces like the Cape Town Station, the City Library, Langa High School and Lookout Hill in Khayelitsha, a poor township area on the outskirts of Cape Town.

I was impressed by the organisers’ boldness in asking burning questions like: How can we rethink the forms of art and exhibitions, to experiment with new methods and to produce new alliances? This seems like a crucial question in the context of a country, which 15 years after the dawn of democracy, is still plagued by gross inequity, and social and racial dividedness.

I was also excited by the idea of CAPE09 being launched with a one-hour procession curated by Claire Tancons (New Orleans/USA) in collaboration with visual artist Marlon Griffith (Trinidad), and composer Garth Erasmus (Cape Town).

Photo courtesy Mark Wessels

Firstly, I am a devoted fan of carnival culture. During my childhood in Durban, a major port city on the Indian Ocean coastline, my extended family – aunts, uncles, cousins and all – used to venture down to the beach front once a year for a crazy pageant of light and disguise that wound itself along the seafront promenade in the darkness of night. By the time I had grown up, the Durban carnival had mysteriously been written out of the city’s annual calendar and I missed its chaotic, exuberant, public spiritedness.

So, in 1998, I ventured to Luanda, shortly after the ceasefire ended Angola’s bitter civil war, to experience and document the annual Angolan carnival. There I experienced the tense, post-war streets of Launda turn into a sea of utter surrealism. I remember a man running through the crowds with a chimpanzee in a nappy on his back yelling: ‘Paz! Paz!’ (Peace) and another sauntering through the throngs cloaked in a technicolour Elvis bath towel like some postmodern Superman.

And all the time the MC was yelling: ‘Car-r-r-r-na-v-a-al! Ca-a-a-a-r-r-r-na-val!’, as group upon group of revellers in ingenious costumes wound their way along the promenade. There was no autonomy of style. Idiosyncracy ruled the day. Even the police, notorious for their whimsical tyranny, forgot about the guns lodged in their belts. A half-naked man wearing a pink piggie mask drove past on his motorbike and the whole town lost itself in a fiesta of crazed catharsis. What started in the pounding afternoon heat went on and on until the sun turned the rusty Cuca beer sign above Luanda into a dark silhouette against the red sky.

My next encounter with the whimsical spirit of carnival was when Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith touched down in Johannesburg in 2004 for a three-month residency at the Bag Factory artists’ studios culminating in a carnival street parade. I have been involved with the studios for about a decade and Griffith’s Making Mas carnival intervention stands out as one of the highlight events at the Bag Factory, bringing life, spirit, laughter and craziness to the streets of Fordsburg at night.

‘As a young artist growing up in Trinidad, the carnival or “mas”, as we call it, had a big impression. I have always found it to be a legitimate art form. It is public, participatory and interdisciplinary. This has made me want to continue in this tradition, pushing the art form to a contemporary level,’ said Griffith, who involved a large number of local artists in the event. The community spirit was a tangible force for good that night, everyone pulling together for a celebration and a parade that stood outside of everyday logic and personal ambition. It was a joyous meltdown of the kind that reminds us of our humility and our humanity. So when I heard Griffith was involved in the procession for CAPE 09, I was eager to board that train for Cape Town.

Photo courtesy Mark Wessels

Borrowing its title from the acclaimed novel by Capetonian author Alex La Guma, A Walk Into the Night was inspired by the history of the Cape Town Carnival and was intended to obliquely tell the story of the forced removals in Cape Town. It was billed an “invisible masquerade” – a processional shadow play, with various elements worn or carried by a multitude of participants, casting shadows onto horizontal and vertical planes along the itinerary of the procession, from hand-held white screens, to buildings, the sidewalk and the ground, participants and audience.

Me and my compadrés arrived at the city end of Government Avenue at about 7pm that Saturday night, just as the procession wound its way into Cape Town’s magnificent inner city Gardens. We skidded to a halt, parked the car, and ran across the street to join the parade. And from then on a sweet spell was cast over the night.

The carnival had been brought to life with the help of a hundred local participants, many of them children, who were holding up beautiful cardboard cutout figures, with Victorian-style filigree patterns echoing the colonial history of the Gardens themselves. Others shone torchlights onto the figures projecting their dancing nighttime silhouettes onto shimmery white sheets.

For seconds at a time, images of nubile young maidens, Victorian madams and, more surreally, dinosaurs, would spring to life on the sheets and then disappear into nothingness or a blur of raw fire held aloft in the darkness. An air of whimsy prevailed as this ephemeral dance of light and shadow proceeded beneath the dark canopy of giant trees in the night. Our strange, makeshift procession was dwarfed by the grand white buildings of Parliament, the Iziko South African National Gallery and the Natural History Museum, illuminated in the moonlight – the fragility of the people set in relief by the stately power of these buildings.

Photo courtesy Mark Wessels

And then there were the surreal pling-plong-plucks emanating from two small bands of traveling minstrels in our midst, whose instruments seemed to be based on indigenous Khoisan musical instruments, tapping into the indigenous and European dichotomy that has informed Cape Town’s history since the Dutch East India Company first dropped anchor in 1652.

I was totally taken in by the inventive shadow play of this small once-off community parade and tried not to let the spirit of the occasion be ruined by one or two cynical and critical comments that invariably arose as we made our way through the Gardens. One criticism was that the procession was not sufficiently well conceived – that it lacked cohesion, that the light should have been stronger, the screens of cloth firmer, the images clearer, blah, blah, blah… I disagreed.

I am married to a Brazilian who has become cynical about carnival, having witnessed the appropriation of this community spirited ritual by big business and hungry capital ever eager to squeeze as much cash as possible out of a tourist-worthy extravaganza. These days the carnival in Brazil is so huge, so well organised and so rampantly commercial, he avoids it at all cost.

So let us cherish the old-style carnival. The makeshift element is what makes a carnival so sweet and splendid. It is not an opera. It is a street parade – imperfect and communalistic by its very nature, a small taste of ephemeral magic to change the mood of a night. For me, that was enough. I was uplifted by the experience, which stayed with me for several days. I did not need it to be an epic feat of theatrical choreography. Its transience and its flaws were all part of its unique charm.

Inspired by the traditions of the Cape Town and Trinidad carnivals and West African shadow puppets, this whimsical procession perfectly captured the spirit of CAPE 09, which aims to culturally connect Cape Town, South Africa, Africa and the Diaspora by creating a ground-breaking contemporary African art event, rooted in the local but global in impact.

Alexandra Dodd is an affiliated researcher at the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

 ***See where all the CAPE 09 exhibitions are happening at www.capeafrica.org

( Guardia de Seguridad ) Trabajo = Trabajo / postcard edition 2008

” …In these photographs, the artist is caught in the act of some everyday scenario in the work life of an average person. These acts consist of different roles such as feeding a number of cats, working as a cashier at a store and piercing a client at a tattoo shop. I began to wonder if in fact it was an artwork. However, a closer look revealed the ideas behind the work and more importantly gave rise to many questions regarding art and its relationship with everyday life. At what point do we draw the line between art and everyday experience? What makes these photographs worthy of such reflection?… ”

( Mesera )  Trabajo = Trabajo

When I saw Catherine Matos Olivo’s work for the first time at the 2nd San Juan Poligraphic Triennial, it did not immediately grab my attention. I was strolling through the room looking at the different works displayed, when I caught a quick glimpse of several postcards of photographs neatly placed on a shelf. Not only did I not know it was her work, since the tag with her name was not placed on the wall, but what I saw did not instantly provoke a reaction within myself. At first glance, the images seem trite and commonplace. In these photographs, the artist is caught in the act of some everyday scenario in the work life of an average person. These acts consist of different roles such as feeding a number of cats, working as a cashier at a store and piercing a client at a tattoo shop. I began to wonder if in fact it was an artwork. However, a closer look revealed the ideas behind the work and more importantly gave rise to many questions regarding art and its relationship with everyday life. At what point do we draw the line between art and everyday experience? What makes these photographs worthy of such reflection?

A security guard, a store clerk, a waitress… the photographs made me think of my own work experiences during the last ten years. When I spoke to the artist about her work, she candidly asked me what did I think the work meant, what kind of interpretation could I give. At this moment, I realized that it is the personal experiences of the viewer that makes her work relevant. For Catherine Matos Olivo, art and her personal experiences reflect each other, as the title of her most recent work Trabajo=Trabajo suggests, where the artist is the protagonist of a series of photographs that document odd jobs held during her formation as an artist. Although she appears as the main subject in ordinary scenarios, they are not self-portraits in a traditional sense. They encourage the viewer to reflect upon the fluctuation of the concept of self and pose questions regarding our political and socio-economic environments.

( Ujier ) Trabajo = Trabajo

But then again, I ask myself, what makes these photographs an artwork to be displayed at a triennial? Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of her diverse personal work experiences that encourages self-contemplation and analysis. In my opinion, it is not the individual act that defines the work, but the collectivity of the actions depicted that imparts meaning. The artist appropriates ordinary everyday actions and through its documentation invites the viewer to see further, to take the time to create a dialogue between her artwork and their own personal experience. When looking at the images as a collective artwork, the artist seems to become invisible among the familiar scenarios and uniforms, as her identity is never truly revealed. By remaining anonymous and confusing the viewer as to her true identity, she places herself in a position of power, obscuring herself but at the same time revealing all the different facets of her own life. The viewer not only identifies themselves with these portrayals, but also begins their own process of self-examination.

 ( Cuidadora de Gatos ) Trabajo = Trabajo

And what exactly is revealed to us? Could it be the simultaneous plurality of our own selves? For both the artist and the viewer, it is a self-defining voyage that explores the concept of oscillating identities. We are all in a constant process of mutation and transformation. Our identities are in constant flux. Each day we wear different masks and adopt different identities depending on the situations we face. People are constantly trying to pinpoint who we are by defining us through our profession. Through the portrayal of different selves, the artist adopts different personas; the ones required to perform a certain task. In every job, her identity is at stake. In the process of adapting to different situations, the individual is effaced to lead the way to a more plural definition of ourselves.

 ( Perforadora Corporal ) Trabajo = Trabajo

The diverse polarization of her personal experience also brings attention to the political aspect of her work. When I asked the artist about this, which entails the socio-political status of Puerto Rico as a US territory and the vague notion of Puerto Rican identity, Matos Olivo expressed that it is not one of her main concerns as an artist, but that she is conscious that these ideas are consequentially discussed in her work. Issues such as immigration, racism, neo-colonialism and feminism are deserving of attention and further reflection. In contemporary society, who are the people that perform these unskillful jobs? Does the issue of identity in her work transcend the personal sphere and enter a more political one? Trabajo=Trabajo can unquestionably be understood as a study in Puerto Rican pluralism. Puerto Rico’s political status has never been clearly defined. The island’s ambiguous political position has weighed heavily not only on politics, but also the visual arts, literature, and social behaviors. Everything in the island seems to revolve around the unsettling and unanswerable question: Who are we? Are we American or Latin American? It seems an almost tiresome discourse for any Puerto Rican. We have become accustomed and acclimatized to the notion of dual identity.

( Acompanante de Envejeciente ) Trabajo = Trabajo

Pushing the political tone even further is a project entitled Geographical Restrictions. In it, the artist documents the limitations and controls that exist on the Internet for the exchange of information and goods.  In Puerto Rico, it is not uncommon to find a situation where a person cannot buy a product on the Internet due to what is called “geographical restrictions.” This upsetting reality speaks further of the island’s political and social conundrum, but also reflects the cultural and social isolation of the island in its relationship with the mainland. Nonetheless, the project also examines the global exchange of information, as search engines fueled by strategically placed servers pick and choose the information we see and do not see. In this sense, we are all geographically and socially restricted. Can we really see further than our own immediate realities? Similar to Trabajo=Trabajo, this project makes us think about how a seemingly isolated experience can transform itself into a global concern. In what way are we truly globally connected if not by our own agglomeration of shared experiences?

In fact, what seems to be an increasingly banal discourse, the documentation of an average life, turns out to pose thought-provoking questions regarding the self and our surrounding socio-political and economic realities. Given the global economic crisis we currently live in, the work is all the more relevant as people from all walks of life recur to odd jobs to make ends meet. Is a new social economic structure currently being constructed? How are these experiences going to affect the way we see ourselves in contemporary society? Trabajo=Trabajo speaks to all of us. It is not an isolated experience, but one that crosses geographical and cultural boundaries.

 Catherine Matos Olivo’s site here