Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 576

Photographing Liberia

We'll pretend we did not see Alex Perry's clichéd description of Liberia (including a reference to Liberian Kreyol as "a patois that is both thuggish and warm") to a Time LightBox feature on the work of photographer Glenna Gordon, and concentrate on her work instead. Instead we'll turn to Glenna's–we interviewed her here about her favorite photographers–own description of her work: "I have now been working in Liberia for the better part of the past three years," she writes "and while much of the work I do is for publications or organizations, the work I feel most strongly about is my own documentary project which focuses on understanding Liberia's past and desire to embrace the present."

Along with the photos, which includes a series on the recent presidential elections, she sent us some context:

Liberia's civil war ended nearly a decade ago and the country is, at least nominally, peaceful. Some things are getting better for some people. But after so many years of conflict, no one makes plans for the future. I first visited Liberia in January 2009, and since then, signs of progress assure donors and investors that their money is well spent. A couple of times a year, the government and businesses put a fresh coat of paint over all the buildings along the main roads. They paint over the mold and the wet, but in the soupy tropical air, the quick coating won't keep the walls clean.  Freed American slaves came to Liberia in the 1820s. They called themselves the Americos. They wore top hats and hoop skirts despite the hot West African sun. They brought antebellum inequality with them, but this time, they were in charge. The indigenous people of Liberia became second-class citizens in their own country. More than a hundred years of grievances led to a coup and political unrest in the 1980s, followed by a civil war that lasted fourteen years, displaced a third of the country and left 200,000 dead. In a country of just three million people, no one was untouched. After the war, a theatrical Truth and Reconciliation Commission did nothing meaningful to address crimes and wrongs and the current leadership, the internationally adored Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is a sheep in wolf's clothing. Liberia's future is uncertain. People are desperate to move forward, but often at the cost of ignoring the past. The past will always out; fixing the surface doesn't fix the problem. In my work, I seek traces of war wounds – psychological and physical – and examine the devices improvised to hide the hurt and embrace the present. I seek out signs of a time before the conflict, where a romanticized past is still visible. I try to understand what it means to live today without thoughts of tomorrow.

Above (that's former footballer George Weah, and his running mate Wilson Tubman and their attaché sitting at a campaign rally) and below we feature some of the images. Following is a photograph of a signboard depicting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, EU president Herman Van Rompuy, UK Prime Minister David Cameron [or is it economist Jeffrey Sachs?] and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 'saving' Liberia (taken in October 2011).

Below, "the Armed Forces of Liberia kept watch as United Nations helicopters circled before the announcement of election results. Many feared Liberia would descend back into violence and war" (October, 2011).

Finally, "a shop in central Monrovia, Liberia, selling wedding dresses also rents them out for $150 a day, which includes the price of dry cleaning. Most Liberians live on less than a dollar a day. While the female president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is internationally lauded as a champion of women's rights, within Liberia women and girls still live with the daily threats of violence and rape" (December 2009).

Afrikaner Bloods

Now and then I'll scan the international media for reports about "heightening tensions between black and white South Africans." They never disappoint. (Serious, try it.) Moreover, it seems to have become standard practice to believe and copy each other's stories. (Incredibly, even Think Africa Press recently wrote tensions flared.) It made me wonder how reporters actually measure those tensions. I assume they rely on sensationalist South African press headlines about run-ins between black and white South African citizens (these stories usually come with blown-up quotes), or fancy documentaries like in the report above with sound-bite bylines such as "White South African teens wrestle with an uncertain identity … They learn they are their own people — not South Africans but Afrikaners" (remember we wrote about this story before and called it 'The Dutch Disease', a month before a motion was submitted, and rejected, to the Dutch Parliament "asking the government to help stop racial discrimination against the Afrikaners in South Africa"; it now comes with a video). The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, one of the few organizations doing factual research on how South African relationships and attitudes evolve, paints a different picture — a picture that might be too complicated for print.

Youssou N'Dour's family politics

Youssou N'Dour's campaign team released the video for his presidential campaign song 'Fekké Maci Boolé'. Strangely, N'Dour's official French facebook campaign's biography (apart from punting the obligatory "Yes You can!" profile) only mentions the wives he wed and the children he has fathered:

The eldest of his family, Youssou N'Dour grew up in the district of Médina, Dakar. His father Elimane N'Dour is of Serer origin while his mother Ndeye Sokhna Mboup is an original Toucouleur and Wolof griotte. As a Muslim and a member of the Mouride Brotherhood in Senegal, Youssou N'Dour and his wife Mami Camara officially divorced after 17 years of marriage. They had four children together (Ndeye Sokhna, Segui, St. Louis and Venus). In his youth, and before his marriage to Camara Mami, Youssou N'Dour had a son and a daughter, Birane and Thioro, from two different mothers. He is currently married to Aida Coulibaly, a French-Senegalse métisse with whom he had two daughters, the eldest of whom is named Mary. Aida Coulibaly is currently the President of the Youssou N'Dour Foundation.

How will this possibly help him win an election?

Music Break. Jules Gueye

It must be the cold weather. It's cold in New York City. Here's the smooth grooves of Senegalese trumpet player Jules Gueye.

A Human Project

Everybody wants in on Martin Luther King today. French electro-instrumental band United Fools with the help of Peuple de l'Herbe's Sir Jean and Burkinabé artist Art Melody.

Martin Luther King Day

The latest installment of comedian Kassem G's "California On …" (remember his "California On Egypt" classic) asking passers-by what they know about Martin Luther King Jr. Part humorous, part annoying and part set-up, but also quite illuminating about American attitudes towards race, history and knowledge–on this day.

The French advantage

… The French influence this year seems ubiquitous; 9 of 16 teams have Francophone history, the largest delegation of foreign coaches are French (4, compared to 7 locals—which is a fairly significant local contingent compared to recent tournaments), and 8 of 15 squads draw more players from French professional teams than from any other foreign league system (the 16th squad — Sudan — has an entirely domestic roster)

 * Andrew Guest previews the 2012 African Cup of Nations for Football is Coming Home. The post comes complete with a table illustrating these findings. The image above is of Moussa Sow, Lille and Senegal striker.

You remember Caster Semenya

There was a big birthday party a week or so ago, in South Africa. No, not that one, not the ANC centenary, although, amazingly, people are still debating that blowout a whole week later, including how some of the VIPs got to experience what ordinary people endure everyday. This was a party of now, of today and tomorrow and then some. On January 7, Caster Semenya turned 21, and she celebrated in style, in her home village of GaMasehlong in Moletjie near Polokwane. She partied with her new coach, Maria Mutola, with the "People's Poet" and mbaqanga singer Mzwakhe Mbuli, her family and friends, including sister athlete Ashleigh Trotter. Semenya is beaming. The pictures and reports indicate a truly joyous event.

You remember Caster Semenya. In 2009, she ran like the wind, and beamed after every race. Until she was charged, by a fellow runner, with gender indeterminacy. Actually, she was first accused of being a man, and then, when that didn't quite pan out, of being … something else. She was 'investigated' by the International Association of Athletic Federations… sort of. The IAAF didn't actually have a procedure for determining gender, and apparently didn't know that sexing the body is an ideological, a political, procedure. So, they invented science and scientists and, as so often happens, betrayed the trust the then 19-year old South African woman had put in them.

"Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative." Western societies. White Western societies.

In the debate that ensued, much of the attention paid by the Western media focused on the intricacies of intersex, transgender and all those 'exotic' realms that were yet again being 'discovered' in the aftermath of homo- and trans-phobic violence and violation. While it was not the first time that the IAAF had screwed up, royally, around sex and gender, this time, the press doted on pictures and stories of "the African girl" who had run through the countryside of Limpopo, and who played soccer rather than fetch wood. They dealt with the sheer and complete support her family and her village gave to this 'different' girl-child with a touch of astonishment. Acceptance of difference is 'modern', isn't it, and modern is rarely African and always urban, metropolitan.

And so the story continued. The scholarly debates continue, the more general attention less so.

The story of Caster Semenya was always a story of a Black African woman, and was equally always the story of a Black woman. As Erykah Badu has been reminding us, Black is a country. So, as 2012 rolls along, let's truly not need a true sex and, instead, let's sing a little praise song, an anthem, for Caster Semenya, and remember the women who blaze trails.

January in Cairo II: The Ministry of Culture

"When the revolution happened, every artist I knew put down their materials." William Wells, director of the Townhouse Gallery, is well placed to speak. Some say he has done more for contemporary Egyptian art in the last decade than the Minister for Culture. In 1998 he established the independent art space in downtown Cairo, in a nest of streets where for some time the ahwas (coffee-shops) have been busy with political dissidents. The gallery took an active role in the uprising, giving their space over to the revolutionary Radio Tahrir. "Many artists moved very smoothly into political activism, using their skills in the service of the revolution."

Tahrir became a theater for political operations which harnessed extraordinary creativity: "In the first eighteen days vendors mixed with artists … it was hilarious, people were responding to things very quickly, creatively. Moments after the regime announced that the protesters were representing the United States, someone in Tahrir Square had produced books which said 'US Agenda', 'Israeli Agenda' and so on." When protest encompasses everything that art has – or aims for – the privileged seclusion of art seems obsolete. Artists started to collect and organize data, to serve the revolution by making real information available online. "There was mass documentation … filmmakers started making work around the square itself." "Then another group of revolutionary artists: filmmakers, grafiti artists came running." Artists turned to raw data collection to record state violence: "people were taking USB sticks from phones … people filming people filming." Townhouse helped to set up screens in Tahrir Square where this work could be shown. Then "the army smashed the screens … we created something and they destroyed it."

At some point, however, art's role in the revolution became more complex, and more necessary. "In March, April, we experienced a withdrawal … bullets and tear gas … that's a different confrontation. The artists left. Our role wasn't necessary – or clear." According to Wells, many artists retreated to their studios or took residencies abroad. "Since the revolution," Wells adds, "I have not met one artist who has taken a celebratory approach." This may be more to do with the careful moves the Townhouse has been making in the last year; the city's commercial galleries seem much more interested in art which represents the revolution.

At the Picasso Gallery in Zamalek, a wealthy district in central Cairo, Helmi El Tonni's paintings are challenging and infantile scenes of fat harlequins who tease the viewer with skeletal fish and the degraded Egyptian flag, smirking allusions to Mubarak's dead regime. According to Ibrahim Abd El-Rahman, the gallery's owner and a prodigious collector, many of these paintings have already been bought, not by foreign buyers but Egyptian businessmen. One of the positive outcomes of the revolution, he says, has been the empowerment of youth, who are starting to see art as an investment. Negar Azimi (quoted in this excellent article by Ursula Lindsey) reflects on the difficult decisions facing art: "A survey of titles of works from recent exhibitions in Cairo reveals the following: 'Freedom,' 'Drink Freedom,' 'Shadow of Freedom,' 'People Demand,' 'Man Crying' and so on." This is, she argues, "the sort of revolution-kitsch the market seeks. To be blandly political is in vogue and to be apolitical risks flirting with philistinism."

Azimi (whose ArtForum article can be read here) argues that the Middle East is not ready for contemporary art; countries such as Egypt produce 'timely mediocrities', it is because changes in government must take place before celebrations of a country's culture should happen. Azimi makes the important point that these celebrations can mask serious social problems, but I wonder whether art does not have an important role to play in the changes themselves. Art is one way of drawing a national culture into an international conversation, asking important questions about modernity, and bringing scrutiny and comparison to political realities. And praise is, after all, the best form of advice.

For the august collector Sherwet Shafei, the revolution has brought about a significant decline in custom at Safarkhan, the gallery she runs in Zamalek. I wonder whether this decline has been counterbalanced by an increased international interest in Egyptian art? She agrees: a recent exhibition in Frankfurt, To Egypt With Love, sold ninety percent of its work to foreign buyers. In this show, Hossam Hassan's mixed-media work is exactly the kind of passionately political art Azimi describes: a revolutionary paint by numbers (see, for example, 'Days to Remember'). I ask Shafei if the revolution has prompted new work. Very much so, and she names a young painter, Ahmed Kassim, whose exhibition will soon open at the gallery.

Many of these artists were clearly making satirical gestures towards the political establishment even before the revolution, but to take the revolution as a subject seems both unavoidable and opportunistic. William certainly seems to agree: his artists "were not producing art, and nobody would – how could anyone expect…" He tails off, and almost seems to suggest that nobody should be making art. The art being made in Cairo reminds him of the Palestinian art of the First and Second Intifada: "banal, direct, literal." (Daanish Faruqi theorises it as a more general problem for the Middle East here.) This is not to blame the artists, Wells emphasises, "they are under great pressure to respond to the situation." But what the situation is is the problem itself.

As 'authentic' experience, revolution is the very material of art, but in Cairo it seems still an obstacle to artistic production. My host Hossam Sakr has been finding it difficult to make work since last January, he says, because "we are still in the event." For artists the revolution is a problem of experience. The revolution as event is, by definition, outside the norm. It is unclear how long it will take for the rules to change, for reality to be reimposed, and for art to resurrect the exception as an experience – and attempt to inhabit it. These abstract problems are practical obstacles for artists in Egypt. I realise I have been hoping to find some quietly powerful subjective document of the times, a contemporary correspondent to Arthur Rimbaud, who elaborated his revolutionary poetic project during the fated Paris Commune. Wells agrees that this search is too hasty. Wait, he says, and see what happens in 2013.

There are, Wells says, a group of 'usual suspects', artists whose work can't be shown in commercial or government spaces. The performance artists who "hit the streets so hard that everyone gets arrested in seven minutes." Another performance artist whose activism meant he recently had to cancel a show in Amsterdam: "I spoke to him and asked him why … he told me he'd been shot in the square." His vocational physicality meant his speed and agility was employed to retrieve those injured during confrontations with the military, and he had been shot. Another critical experience was a philosopher who only realised "he had to retreat" when he too was shot and "they couldn't extract the bullets". "I've spoken to artists who found themselves in the ministry chanting 'Kill'. In these torture chambers they felt justified chanting that. But they had to retreat."

I ask for some names: who are these 'usual suspects'? He demurs, referring to a group of French journalists who came into his office demanding to interview Egyptian artists. "Look back at the art that was being made before the revolution." Lara Baladi's Borg el-Amal ('Tower of Hope') commissioned to stand in the grounds of the Cairo Opera House by the government when it had "lost credibility" and had to "reach out to the independent sector". The Tower, a structure inspired by the ashwa'iyat ('informal housing') in many of Cairo's residential districts. "Each brick inscribed with hope and a picture of a man with a cart." But this is no eulogy to the transcendental value of hard work. "Inside the tower, there is the bray of donkeys … a donkey symphony." In spite of this obvious alliance with local deprivation, contemporary art seems to have become alienated from popular discourse about revolutionary Egyptian identity.

Before the revolution, Wells says, "artists were highly critical of each other". But recent events have forced coherence on artists. "Our new programme is focusing on multiple truths, the ownership of truths" and this seems a crucial question for Egyptian artists. "In the process of the revolution, the artist becomes unwittingly factionalised, as secular, international … And people start to ask you: are you really Egyptian? You begin to question yourself. At political gatherings they started to say: 'If you didn't sleep in the square for eighteen days you are not allowed to speak.'" The counterpart to this is the radical Islamic critique of art, provided by the Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Amer: "I'm talking in general about the artists who held that demonstration or strike. What is this art of yours? The art of lesbians? The art of prostitutes? What reasonable Egyptian would say that it's okay? Hold a referendum." This archetype, the 'reasonable Egyptian', has become a critical problem for the revolution.

This xenophobia has been exacerbated by the army's recent call for citizens to arrest those working against the revolution. Shortly after it was first established, Wells recalls, the Townhouse was accused of receiving Israeli money: "it is a bad Egyptian habit, blaming the other." (The Townhouse website declares its sponsors, which include several Western embassies and numerous global corporations, notably the Ford Foundation.) This confrontation, in which the artist is forced to prove herself Egyptian, must be limiting? The gallery has responded with an outreach program, Friday workshops for Cairo's countless working children. This is partly an attempt to engage with the community: in the initial stages of the uprising "we were protected by the street … then they turned against us. After the revolution people started to come out as pro-Mubarak."

At the beginning of April a coalition of independent galleries presented the first al-Fann Midan ('Art is a Square') event in Abdeen Square (as well as five other cities: Alexandria, Asyat, Suez, Minya and Port Said). Townhouse is involved but Wells finds the activity of "bringing art to the public" unsurprisingly problematic: "it omits the importance of quality." One of the lessons of this revolution is that art is not an inalienable good. Art which consciously positions itself as public is, he believes, "in danger of committing the same mistake as that of the Mubarak regime: it's got to be big." The Townhouse has hosted its own events, curating testimonies from protesters: the Tahrir Monologues, Lessons in Revolting, open mic nights, and pursuing Wells's ambition to turn the gallery into a truly multi-disciplinary space which responds to the needs of the community. Writing three decades before the French revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a radical festival: a spectacle without "anything to see", a theater where the audience become the actors. The Townhouse has reached similar conclusions; "Before the revolution there was a silent audience. Now they're saying 'We're not going to sit in the coffee shop, we're players now.'" If it's unclear what actual art this project might involve, it is perhaps because the institution itself has become a work of art.

The gallery set up a "wannabe photoshoot", using a life-sized image of Tahrir Square as a backdrop, people could pose for photographs which made it look as though they were in the right place at the right time (and this [and this] seems to have become a dubious pilgrimage to democracy). Another project involved a similar détournement, in which the gallery produced a street sign quoting Barack Obama's response to the uprising: 'The Situation is Fluid.' (The accompanying Arabic reads 'the situation is not fluid'.) I wondered, when I heard this, what made Obama's utterance feel so wrong. The uprising clearly had, at many points, fluidities. It had to have them. But (as with Berlusconi's words quoted in the last post) the question is not whether the truism is true, but how it is used. And what cowardice it authorises.

The current debate around the Egyptian elections highlights an important difference between populism and democracy. Electoral victories by candidates sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups seem to have betrayed the democracy fought for – and won – by the protesters in Tahrir Square. The revolution has been forced to forget its fluidities, and protesters are expected to not only come up with the achievable goals of a manifesto, but run a successful campaign. This picture is hopelessly simplistic. It is clear that whatever has changed in Egypt – and whatever the army's role in Mubarak's downfall – the global community witnessed a real dedication of bodies to political ends.

I was struck by how the Egyptians I met in Cairo were aware they had inspired protests throughout the rest of the world. The Occupy movements have constantly signalled their identification with the Egyptian revolution, and this is not just solidarity (or desperately optimistic thinking) but an identification of bodies. The British poet J.H. Prynne has described radical occupation as "a kind of trespass, to stream into controlled spaces and just overflow them, not by reasoned argument but simply by shared presence: demography! Thus the legal formats of punitive exclusion are also challenged, not by violence but simply by spillage of peoples in large numbers and by acts of individual self-positioning." (The rest can be found here.) It is perhaps the exemplary demography of the Egyptian people – overflowing the measures of control and challenging the monopoly on violence – which art does not yet understand. The Townhouse is in the process of making the data they collected in extensive interviews with those involved in the revolution available to the future. It will no doubt prove highly valuable.

Angola Rock

A few days ago a young Angolan man I interviewed last year about a rock radio program, Volume 10 that's been on Angola's Radio FM/Radio Escola 16 years, posted this video on facebook. It's by an Angolan rock band Café Negro and is called "Kilapanga do Orfão" (the Orphan's Kilapanga). Kilapanga is a rhythm from northern Angola fused here with rock. Rock has been popular in Angola since the late colonial period (which ended in 1975 at independence) and has formed part of a complex urban soundscape.

Last May when I interviewed some of the members of the Volume 10 crew, all of whom were born after independence, all of them recalled that their taste for rock music had been discouraged by parents, teachers, friends, etc. and sometimes described as un-Angolan. Yet even at the height of Angola's civil war (1975-2002) the clubs and bars of Luanda's downtown played rock as well as Congolese music, music from the Caribbean (especially zouk) and from Cape Verde. Angolan musical genres like kizomba, Angolan hip hop and kuduro (we'll save those for another post) emerged out of this scene, and apparently Angolan rock too.

This video switches between the desert of Namibe in Angola's south and the forest on the Ilha de Luanda (Luanda Island) an atoll connected to the capital.–Marissa Moorman