The Brooklyn Rail

“Reverse the way history is told.” What began as an aspirational curatorial intent for Congolese artist collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), ever since its members Matthieu Kasiama and Ced’art Tamasala inscribed those words on the walls of Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality’s White Cube, reads more like injunction after viewing CATPC’s recent film Ku Sambisama Ya Nso Ya Mpembe (The Judgement of the White Cube). The six-minute film, part of The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred, the Dutch entry to the sixtieth Venice Biennale, dramatically reenacts the years-long process of the return of the Congolese sculpture Balot (ca. 1930) to Lusanga. Balot is named for Belgian colonial officer Maximilien Balot, known for his brutal campaign of violence to enforce recruitment at the former Unilever plantation in Lusanga. It is through this filmed performance, with its rhetorical allowances featuring an anthropomorphized White Cube on trial, that CATPC demonstrates the relational, namely material and spatial, ramifications undergirding the practices of art institutions and museums, albeit with a far more cogent understanding than the dissimulative role that typically characterizes them and, crucially, celebrates the techniques of CATPC’s injunction against them.

In other words, the spatial relationships (re)produced by colonial formations are not limited to raw materials but also pointedly include cultural production that follows. This formulation has its own historic legacy: I am reminded of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notes on the 1987 exhibition Perspectives: Angles on African Art, at the Center for African Art in New York, where ten curators were each tasked with selecting one work from a varied collection of photographs of “African art.” James Baldwin’s selection, a statue labeled Yoruba Man with a Bicycle, serves as a critical rupture for Appiah as the only selection “not in the mold of the Africa of ‘Primitivism.’”¹ and reveals the curatorial biases of the exhibition as “a commodification that requires, by the logic of the space-clearing gesture, the manufacture of Otherness.”² However, it is not just CATPC’s Balot sculpture which points to a similar, space-clearing manipulation at the hands of the art institutions. The White Cube, a metonym for museums and art institutions “steeped in ideologies of dominance,”³ in its entirety reveals that the temporal categorizations which designate Baldwin’s sculpture as (neo)traditional are in fact spatial, neo-colonial, delineations.

CATPC incisively analyses and challenges how those ideologies of dominance embodied by the White Cube operate by way of the twenty-one sculptures also on display at the Dutch Pavilion. The sculptures are first molded by CATPC members from clay collected from old-growth forests around Lusanga, 3D-scanned, and, finally, recast in cacao and palm oil in Amsterdam. The two sets of sculptures presented synchronously via a video livestream between the White Cube in Lusanga and the Dutch Pavilion at the Giardini in Venice represent for CATPC a jumelage [twinning], which elucidates the material links between museums and the forced labor and raw materials from which they derive their wealth—a twinning characterized by a transmutation, from clay in Lusanga to extracted raw materials in Venice.

It is in their performance, however, where CATPC most explicitly names and acts on the inextricably linked plantation and art economies referenced elsewhere in the exhibition. When Maman Café and Papa Caoutchouc bear witness to the mutilation that occurred at coffee and rubber plantations, respectively, it is the White Cube which stands accused. When the plantation workers strike the White Cube with leaves and branches for its crimes, it is the White Cube which “bleeds” palm oil. Here, rather than curatorial inscriptions, the material and spatial relations of systemic looting construct and literally imbue (with palm oil in this case) the walls of all art institutions. Narratively, then, it is not just the whiteness, implied as emptiness, of the walls that is blood-stained, but also the whiteness, insinuated as innocence, of those who have long served as beneficiaries of these colonial relations.

While much of the language of the performance is in the palatable strain of judgment and trial, the tactics of resistance, historically and as demonstrated by the characters in the film, are in fact hostage and revolt. Balot, the colonial officer, was beheaded and dismembered at the hands of those he compelled to labor, while the statue was carved in the immediate aftermath to harness his spirit in service of those he tormented in life. This is where the necessity for the obscurantism of art institutions arises; whereas the sculpture Balot for museums is demonstrative of a more or less magical thinking by its creator, Balot, for CATPC, is a representation of specific oppositional relation to colonial placemaking. This is precisely why when the anthropomorphized White Cube ultimately emerges in the final moments of the performance, white and wearing a suit, not unlike Balot, we are able to read, in this twinning, what amounts to an injunction by CATPC for the use of the similar tactics of resistance against art institutions and their corollaries as those used against the officer Balot.

Balot’s history is never explicitly mentioned in CATPC’s film, but the Balot sculpture still figures centrally as the White Cube agrees to return the statue and the stolen land. James Baldwin, describing his rationale for selecting Yoruba Man with a Bicycle, writes, “‘He is challenging something—or something has challenged him.’”⁴ The latter is indeed the case with the Balot sculpture. This is precisely why, during a heated exchange with the White Cube’s attorney (late CATPC member Blaise Mandefu Ayawo), Mathieu Kasiama (as himself) can state plainly: “The sculpture is the resistance.” Employing neither metonymy nor metaphor, Kasiama heeds Appiah’s conclusion that “it matters little whom the work was made for; what we should learn from is the imagination that produced it.”⁵ In this case, an imagination which is, at the very least, aware of the fate Balot met and understood, as the Pende who revolted against him historically and CATPC presently, the necessity for taking hostage oppressive institutions, and an acute awareness of the role of representing such struggles in transmuting lands and minds.