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OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Health eMagazine August 2022 Highlights Clinical Case of the Month Reflections Health Disparities Within Our Borders Nursing Division Art to Remind Us of Who We Can Be Our Beautiful Planet Among the Letters Congratulations Global Health Team Calendar Art To Remind Us of Who We Can Be Editor: Majid Sadigh Contributing Editor: Mitra Sadigh During times of confusion, tribulation, grief, uncertainty, and despair, the arts enliven us by reintegrating the disjointed pieces of ourselves and replenishing them with clarity and hope. The arts remind us of our individual and collective potential to grow, evolve, and transform. They remind us of what and who we can be and what we can create. In this new section, we bring you works of art that have moved and inspired us. We encourage you to also share works that have inspired you. Can an Artists’ Collective in Africa Repair a Colonial Legacy? Its founders believe that they can use the tools of the Western art world to help heal the effects of more than a century of plunder. By Alice Gregory New Yorker, July 18, 2022 In January, 2020, two young men from Lusanga, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, flew to New York. Cedart Tamasala had never been to the United States before; Mathieu Kasiama had, a few years earlier, and, during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he had been scolded by employees for touching a Resources Mbuku Kimpala, center, and other collective members, on what used to be a Unilever plantation. With the proceeds from its art work, the group is slowly buying back land. Photograph by Léonard Pongo for The New Yorker 18
OUR PEOPLE, OUR MISSION Global Health eMagazine August 2022 Highlights Clinical Case of the Month Reflections Health Disparities Within Our Borders Nursing Division Art to Remind Us of Who We Can Be Our Beautiful Planet Among the Letters Congratulations Global Health Team Calendar Resources Congolese artifact. Together, they went to Times Square and ate Big Macs. Then, donning winter outerwear, they took the train to New Haven. They had been invited to address a tropical-forestry conference at Yale, a gathering that brought together, among others, a Puerto Rican ecologist, a Uruguayan photojournalist, a Kenyan agriculturist, an Indonesian lawyer, and a Malagasy lemur conservationist. Tamasala and Kasiama are founding members of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (C.A.T.P.C., as its initials are rendered in French), an artists’ collective established in 2014 with grand, sometimes surreal-sounding ambitions. Aided by images projected onto a screen behind him, Tamasala described the group’s work, which is informed by the legacy of a former palm-oil plantation, once owned by the giant consumer-goods company Unilever, where many of them lived. A convoluted schematic appeared on the screen; many arrows were involved. Tamasala explained that corporations such as Unilever have used the profits from plantation labor in Africa to fund the cultural enrichment of wealthy Western populations. A photograph of depleted farmland dissolved into a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the sort collected by the founder of what would become Unilever. “Nothing of all this investment goes back to the plantations,” Tamasala said. “It doesn’t benefit the place where the money comes from.” Explaining that the Lusangans “had thought about this situation and about how we might detach ourselves from its grip,” he described the C.A.T.P.C.’s sly, absurdist approach. The collective, which is made up of some thirty local artists of all ages, creates figurative sculptures using river clay, which are then scanned in 3-D. The files are sent to Amsterdam, where they are cast in chocolate, which until recently most members of the C.A.T.P.C. had never tasted, despite the fact that many of them harvested the ingredients from which it is made. The finished sculptures— technically edible, symbolically fraught—are sold in art galleries, mostly in Europe. With the proceeds from their art work, and with help from a European nonprofit, the coöperative buys back land—more than two hundred acres so far—and farms it using ecological methods, to replenish soil devastated by Unilever’s monocultural farming techniques. The C.A.T.P.C. calls the project a “post-plantation.” The process, with its dreamlike logic, has transformed life in Lusanga. Plantation workers there earn twenty or thirty dollars a month; as artists, they make much more. The collective has brought in more than a hundred thousand dollars since its creation, and it has had shows in cities including Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, Copenhagen, and Jeddah. Tamasala showed a photograph of a man working on a sculpture. “Here you’ll recognize my colleague Mathieu,” he said, and smiled at Kasiama, who had remained seated. Kasiama appeared in one of the following images as well—a portrait accompanying a rave review in the Times of a 2017 C.A.T.P.C. exhibition at SculptureCenter, in Queens. Read the Article: Can an Artists’ Collective in Africa Repair a Colonial Legacy https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/can-an-artists-collective-inafrica-repair-a-colonial-legacy 19 19
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