eMagazine August 2022

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
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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
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