Empty Spaces (Souvenirs), 2017
13 sheets of protective paper from found photo albums, 26 sheets of collored paper 180m/g2
digitally manipulated photographs and text printed on paper, variable dimensions |
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This work had two starting points that intersected and formed the final work. The first one was the textbook "Histoire de Belgique", from 1947, bought at the Jeu de Balle, most famous flea market of Brussels, from which I extracted specific excerpts and printed on 26 sheets of paper. The text comes from the book’s chapter on Belgian colonization of the Congo and King Leopold II’s life.
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The second were the images presented alongside the text, essentially consisting of digitally manipulated archive photography printed on paper from old photo albums also found at the same flea market. The chosen photographs, in turn, come from the appropriation and transformation of images of digital archives, which document the territory known in the early 20th century as Congo Free State, now DRC.
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My main concern when creating Empty Spaces (Souvenirs) was addressing the issue of colonial amnesia using Belgium’s case and the available content found in the city of Brussels itself. I meant to highlight, as Edward Said puts it, the “redeeming ideas” created to justify colonization, whose values were promoted and reinforced through official ideological devices, such as schools and museums. Thus, reflecting on the possible traces they have left on Belgian collective memory of colonization.
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The concept of terres vacantes, that is, empty spaces, was introduced in the colony by Leopold II, which determined that all the Congo was royal property and that any land not inhabited or farmed was to be cultivated by the European settlers.
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By perceiving this textbook as a historic document it is possible to glimpse the role of nationalism, imperialism and racism to promote and reinforce the domination of people and territories abroad.
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"How many ever-increasing difficulties did they not have to overcome! Neither the overpowering heat, nor the deadly fevers, nor the ferocious Arabs: nothing stopped these courageous explorers."
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"When, on 18 October 1908, the Belgian Chambers voted for the annexation of the Congo to Belgium, slavery had disappeared from the Belgian colony and barbarism had given way to civilization."
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The photographs in this piece, on their turn, suggest more than the ghostly figures they represent: like memories, they are increasingly weak, faded and disappearing, in different degrees of oblivion. The paper onto which they were printed, the kind of which is used to protect photographs on old family albums, is thin and delicate, but also aged, twisted, folded, almost disintegrating at the mere breeze created by the walking public.
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"If you abandon the territories, your old king will rise from his grave to reproach you!"
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Extracts from "History of Belgium, R. Bynens. Taught to the pupils of the 3rd and 4th primary grades and preparatory sections of the middle schools athenees and colleges. Brussels, 1947."
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"In the battle for the "empty spaces" of Africa, the so called dark continent, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and others resorted not only to force but to a whole hall of theories and rhetoric for justifying their plunder. Perhaps the most famous of such devices is the French notion of the civilizing mission, "la mission civilisatrice", a notion underlying the idea that some races and cultures have a higher aim in life than others. This gives the more powerful, civilized, developed, superior, the right to colonize others not in the name of brute force or plunder (both of which are standard components of the exercise) but in the name of a noble ideal. [...]
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[...] what redeemed [the violence of colonization] was an idea in the back of it and an unselfish belief in the idea; something you can bow down before and sacrifice to. Colonial imperial powers invented their own theory of cultural destiny in order to justify their actions abroad. These "redeeming" ideas, dignified the practice of competition and clash whose real purpose was self-aggrandizement, conquest, power and unrestrained self-pride."
(Edward Said, 1998) |
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