In the past few years, the Angolan artist Fernando Alvim has built up a network that provides contemporary African art with various platforms: »Camouflage« in Brussels presented a notable exhibition programme in its own facilities featuring contemporary African artists, both those living on the continent and those of the diaspora – without institutional backing. Numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries in Europe have also been organized from Brussels under the title »Next Flag«, for example, in the Casino Luxemburg and the Migros Museum in Zurich.
»Camouflage« looks after the collection of contemporary African art put together by Hans Bogatzke, and advises the Angolan businessman Costa Reis on building up his collection. The magazine »Coartnews«, which has been published since 1999 - unfortunately irregularly, owing to financial problems -also deserves a special mention. Alvim has also founded a structure in Angola: TACCA, »Territorios de Arte e Cultura Contemporanea Africana«, which is working on its next big project, the Triennale de Luanda, scheduled for the end of 2005.

This interview with Fernando Alvim took place on 18 February 2004 in Brussels.

[b]Christian Hanussek:[/b] You moved to Belgium in 1988, but since then you have been going back and forth between Angola and Brussels, organizing several art projects in Angola, South Africa and Belgium. The first one I heard of was your »memórias íntimas marcas« (»Memories, Intimacies, Traces«). For the project, you invited artists to create art works in Cuito Cuanavale, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds where Angola fought against South Africa, and then organized a number of exhibitions showing these works. Could you just explain how all this evolved, and how the different parts of the project developed?

[b]Fernando Alvim:[/b] First of all, in 1996, just like in any other project, I set up a project framework, an office with five people, and I saw politicians – just as I did for the Triennial. I had the original concept for the »memórias íntimas marcas« project planned by 1992-94. And then in 1996 I had to spend nearly the whole year convincing the politicians to set up the structures in Luanda - and that was essential because the first part of the project in Luanda had been funded completely by money raised from Angolan companies and institutions and, of course, the government. Then we also got support from the European Union. In April 1997 we started working with Carlos Garaicoa, a Cuban artist, Gavin Younge, a South African artist, two curators and art historians from Cuba and myself – and we were joined by an Angolan TV film crew and a team arranging the logistics of it all. Before starting any work directly on the exhibition itself, we went to the south of Angola, to Cuito Cuanavale, and stayed there for twelve days. To start with, we didn’t really have any fixed idea of what we wanted to work around - it was very free. We simply went there and found ourselves facing a reality, facing this space, which provided the impetus for everyone to start developing his own work. Once we were back in Luanda, we arranged a show there in the Portuguese cultural centre, which we completely changed. We covered all the walls, making a big white box as a setting for our show, and then brought all the things we’d produced in Cuito Cuanavale. And after that, we just continued to elaborate the project, showing it in Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope, which is both a military base and a museum.
While I was living in Johannesburg from May 1997 until the beginning of 1998, the project developed further and took different forms. While there, I came into contact with artists who’d been involved in the war in Angola. For this reason, we felt a need to explore other territories of information and other artists’ work. This was a development in the project, since I’d started by deliberately choosing to invite Cuban and South African artists who hadn’t been involved in the war, asking them to give their personal view on this issue. And they were creating projects and art works linked to this idea of national guilt, really operating through the idea of a nation. But then in Johannesburg, with fourteen artists involved - and most of them from South Africa, of course - it turned out to be quite the contrary. In this case, I was the only Angolan, working with two Cubans and thirteen artists from South Africa. Then we organized our show in Pretoria, and I started to invite others to join us, particularly those who at least had memories of violence or experiences of violence, mutations and violent changes in war. In this way, we were joined by artists from Burundi, Congo, and even from Cameroon. These projects were first shown in 1998/99 in the Lisbon city museum and then in 2000 in the MUHKA in Antwerp – and by then, we were almost fifteen artists, including European artists.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] So the idea spread and more artists got involved. But let’s just go back the start of the project in Cuito Cuanavale and Luanda in 1997. At that time, the war was still going on, wasn’t it?

[b]Alvim:[/b] Yes, it was. In reality - and this is very bizarre - the war stopped for a few months and then started again. When we went to the south of Angola, the war hadn’t really stopped completely, and in a lot of places in Angola, people weren’t even aware that it had eased up.
In a way Cuito Cuanavale was also a show – anyway, that’s how I think of it. Every day for twelve days I went out with a little camera on top of a toy car and I ran it for kilometres inside the savanna all over the place - producing I don’t know how many hours of film footage every day. The car was always moving like some small animal, but very fast, always fast, fast, fast. One other film I did was shot in a ravine. It was about eight metres high, and I dug a long trench about 25 metres long at the base of the ravine. I dug out everything, then I covered it again and I filmed under the ground with a camera in the trench full of water, filming a kind of two-headed baby doll getting born. This was almost like a fetishist action and it became quite interesting because in this village - a big village with four parts - they don’t have a chief but a kind of king. And this king – who we call “Rey” - asked me to leave one of the dolls, one of them with two heads and the other with one head. It was very bizarre - they started to make a sort of little house, around two metres high and one metre by one metre with a little window, and they asked me to put one of the dolls there inside the little house, to prevent rain, keep poverty at bay and guarantee good health. I didn’t suggest it and it wasn’t planned in any way, but people understood what we were doing there. The South African artist was filming with a bike, creating some works about birds that were disappearing from the area, and the Cuban artist was digging, excavating holes, questioning the earth.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] So you stayed in the village for these twelve days, and had close contact to the people there?

[b]Alvim:[/b] Yes, every night all the people and the children of this village of around 100 inhabitants came to see our work on a little TV. There was no electricity, but we had brought a small generator with us. We also recorded some of the people’s history.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] What was the reception like in Luanda?

[b]Alvim:[/b] There were two sides to that. First of all, people were quite worried. I did interviews with the Carlos Gracaioa and Gavin Younge. Younge was really afraid of being recognised as an old South African soldier, and he said so in the video. The Cuban artist was very concerned about the Cubans who had been killed in the area – quite a lot, in fact - and he couldn’t understand why they’d gone there, like some of his old school friends. I think the key aspect to the public reaction was that it showed how much all of us in Angola are still deeply connected to that period. It’s a place where a major battle took place between South African and Angolan troops, marking the end of the war in a way, because afterwards South Africa withdrew its forces. Yet people understood how necessary our project was - I asked some military personnel for help to provide us with transport to get there - military airplanes - and all the politicians were very supportive. They were all supportive and very enthusiastic about the project. We received major sponsoring and, of course, the newspapers gave it front-page coverage. And when we went to South Africa, the Angolan deputy minister of culture came with us to open the show.
Hanussek: What happened later on as more artists came into the project – did they ever go to Cuito Cuanavale?

[b]Alvim:[/b] Some of them did, but only later on, because when the show first came to Cape Town, it was still a big taboo for the newspapers and the South Africans generally. When the show then went to Johannesburg, some people who were in the war came up to me and said: »I’m an artist and I was in the war and I would like to participate.« The curatorial approach at the Johannesburg exhibition was quite funny because I just opened the doors of the place and said: »Come in!« It wasn’t a curated show - it was very free and people just occupied the place.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] Where was that?

[b]Alvim:[/b] In the same venue as the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial - a big electricity workshop, a huge place of around 6000 square metres. And we used exactly the same boxes they had used for the 2nd Biennial. We didn’t touch anything.
That’s how things started to grow: in Pretoria, the show was held in the African Windows Museum - a huge place, very big, 30 by 30 metres or even more, but without daylight. So we created a structure resembling a countryside hospital, with corridors and, between them, five rooms simply made of a wooden structure of around five by six metres, one behind the other. And these rooms were covered with white plastic, thick white plastic. All the walls were plastic. In South Africa, during the »memórias íntimas marcas« project, I started »Coartnews«, and after that I founded »Camouflage«, also in South Africa.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] It’s been rather amazing how things have developed, since it’s become a whole network of different activities. It seems to me, though, that one of your major aims is to install a structure in Luanda - an exhibition space, an archive, residencies and all kinds of things – and the Luanda Triennial will be part of this or linked to it.

[b]Alvim:[/b] When I created »Camouflage«, in Brussels, I started it with the very clear idea of creating a satellite in order to experiment with projects by African artists from Africa, and projects by Africans from all over the world. You could say I’ve trained here before opening a Centre for African Art in Luanda. With the network I created during these four years, the collections and the artists’ network, I already have something for the centre in Luanda. We first created TACCA, Territórios de Arte e Cultura Contemporânea Africana, and then the government and the minister of culture invited us to conceptualize a Triennial for Luanda. All these things are linked, and we are now using Camouflage as a real satellite of TACCA – even though when we created Camouflage we didn’t yet have any venue in Luanda - we still called Camouflage the European satellite of the Centre of Contemporary Art of Africa. Now we are in Angola calling TACCA The Territories of Contemporary Art and Culture of Africa, and not just an Angolan centre - I remember when I called Camouflage a satellite, people were forever asking: »What centre in Africa is it a satellite of?«

[b]Hanussek:[/b] Obviously Africa is the centre of all your activities, although I’m often struck particularly by the way people involved in African art or dealing with artists from Africa frequently avoid using the continent’s name – for a number of reasons. So when you talk of a Centre of African Art, what do you mean by the term African?

[b]Alvim:[/b] I think it is actually very easy. In reality people complicate the approach – and that’s indicative of how many complexes are connected with the issue. We call the European Union European, and see flags from the EU all over Europe, with programmes in Europe on science called European programmes for science, and we have the Euro. All that is quite normal. In Africa, I think we need to create…let’s call it a temporary moment of self-esteem. So when I’m involved in very sophisticated art projects with a very high level of awareness, I’ve decided to call it »contemporary Africa«.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] Are you reviving the spirit of the sixties, a kind of pan-Africanism?

[b]Alvim:[/b] Not at all - I think it’s the real name of this continent today. The good thing in Africa is that things never come back, which I like, because the mutations in Africa are so deep, always creating a certain chaos. For example, in Angola we are presently living in a capitalist system. We went through the Marxist-Leninist system very quickly, and then it was over – and now we don’t even think about it any more. So what does it mean to be an African? We can say, it means being in a state of process.

[b]Hanussek:[/b] The Triennial will also be a political statement, quite directly involving the government and under government auspices. Angola’s situation is still rather tense, with many unresolved problems to deal with and, of course, the aftermath of the war still dominating both the entire cultural sphere and everyday life.

[b]Alvim:[/b] I think culture can be a very interesting tool for this passage from war to peace. In our talks with the government it’s quite clear everybody knows this. Of course, any country that has spent 28 years at war has a culture of war, even if you don’t want it to. Illness and poverty can be clearly named, but with war it is harder to understand where it comes from and where it is going. Of course you can’t ignore history – and we have been ignoring it since 1961, more than 40 years. The first war was against the Portuguese, then South Africa and Zaire, and then between us. I’m quite surprised at how quickly we have moved. For example, we have Unita people in the government and we are working with white South Africans who were bombing Angola. And we are friends with the US Americans.
It’s not history we need to revisit, but the old images and symptoms we had during wartime. Economics naturally played an enormous role in this war, but religions also do this on a cultural level. When we do the Triennial, we also have to examine this religious side, and interrogate the aesthetics in which politics manifest themselves and those in which religions manifest themselves. Then we may be able to reach a point where it becomes apparent that these are our cultural symptoms. It is a sort of psychoanalysis of our existence that has not been carried out during the past 30 years.

http://www.camouflage-world.com/

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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