Reality without Guarantee

Perhaps the question of centre and periphery is only a question of the viewpoint: central perspective places the European individual at the focus and makes everything else a function of his/her coordinates. Christine Meisner emblematically prefaces her examination of African realities with the portrait »The Geographer« by Jan Vermeer: an interior, constructed with the help of a camera obscura, that already contains all the instruments the scholar needs to explore his reality, while the outside world appears solely as a diffuse source of light behind a window seen from a slant. Is it still the case that, as Meisner claims, quoting Jonathan Swift, we imagine wild animals where our knowledge of urban life on the African continent ends?1

Mistrusting the media images of people with AIDS and child soldiers, dancing natives and safari paradises, Christine Meisner began in 2002 to convince herself of the reality of African cities with her own eyes. Abidjan, Yamoussoukro and Lagos are the names of the places she visits. Her video camera and drawing pencil are to her what dividers and globe are to Vermeer’s geographer. The difference is that she does not present an unalterable reality from a privileged standpoint, but on the contrary tries to shake European self-certainty by highlighting the part played by means of representation in the construction of reality. She uses an intermedial strategy, picking out individual, meaningful scenes from photographs and moving pictures and confronting them with texts.
In Abidjan she speaks with people whose professions are allied to her own interests and accompanies them on their way through the city: architects, a photographer, a filmmaker. She picks out stills from the video recordings of the conversations and arranges them to form panorama-like tableaux. By so doing, she frees the images from their linear sequence and allows a simultaneous view of the multi-layered references. On the storyboards is written »Actor/actress of his/her own life«: they have found their own way through the complex world of the Ivorian metropolis, which seems far removed from clichéd European notions, even though, in a strange way, the European model is present everywhere.
No one talks about »Africans« in Abidjan. As well as the Ivorians, there are underprivileged immigrants from neighbouring countries and around 20,000 French people who have mostly been living in the country for generations. »The role of the whites has changed. Now they have to join in. Grin and bear the »underdevelopment«, the fact that they are no longer the rulers but invited guests; pretending to be interested, concealing with difficulty how superior they still feel.« Meisner observes the shopping centre Galerie du Parc and the fast-food chain Debonnairs Pizza and concludes: »Mediocrity in the tropics. The culture of French suburbs establishes itself here as mediocrity, widespread and irrevocable.« But instead of elevating herself above it, she uses it as a basis for reflecting on her own interest: »In principle I feel as alien here as one always does in a new city. I travel here and find myself once more in my culture, in my usual surroundings.«
For a decade, the first president of the independent republic of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouet-Boigny, moved the country’s capital to his native town of Yamoussoukro – with its government buildings and main streets on a European scale and a slightly enlarged copy of St. Peter’s. The economic situation in the capital did not at all tally with these plans, and the city turned into a ghost town after the president’s death. Meisner’s video of a street leading to the parliament house presents an eloquent image of the contrast between these pompous plans and the slow pace of development: a broad, grey ribbon leads straight to the horizon, with only red earth and the odd tree or bush to the right and left. Time seems to have stopped: pedestrians and even vehicles seem to move along the monumental boulevard at an endlessly slow rate.
Lagos presents the reverse picture: here, a lot of things move very fast, and connections are hard to decipher at first glance. »A place without my available codes, so at first unrecognizable for me, something that gives rise to a strange freedom.« But: »What could you do here? You can’t go for walks. I have to adapt to the tempo of the city, otherwise I will stand out among the disorder and be the object of offence.« To gain time, she takes photographs and uses these to make detailed pencil drawings later on. »Views with participants and detached onlookers« is the name give by Meisner to her work on Lagos, which is at present on display in the Berlin Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa): she accompanies her own impressions in words and images with quotes ranging from Mungo Park to Rem Koolhaas.2 But in contrast to Koolhaas, Christine Meisner does not seek deliverance from European orderliness in the supposed chaos.3 She wants to make experienceable the complexity of an ambiguous, randomly composed reality. With her previous media-conveyed knowledge in her mind, she sees European patterns in the motorway-like flyovers, in the architecture and the sphere of consumerism and interrogates the specificity of this, her present experience. »I am not yet in this place and at the same time no longer here and yet I am present in it at the moment of viewing.«
What Christine Meisner finds in African cities is a »reality without guarantee«. Like their inhabitants, this artistic examination can only get along by using stopgap measures. During her research in Lagos, Meisner also encountered people returned from Brazil, the descendants of former slaves. In this way she arrived at her next place of call, Recife, where she was invited to a congress at the start of August and now continues her engagement with images of Self and Other in the triangle between Europe, Africa and America.4 Once more she refers to a Baroque painter, Frans Post: »I am interested in the discrepancy between the pictures that he painted here on the spot in Recife and those that he made in Holland using his sketches and from his imagination and memory.«