When they went on show at the KOW1 in Berlin in May 2016, the sculptures by the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) astonished the German and international public. The seven works exhibited by Mathieu Kasiama, Mbuku Kimpala, Thomas Leba, Jérémie Mabiala, Daniel Manenga, Emery Muhumba and Cedrick Tamasala showed formal and narrative qualities whose expressive strength was obvious both to professional critics and ordinary art lovers. At the same time, the technical details of their production – and their economic and conceptual relation to the activities of the IHA and Renzo Martens’ artistic practice – have raised a number of questions, some of which I will answer here.
Adequately describing and understanding these busts and statues cast in chocolate means explaining their origin in the collaborative work of various protagonists at several different stages of production. The project was initiated in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo by a network of individuals and organisations, each of whom took on different roles in the process of devising, producing and distributing the statues. I will first describe the technical process, limiting myself to those factors that are directly relevant to how the CATPC produced its sculptures. Finally I will deal with the conceptual and social aspects of this production process.
In August 2014 the CATPC started holding sculpture workshops with plantation workers from in and around Lusanga. These were led by the Kinshasa artists Michel Ekeba, Eléonore Hellio and Mega Mingiedi (Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is 800 kilometres from Lusanga). The workshops used their participants’ biographical stories, personal memories and critical views of their own living conditions as inspiration for a series of self-portraits and allegorical figures, which were executed in clay. During a conversation in the group Renzo Martens came up with the idea to reproduce theses works in chocolate, and some weeks later the group decided to proceed that way. So the sculptures were digitalised using a 3D scanner and the data was sent by Internet to the IHA’s offices in Amsterdam, which coordinated the reproduction and distribution of the works. Exact replicas of the sculptures were produced using a 3D printer, which then served as prototypes for the production of further reproductions and casts. Dutch chocolatiers cast copies of the works using raw chocolate provided by the Franco-Belgian company Barry Callebaut, one of the leading suppliers of chocolate in the world. Finally, an art removal firm packed the chocolate sculptures into transport crates and transported them to a variety of destinations across Europe: museums, art centres, galleries, art fairs and private collections.
Although this production process doesn’t sound particularly complicated, it was technically and logistically demanding and required the participation of several dozen people. It is also of central importance to the sculptures’ conceptual and aesthetic significance, as well as to the different meanings they have in Lusanga, where they were made, on the one hand, and at the primary sites of their reception and distribution in the European or western art world on the other. The material and ideological conditions of the various people who made, transported and received the sculptures were unusually disparate. The objects themselves both bear the imprint of this difference, and to some extent also bridge it.
Clay, the material initially used to make statues, is naturally and abundantly available in Lusanga, and comparatively easy to model. However, it is too heavy and brittle to be easily transported long distances without technical stabilisation of some kind. More importantly, the transport infrastructure between Lusanga and the exhibition venues is either non-existent or extremely difficult to negotiate. By contrast, the transport routes for raw materials grown in and around Lusanga, including rubber and cocoa as well as palm oil, are functional and efficient. Raw material exports are the only direct connection between the plantation workers and the distant world of industry and consumption. This connection leads, among other places, to Amsterdam, the largest trading port for chocolate in the world.
The CATPC sculptures were made from raw chocolate – some of it originating from plantations in Lusanga – that had been shipped to Holland and refined into its edible form. This meant that they travelled along existing export and colonial trade routes, while undergoing a number of transformations in the process. The 3D scanner in Lusanga dematerialised the objects and transformed them into digital information, which was then sent by Internet to Holland where it was further worked on. Thus, together with the raw material chocolate, all the most valuable components of the reproduced sculptures come from the Congo: on the one hand the artistic forms and narratives that shaped them, and on the other the Lusanga artists’ subjective experiences and expressive power, which are the quintessence of the works of art.
The result is that the chocolate replicas – each prototype had an edition of five copies made from it – make a definitive break with western clichés about the auratic power of African sculpture. The surface of the sculptures clearly show structures produced by the 3D printing process. These bear witness both to the mechanical process used to produce them, and to the distance between the works’ place of origin and the places where they are distributed and received, a distance that has been covered by technology. The result is that their undeniable aesthetic effect can not be directly attributed to their authenticity. Instead, this effect becomes mingled with the gastronomic qualities of chocolate that are associated with pleasure, sophistication and taste, and which almost unavoidably make satirical reference to both the traditional and trivial qualities of art.
Other aspects of the chocolate sculptures are their ageing process and their sensitivity to heat. They start to melt at temperatures over 26 degrees Celsius, meaning that in Lusanga they would last only a few days, while in air-conditioned museums and private collections they can last a good few decades. The sculptures are sold with a guarantee that, should they be damaged or destroyed, a new copy of them will be provided at cost price, as the data sets needed to do this can be preserved over long periods of time. This means that the objects can, in principle, be eaten and replaced without losing any of their real value. The fact that these works offer buyers the opportunity to literally – and not just symbolically – consume African sculpture can be seen as one of their qualities within Renzo Martens’ conceptual attempts.
One notable reaction of many visitors to our exhibition in Berlin was the surprised remark that the sculptures “didn’t look at all African”. Rather, they were more reminiscent of European Gothic sculptures. What is revealing here is the cultural misunderstanding and historical ignorance of colonial history. After missionaries and colonial occupiers had erased Congolese cultural identities and narratives and replaced them with Christian motifs and allegories, and after they had largely eradicated the country’s once-famous traditions of sculpture-making, the CATPC sculptures bring the consequences of this violent transformation back to Europe, confronting its public with works that seem, thanks to the influence of their own culture, inauthentic and strange. The point made is not an insignificant one.
Renzo Martens’ initiative in the Congo had a part in helping found both the IHA and the CATPC. Following on from his film Enjoy Poverty, the initiative aims not only at exposing contemporary art’s complicity with the mechanisms of colonial exploitation and economic inequality, but also at using this complicity to develop a model of action for fighting inequality that is both artistic and economic. Put simply: if, within its own neo-feudal and neo-colonial conditions of production, contemporary art can transform critical reflection on injustice into surplus value, can it also produce this surplus value where this injustice has its material origin: at the sites of poverty and deprivation on which western prosperity is based?
Will some of the plantation workers of the CATPC give up working on the plantation to embark upon artistic careers, with all the risks, hopes and exposure to external factors that this implies? Some desire to do so. Three possible motives might be ascribed them for hoping to make this change of career. The first would be to free themselves from grinding material poverty. The second would be the hope of leading a life they have some control over, as well as one in which they can freely express themselves through artistic forms. The third would be participation in a global dialogue about the conditions in which they live. If that will ever happen depends on the success of CATPC’s, IHA’s and Renzo Martens’ collaboration, including the success of our work as a gallery.
While I contemplate on this question from my desk in Berlin, it is becoming clear how different the social, economic and contentual dimensions of these sculptures appear when looked at from different points of view. Our gallery KOW is one of those locations where social and economic inequality can be critically reflected on from a position of privilege. However, it is also – as Renzo Martens rightly points out – a location that stabilises that inequality or even makes it worse, by profiting from critique and benefiting from the capital accumulation that routinely goes on in the urban art centres of the West.
Contemporary art’s basic economic model is based on money that has been stolen, lives that have been robbed and culture that has been destroyed. The workings of the western art system cannot be explained without reference to the industrialised countries’ ongoing colonial exploitation of the global south.2 From the perspective of Berlin, exhibiting and selling the CATPC’s sculptures in exhibitions and art fairs means confronting one’s own history and present of social violence. It goes hand in hand with the hope of exposing the ethical and structural dilemma of how this violence is bound up with everything – no matter how unintentionally – so that it no longer continues to be a blind spot in our own, and the public’s, understanding of art
Another hope is to be able to help shape, and learn from, an alternative model. Of course, any such attempt to reorganise the art world’s ideological parameters, symbolic capitals, material resources and social privileges so that they actually reduce inequality rather than increase it will inevitably involve pitfalls. This particular model has a number of economic aspects, one of which is that 50% of the profits from the sale of the CATPC’s sculptures flow to Lusanga, while the other 50% remain, as is usual, with the gallery in Berlin. This is not about creating an exception to the rule, but rather a different constellation of actors and relationships.
In many places today, the bringing together of local knowledge, digital technology and global means of communication is seen to hold out the promise of lasting social innovation and economic change, which emerge both locally and offline. In this regard, CATPC’s sculptures can be understood and addressed as conceptual works inspired by new models of collaboration. At the same time, they are also simply fascinating sculptural works by people who would never have been expected to make them; works which at least make it more difficult to defend the privileges to express themselves enjoyed by some against the supposed voicelessness of others, including the economic system that is linked to these privileges.
Notes
1. A Lucky Day, 2 May – 26 July 2016. The KOW gallery, based in Berlin, is run by Nikolaus Oberhuber and me. It represents Renzo Martens and therefore also shows works by the CATPC. An earlier series of sculptures was first shown at the National Museum of Art in Cardiff, U.K., in October 2014. The same series was shown in May 2015 at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin alongside the exhibition at the KOW.
2. See Unilever’s corporate history and cultural funding, which partly originated in Lusanga (Leverville).