JOUVAY LASSUPA
The article below by Amon Saba Saakana, pulled at several things that interested me:
1. The idea of the house
2. The idea of the community that was presented by the Studio 66 community.
3. The deconstruction and reconstruction of the artists within community.
4. Revolutionizing the presentation of the product.
It is some thing that I have been in discussion with my colleagues for sometime now. On those Fridays or whatever afternoon that we sit or meet in conversation about the things that we do; how do we do it; why do it, why continue to do it (someday I will like to post something on the why we do this).
The presentation of Makemba's painting last Sunday presented part of the answer.
As artists' continue their negotiation for nurturing space with the state and the state's creation of the -
Trinidad and Tobago
Creative Industries Company.
I have always commented that we need to deconstruct the way we do and present our work alongside the same vibration of our own communities and other communities.
I have told Sean that when we see the prostitutes or the transvestites (who use the nearby park as their office and are practically his neighbours) sitting down in one of Alice Yard's many cultural conversations we know that we're doing something right.
Well you know that I can't speak about community without not mentioning The Sculptural Playground Project which will be my attempt to speak about the presentation of the artists' ideas in relation to communities and the role of -
ART-DESIGN.
in the re-formulation of how people interact with our work and the reconstruction of how the political, philosophical and economic system of the art/design product OPERATES.
WE NEED TO BUILD COMMUNITY ART-DESIGN ARCHITECTURE THAT RESPONDS NOT ONLY TO THE COLONIAL PAST, BUT TO SERIOUS PERSONAL HIS/HERSTORIES.
This was what I attempted to bring up at the artists' meeting the other day... the building of community, is as important to any activism as the intervention of protest. Just because we sit with leaders of stakeholders groups, does not means that we have a community. Building the community means that we need to look at the formula of what has happened in Makemba's exhibition and to what Saba has alluded to in his article. But we need to carry it one step further, which will be the creation of the symbolic architecture of that new meaning of what the house can be in community. History becoming the walls, walls morphing into symbolic historical didactism. This is what came out to me. If anyone knows Studio 66 - it is a living space, a heart beating centre of people that is open to new footprints and voices, connected to very interesting cultural purpose.
PLEASE READ.
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| Makenbas's painting. ah forget the name, But you can go down there and check it out. |
Artist Makemba Kunle Presents His Jouvay
Lassuppa
By Amon Saba
Saakana
Story
Created: Nov 23, 2012 at 11:39 PM ECT
Story
Updated: Nov 23, 2012 at 11:39 PM ECT
Jamaica jumped ship from the proposed federation
and Trinbago followed with the infamous words of Dr Eric Williams, "one
from ten leaves nought," and he too plunged this twin-island state into
political separatism.
Politicians are not trained to govern; they receive
their training in other disciplines and are programmed to control and dictate
in a "democratic" process that is relaunched every five years, when
they make a magical appeal to the population that has little to do with reality
than with winning votes. In any other profession they would have been
justifiably characterised as "con" men and "charlatans."
But there is no union, governing body, for redress
from malfunctioning politicians as there are for lawyers and doctors.
What does all this vitriolic prologue have to do
with art and particularly that of Makemba Kunle?
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| Unknown person,Peter Minshall (artist/designer), Vel Lewis, another unknown person. sorry |
The present "exhibition" titled Jouvay
Lassuppa mounted at Studio 66, Barataria prominently featuring the new work of
Makemba Kunle has also subtly interwoven into the working fabric of the
production a Pan-Caribbean, Pan-African workforce.
The architectural designer of the space is
Makemba's Jamaican son-in-law, architect/designer Lionel Spence, aided by his
Jamaican colleague, Kemar Rodney.
Spence not only designed the project but oversaw
the implementation of his design ideas with builder Ukambi.
Some of his art workers included Turunesh
(Ethiopian), Bill Trotman, Barry Walkins, Rafiki Morris (African American),
Bandele (UK/Trinbago) and Nigel Parris who constituted the core.
These were augmented seasonally by Congo, Eddie
Romany, and concretised by the skillful management of "diplomat" Babu
Ketema, a diffident arts worker who subsumes the "cause" better than
most, and Onika.
Also included were stones collected by Congo from Grand
Reviere to create a design, which, in the end, was an ancestral shrine, with
sculptured clay heads of humans and animals as the surface of the sacre
funerary space and the soft drippings of a waterfall. There was also bamboo cut
in differing lengths to create a natural environment for hanging pictures,
plastic sheeting which covered coloured plastic strips as screen, etc. a number
of art pieces was also specially created to complement the locus of the
exhibition with abstract painted motifs and dressed figures, cups, glasses,
ceramic pieces, etc.
The cumulative effect of this monumental effort is
that it reverts atavistically to the African tradition in which art is not seen
as an expression of the separated individual but from the collective consciousness
of the community.
Traditional house building in Africa, as well as
royal and noble art, is done this way, thus an "exhibition" may well
be the wrong choice of word to describe what this spectacle represents.
Naturally, the work of Makemba Kunle is central to
the spectacle but the environmental device of location is what is so
stimulating and unusual for art houses in Trinbago.
This undoubtedly has revolutionised art
presentation in our artistic environment, and may well lead to the development
of a new aesthetic which is located in the honouring of ancestors as mediative
force in our proceedings, since it is our ancestors upon whose testable
contributions to our living space we have inherited and inhabit.
Makemba Kunle as artist has been groping towards
realisation of a form of artistic expression that could structure his creative
intuition and unresolved spiritual ambivalence.
In this production, the result of two years work,
he has finally realised what was before an unresolved intuition. He has now
standardised an impressive set of work (70) which is organically linked by
themes peopled by signs, molecular perception of the cosmos and the translation
of spiritual intuition, and runs through the space to two adjoining houses.
How is this realised?
Kunle's work incorporates lines not as a central
design element as in the work of others but as an indecipherable artifice in
the construction of his universe. Lines represent concrete reality: buildings
and earth creatures.
Kunle's initial point is the point of the dot, as
in the art of house painting among southern african women. The dot is infinite
and non-linear while the line is earthly and of a limited horizon.
The dot connects billions in an expanding universe,
invisible but tangible under a microscope or spiritually intuited.
This sets this art up as a connective, interactive,
communing experience (jouvaylassupper).
Though the human eyes cannot penetrate into our
atmosphere, it is nevertheless made up of molecular structures (the core of our
universe) and electromagnetic waves that may influence moods and natural
phenomena (the moon moves water, for example).
These are perceptually expressed by the artist as a
series of dots that are seen to people every organic form of our universe. in
the articulation of this science of art or art of science.
Kunle has also expressed levels of consciousness
through communication of signs. Peter Minshall, master designer, alluded to the
relationship between community and communication in his delivery at the opening
of the exhibition.
Signs are primordial markers of humanity through
the ages communicating to others ideas of perception and apprehension, of
experience.
Spiritual intuition is bound up with the
unexplainable phenomenon that occurs through dreams, coincidences, diverse yet
linked pathways, visitations, sensing of concrete reality yet expressed
subliminally.
All these considerations are central to the
realisation of self in community and communion, the sharing of a drink, food,
the giving of a gift, the acceptance and giving of unsolicited advice, the
single act that is experienced ephemerally yet constituting a new departure and
development in the artistic psyche. Community and communication are twin
placentas of distillation of consciousness, of shared journeys, of nebulous or
pivotal links.
Politicians cannot fathom a journey that does not
necessarily culminate in the amassing of monetary rewards, but the artist,
striving for community, working towards a holistic and re-engineered selfhood,
can be used as a measure of nudity before god and humanity and evokes and
conjures up the image of the philosopher-priest which only the truly gifted and
the truly cleansed can stake a claim to and dare to call into being.
The exhibition continues till December 9 and is
open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Studio 66 is located at 66 Sixth Street,
Barataria.
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