For Sandra Mujinga (born in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1989) there is no more foreignness in Norway than in Kenya. This Afro-European woman who grew up in Oslo – a city where she arrived when she was two years old – lived part of her adolescence in Nairobi, where she settled with her family between the ages of 12 and 15. From her mother, she learned the trade of fabrics, then he studied at the Oslo Academy of Arts and today his surname resonates without borders in the field of contemporary plastic arts.
Mujinga is already a renowned artist whose work is in the collections of the MoMa in New York or the Hamburger Banhoff in Berlin. For the first time, her creations arrive in Spain. Two of her installations ―Rewording remains (The rewriting of the remains) and Sentinels of change (Sentinels of change)―, precisely those chosen for the Venice Biennale in 2022, are exhibited in The House on from Madrid until April 28, within the framework of the collective exhibition Loving the alien.
Her love for the strange leads her to explore social issues that she has a mark on her own skin, through speculative fiction. In this search, the North American science fiction writer Octavia Butler is recognized in the texts, but also in the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, who speaks of necropolitics as “a kind of technology of power whose objective is the regulation of populations through the production of available and disposable subjects”. She is sure that these subjects “have always been forced to move” and, precisely because “we are all destined to move all the time,” she wants to reconsider borders. “Africa was created before those limits.”
In the dialogue held with Mujinga in Madrid, where she attended the opening of the exhibition last February, the artist joyfully recalls her teenage years in Kenya and Uganda, and remembers that being Congolese did not pave the way for otherness, in East Africa. Today she lives between Berlin and Oslo, and she brings us reflections with fabric sculptures, which speak of strangeness and belongings, with the recognizable greenish light of the digital, that hyper-vigilated universe that, however, she connects us.
Ask. What does your work mean? Sentinels of change?
Answer. They are words that are represented in a dinosaur and another figure. Then there are the remains of the world embodied in the other three bodies. I thought of them as two different works, but I also present them as a group of bodies linked by the idea of a reuse (or rewriting) of the remains; in this case, of the concepts, to be able to rethink them.
Q. What are those concepts to rewrite?
R. In this case, it is about the use of existing fabrics (old sheets and curtains) and the way in which a new skin is created: in that process, there is a combination of old skin (such as used fabrics) with new skins. These can hide, in a sense of camouflage, but the act of hiding is also about surveillance.
Q. Why do you place these two works together in the same space?
R. It is a way of linking them, like the continuation of a series. The element of the dinosaur, which belongs to the past, refers us to a way of thinking about ghosts, for example, and how they are present in our lives. It is interesting to investigate what ancient stories we carry with us, whether they come from colonialism or extinct animals like dinosaurs, and how they leave us with the traces we have today. The use of elements from the past also helps us reimagine the future and how we can live together. Or reimagine fragility, as if it were a skin, which while it deteriorates is rebuilding itself. The strong or the weak express ways of harboring sensitivities.
Neither in the Congo am I Congolese nor in Norway am I Norwegian; I've always been living in this in-between space, but I also think it's an interesting place.
Q. Is there a relationship between the presence of the idea of surveillance in your work and the places you have lived in Europe?
R. I have lived in Berlin (Germany) and in Oslo, the capital of a country that is still very white, not very diverse, but that has also led me to travel. For me, surveillance is linked to our activity on-line, where we are aware that we deliver our data. Although the notion of surveillance is also related to how technology is created—facial recognition, for example—and how this can be biased toward black and brown people. Here's a reminder that technology and surveillance are created from a given demographic and, in turn, target certain other demographics.
Q. The Internet is, furthermore, an uncomfortable room that welcomes us with the coldness of this unreal green light from the screens that you recreate in your installation.
R. In fact, there is nothing comfortable there, so there is always a negotiation in which you are aware of that vigilance. You're thinking about it. You wonder what I'm giving, what's being taken away, and what I'm giving up to be in this community and find people.
Q. Is there anything in your artistic reflections that alludes to the coexistence of the souls of ancestors with present beings that recreate the rituals of some West African cultures?
R. This doesn't resonate with me because, although I was born in the Congo, I grew up in Norway and lost my parents when I was a teenager. So the path is different, but also interesting, because on both sides I have the same problems: neither in the Congo am I Congolese nor in Norway am I Norwegian. I've always been living in this in-between space, but I also think it's an interesting place. Before I did want to belong to a place, but now for me home is my body. So I can be everywhere and then the act of thinking about the body is like thinking about the house.
Q. What inspires you?
R. My work is inspired by what I read from Octavia Butler, from Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson (who talks about Afropessimism), Fred Morton, James Baldwin and Sylvia Wynter, who is very important to me. I am also inspired by animals: the elephant appears a lot in my work.
Q. In the West, the idea of virgin nature that the intrepid discover, forgetting about the other creatures that already lived in those “wild” places, has been transmitted.
R. When you see The Lion King You realize that there are no people there. This view is part of the reductionism of the African continent where humans do not matter. There is more empathy to protect animals than to protect you. There is a book by Alexis Pauline Gumbs that is really interesting —Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020)—, in which she talks about the violence of naming. Men who arrive at a place, describe and name it, and there is violence there too.
If we thought we were connected, we would know that what happens in a forest will affect the air and it will also affect us
Q. When you think about your position in the art scene, do you place yourself close to daughters of diasporas who rework racial issues?
R. I think we live in a world where racial issues are still there. You can't escape it. Not that one has a choice. If one had a choice, one would not want it to be like this. It is because we actually live in a world where the material conditions are too different, so it is an element that constantly occurs. Without going any further, when we say postcolonialism it sounds very strange, because nothing is postcolonial: this is still valid in the taxes paid by the African continent, in extractivism. These are the traces with which we have to live.
Q.If postcolonialism is, in fact, colonialism, what do you think are the other things we're not talking about?
R. About the real interconnectedness of human beings and I think climate change will help us think about how we are connected on the planet. There is the idea that what is happening is not happening to us or that we would have to sacrifice some of our rights. If we thought we were connected, we would know that what happens in that forest will affect the air and it will also affect us. I think we have to have an approach of allies rather than gentle saviors. There have to be more alliances, because your survival is also my survival. It's not like I'm going to save you.
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