Vivienne Koorland

Vivienne Koorland. Close Your Little Eyes, 2010. Oil on stitched canvas 31" x 27" inches (79 x 68 cm) Collection the artist

Vivienne Koorland works in New York, is currently showing in London at East Central Gallery and grew up in South Africa, leaving it before the end of apartheid.  Her mother was a hidden and smuggled child in Poland during WWII, ending up in a Jewish orphans home in South Africa in 1948.
 
Koorland's work is characteristically complex where everything from the kind of marks made, the material they are made with, the canvas or burlap or bookcovers they are made upon is heavy with historical memory, from her own conflicted childhood in Africa to her mother's loss of childhood and family to her own exile and homesickness for an impossible childhood that cannot be revisited.  
It is not just Germany, or just the holocaust, or just apartheid, or just the unfairness, or just the loss of material goods, or talents, or love; it is all these things, constantly jostling on the crowded historical surfaces of her work.  Letters, writing, ledgers, sheet music, popular songs, maps – they all lie together.  

Her working method reuses her own rejected drawings and paintings, burlap rice bags are stitched together to make a full canvas, their printed labels worked into the content.  Her work is constantly being remade and re-referenced.  
Although nominally about the past, it is the present that is often discussed: a magnificent gold map of Africa is so simple, yet so complex in reference to gold mining, to a shimmering beautiful potential and a hateful process of extraction.  This is work that sinks in complexity rather than skimming on a too easily grasped surface. 

Vivienne Koorland. Gold Africa, 2010. oil and pigment on stitched burlap. 68.5 x 61 inches (27 x 24 cm) Private Collection, London

the Jompy

David Osborne. The Jompy water heater.This was one of the entries into the Shell World Challenge last year.  It is very clever: a flat coil of hardened aluminum alloy, like a flat skillet, that sits between the fire and the cooking pot.  What looks like a handle is attached to water, cold or contaminated which circulates through the coil, is heated and comes out of the other end of the coil hot and boiled. 

Although in use in South Africa, Kenya and India, in theory it is the same as the hot water on demand burners which are slowly replacing the elephantine hot water tank that lurks in most basements.  The Jompy is much more minimal however, and consequently more adaptable to different conditions and uses. 
David Osborne, a plumber and gas fitter from Troon in Scotland was on his honeymoon in a water-challenged part of Africa and figured out this inexpensive way of boiling water with fire already doing some other task such as cooking food. 

The website, celsiussolar.com is a bit cumbersome, but all the information is there, plus various videos, including the World Challenge introduction. 

David Osborne. The Jompy in demonstration in Kenya by Celsius Solar's enthusiastic representative, Kalfan Okoth, just reminding everyone that this is a Scottish product.

North African distances

The Western Desert. WWIIGaddafi expelled all Italians from Libya in 1970.  Libya had been the North African staging post for the Italian-German axis in WWII, as Libya had been under Italian control/occupation since the 19th century.

On Al Jazeera last night there was a map of the north coast of Libya with Tubruq on it which, when it was known as Tobruk, was the site of a major and extended battle during WWII.  Rommel held Tobruk for 240 days and then lost it to the Eighth Army.

On the maps we are seeing on the news, one realises just how close Tunisia and Libya are to Sicily.  Lampedusa, a miniature and bleak little island 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia is still part of Italy and until 1994 had a US Coast Guard base on it, used to monitor Libya and fired upon by Libya after the US bombed it in 1986 killing, among many others, Gaddafi's daughter.   Lampedusa is the main entry point for African refugees/ illegal immigrants / economic migrants to Europe.  Although closer to Tunisia, Libya is the easier country to leave from, evidently.

During WWII Tunisia and Libya were simply known by the Allies as the Western Desert.  Strategically important, it was the launching point for the Italian invasion which began with the landings on Sicily.   In On Site 22: WAR, Aisling O'Carroll wrote about the use of camouflage in the desert where whole dummy armies were installed in misleading locations.  This was a North African war conducted, it seems, without local involvement, something that seems difficult to believe now. 

Tunisia, Libya, Sicily. google maps

Green Square

Green Square, Tripoli, Libya. google maps

At the time the google satellite took the picture of Green Square in Tripoli, this week the site of an emergent genocide, it was used as a parking lot.  it is across the street from a vast museum and archaeology complex, on the other side, to the south east is an immense stretch of parks and squares.  Directly south and south west is a bit of city – shops and offices, directly north a large pond, a divided highway and the Mediterranean with a built up edge – all gardens and plaza.

Green Square isn't a place of compression, it leaks all over into adjacent flat spaces.  One can read urban patterns only so far.  Tripoli has an unused traffic circle, it has larger open spaces, it has spaces adjacent to more powerful government buildings than the National Museum, so why Green Square?

Ah, on a tourist site I find (from 2009):  'The square is one of the most important celebration places in Libya.  Muammar Kaddafi addresses his speeches to the nation from here on the most important days such as 1st September Revolution anniversary. . .. Traffic circles the square and it is full of speeding cars day and night.'

So it has been made a potent urban site by association with the reiterated revolutionary origins of Gaddafi who came to power in 1969 with a coup against King Idris.  He was 27, Gaddafi was.

Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas

Cristovao Canhavato (Kester). Throne of Weapons, 2001Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) is a project initiated by Bishop Dinis Sengulane in Mozambique in 1992 to exchange the weapons accumulated during the 1976-1992 civil war for tools such as sewing machines, bicycles, hoes and shovels.  One village exchanged all their arms for a tractor.  The weapons are decommissioned, cut up into scrap metal which is then used by artists. 

The resulting sculptures are powerful anti-war statements, diagrammatic in their political import:  the first image on the TAE website is of a saxophone made from an AK-47 and a bazooka. The caption reads: 'It is the antithesis of the weapons used to construct it. It regroups people rather than separating them. It's an instrument of peace rather than an instrument of death.'

In 2005, in conjunction with Christian Aid which supports TAE, Bishop Sengulane gave an enormous Tree of Life to the British Museum.  It is as one would expect, a large metal baobab tree trunk made of gun barrels. 

A more subtle piece is Throne of Weapons, 2001, by Cristovao Canhavato (Kester) who studied at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo in 1998, becoming involved in the TAE project.  This is a generation of artists, many of whom were child soldiers, who grew up knowing only civil war and the tools of civil war.  Art here is instrumental in turning those tools – chunks of metal, plastic and wood – into things that war cannot appropriate. 

The Throne of Weapons which featured recently on BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects turns the weapons of war back into politics: thrones, chairs, seats – these are the euphemisms for power, especially during war when it is those who sit in chairs that conduct the war, not the children with the AK-47s.  

Kenya Field of Dreams

Watching the World Cup in Kilifi, KenyaDigital Planet had a thing on the Kenya Field Of Dreams project this morning.  This is an inflatable screen set up in Kilifi, a town north of Mombasa.  It is supported by UK Sport, Google and Moving the Goalposts, a charity that uses football to empower girls.   The BBC has given this project a lot of coverage, Digital Planet is the most recent. 

Where to start.  Nominally, in a town where hardly anyone has a tv, a large inflatable screen was set up to broadcast the FIFA World Cup games.  The screen came from Open Air Cinema, donated by Google.  Stuart Farmer of Open Air Cinema provided support and training.  The Open Air Cinema package is just one of many kinds of inflatable screens, usually advertised for showing movies on the beach or at pool parties.  The least horrible video I found of how they are set up is this one from Airscreen: 

They all follow the same principles: the inflatable screen and support structure are stuffed in a big bag accompanied by a small suitcase with a rear screen projector, a hammer, stakes, speakers and a fan: it's a tidy package.  Inflatable screens withstand the weather better than a fixed screen. They bounce around in the wind, but don't blow away. 
On the Kenya Field of Dreams blog Alix in Kilifi writes:  'Oddly, it's not the high-technology which struggles here — we have a satellite internet connection, 3G broadband dongles and excellent mobile coverage for organisation, and imminent arrival of WiMax – it's the low tech: Weather, sanitation, electricity.' 

The fan that inflates the screen is run off a generator and it inflates quickly, in a minute or so.  It is the girls of Moving the Goalposts who set it all up, make the connections and fix bugs.  The girl who was interviewed on Digital Planet said that after the World Cup they will show educational videos about health and education. 

Now, remember all you fellows who can't figure out how to work a digital camera and Photoshop, these are teenaged girls at risk in extreme poverty.   The Moving the Goalposts Kenya site describes its mandate:  'Girls and women in Kilifi District, Kenya are some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people. Low retention in school, early and unintended pregnancies and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS trap them in a cycle of poverty. Moving the Goalposts Kilifi (MTG) uses football to empower girls and young women, helping them to fulfill their potential both on and off the football field.'

Moving the Goalposts Kenya, raising self-esteem through girls footballMoving the Goalposts Kenya started in 2001 with a small grant from the British Council and advice from Moving the Goalposts UK.  Football teams were formed, matches played, there are now over 3,000 players.  It has reproductive health rights programmes, HIV/AIDS programmes and a new economic empowerment project.  In 2008 MTG Kenya built a headquarters building with help from the British HIgh Commission and the Ford Foundation.  

Moving the Goalposts Headquarters, Kilifi, KenyaThere is something about this story that makes me feel as if I am the one living in an impoverished society. 

Mario, from Jonal & Malage de Lugendo

A couple of nights ago heard a radio documentary on Franco Luambo Makiadi on BBC World African Perspectives.  You can get it as a podcast from the African Perspectives website.

'Mario' was Franco's most famous song, the opening soukous guitar chords are unmistakable, as is his voice.  This is OK Jazz, from the Congo.  Aboubacar Siddikh has posted a 1985 version in two parts:  there's an interview and discussion in the middle between 4:16 - 6:30.  This is the link to Part 1, then it continues in Part 2.

African jazz was the soundtrack to my life in the early 90s where I would spend the summers in Calgary and drive to Austin Texas for the rest of the year.  The drive down in mid August was terribly gruelling: the temperature goes up 10 degrees each day, so one leaves Alberta at 15°C (5° at night) and arrives in central Texas at 45°C.  These were the days of cassette tapes, of which I had two shoe boxes.  By the end of the day when a campsite showed on the map and one could leave the relentless, fiery heat of the highway, I'd put on my African tapes — Salif Keita, the Malathini Queens, Franco: spirits lift, the pets would know we were about to stop, all would be repaired.  This is music for heat and high humidity where languid is the only way to move.

While looking for Franco's Mario, I found Scott Shuster's posting of Mario done by Jonal and Malage de Luendo.  This is long - 17 minutes or so, but just the thing to ameliorate the coming week of deadlines, deliveries delayed, and all that work to do.  

Shuster writes (on the original YouTube posting):

LOKASSA YA MBONGO rhythm break about 12:45-minutes into the clip, & great Franco-style solo work by Shiko Mawatu throughout. Also modern Congolese male dancing -watch the WHOLE 19-minutes! They play the Azda Volkswagen commercial commercial at the end, brining back radio memories of the 1970s for millions of Zairoise, Congolese, and others of the Central and East African region. Congolese rumba newbies can learn more about this music at africambiance.com and at tribes.tribe.net/soukousguitar

Mali: Ali Farka Touré, Toumani Diabaté, Malick Sidibé and Ruby

Malick Sidibé

Malick Sidibé. Nuit de Noël, 1963Each spring when TVO does its photography month of documentaries it shows Dolce Vita Africana about Malick Sidibé.  Sidibé opened his photography studio in Bamako, Mali in 1958, and is best known for his photos of Bamako youth, dancing at clubs, clowning around on beaches, posing formally in their coolest clothes.  He photographed everyone however, from babies to the very elderly charting over 50 years and hundreds of thousands of photographs.

Malick Sidibé. Friends, 1976
In Dolce Vita Africana he meets up with a group of men, in their seventies as was Sidibé at the time, with all the photos of them in their teens and twenties.  Much laughter at the clothes, at their youth at their beauty.  One says of all the girls in their bathing suits, 'some of these girls are in burqas now'.  When they have a party, for old time's sake with all the old 45s and everyone dresses up, yes, most of the women are very covered.

Mali achieved independence from France in 1960; it is 90% Muslim, speaks French and has a secular constitution no doubt greatly influenced by the French civil system.  The original Mali Empire controlled trade in the west Sahara, a fluid empire and territory which, after several internal shifts in power over 600 years fell to the French in the late 19th century and became French Sudan.  With decolonisation French Sudan became the Republic of Mali and Senegal.  At which point Sidibé opened his studio and documented the effervescent and heady gaiety of newly postcolonial Mali.  The old shackles were off, the new ones had not yet arrived. 

There is a brief postcolonial interregnum which is a social free-fall, a period of great creativity as paradigms crash before some new ideological system moves in.  Cuba between pre-1959 American colonisation and post-1961 Soviet interest.  Spain between Franco's death in 1976 and joining the EU in 1992.  It is a delicate time, when new values are tried out and either kept or discarded. 
Sidibé comes out of that time.  His eye is so free.  His studio is small, difficult, he lives a social life in his neighbourhood in Bamako, he takes, still, thousands of pictures of people who are presented calmly, formally and respectfully.  The photographic space is shallow, people are significant.

The relatively recent discovery of Malick Sidibé in Europe and the attendant exhibitions, prizes and lifetime achievement awards perhaps indicates the appreciation of a photographic eye that is not ideological and cares very much about the subject, rather than the process of making photographs or using photographs as text, as voice.  This is Sidibé's photographic clarity, his modernity.  

Malick Sidibé. View From the Back, 2001good interviews and reviews from LensCulture, Frieze, and the Guardian.

and the trailer for Dolce Vita Africana:

botswana: the only way to play guitar

how to do the Diski Dance

by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:

iSchoolAfrica: Soccer's offside rule explained

Geles

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

Makarabas

Makoya Makaraba. design 3: Look at the Score. The Makoya Mararaba website is subtitled 'the genuine south african hand painted fan helmet'.   Makarapas are plastic hardhats usually worn by miners, cut, bent and painted to make soccer fan headgear.  The original makarapa was produced in 1979 by Alfred Baloyi at Evendale as protection against flying bottles during a match.  He has parlayed this into Baloyi Makarapa, which also produces well-decorated vuvuzelas, the football trumpets.  He seems to have a trademark on 'makarapa' with a 'p'.

Michael Souter, a Cape Town graphic designer started Makoya Makaraba (with a 'b'), a township community project near Cape Town at Diep River that trains unemployed people in makarapa production.   
One senses a lawsuit in the offing, as Baloyi's story on his website ends with 'Baloyi's authentic Makarapas will now be marketed under the name Baloyi Makarapas (TM) ensuring that not only is his role as the originator of these unique creations recognised, but that his hard work is rewarded and his intellectual property protected'.
But, but, Makoya Mararaba is a community project, and its website states, heroically, 'We are a small company that train and help uplift the people from the Township communities on the Cape Peninsula ... We strive to create permanent and meaningful employment for individuals from previously disadvantaged backgrounds'.

Ha!  However, FIFA's website ignores these two projects and presents Newtown Projects in Johannesburg, part of an urban regeneration project.  Newtown Projects is going into high production for FIFA 2010.  They 'stumbled' upon a robotic arm from the automobile industry.  Paul Wygers, an architect who started Newtown Projects makarapas says, ingenuously, 'there are two pinch points in the process; cutting them and painting them.  If you can get rid of the pinch point of cutting them, which is the most labour intensive part of the whole process, you can up the numbers'.  They can do 1000 makarapas a day: huge employment opportunities for painters.  They too employ the underemployed, about 35 painters on a production line, some of whom just do the base, some brushes, some airbrush.  
Baloyi started by doing 2 a day, who knows how many Makoya does in a day, maybe they too have a robotic arm but somehow I doubt it.  Makoya's makarabas start at R270 (CAD36).   Baloyi's basic makarapa is R99 going up to R299.  (CAD13-40).

There is such an exuberant graphic sensibility at work here, hardhats become fantastic, towering sculptures absolutely integral to South African soccer culture.  FIFA 2010 is a powerful endorsement of South Africa's survival, its culture and its future —attention will be diverted away from corruption, poverty and South Africa's support of Mugabe.  These enormous sporting events, like the Vancouver Olympics, really seem to propel both cities and their regions into some other stratosphere for the duration and when it is all over, so many things have changed. 

Kenya Ceramic Jiko

reproduced from 'With Our Own Hands'. IRDC 1986

Jikos are traditional charcoal stoves in Kenya made from scrap metal: a small drum has a grate set in the middle.  A fire is made below the grate, pots sit on the top of the drum.  It is a form brought from India to Kenya by railway buildings in the 1890s.  They are inefficient and consume a lot of charcoal.
Kenya Ceramic Jiko (KCJ) is an improved version adapted in 1982  from the ceramic charcoal stoves found in Thailand.  The top chamber is lined with a pottery liner made from clay, rice husks and ash cemented to the metal. The grate is either pottery or metal and the drum is now waisted: the fire is in the bottom chamber, the grate is small and the top flares out to hold the cooking pot.  The KCJ is 50% more fuel efficient.

The Mountain Gorilla population of Central Africa is near extinction because of deforestation due to the production of charcoal.  A workshop has been set up for the local manufacture of ceramic Jikos to reduce the demand for charcoal in areas with massive refugee populations, such as Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  This will reduce the illegal harvesting of wood in the nearby Virunga National Park, the last refuge of the Mountain Gorilla.

This comes by way of the World Challenge