Bringing out the Memory of African Identities

by Bruna Tupiniquim, Filippa Jorge, Kelvin Marinho, Lorenna Rocha, Marta Georgea Martins de Souza, Renata Martins, Rogério Felix

Tue 11 Aug, 2020

Burkinabé visual artist Koffi Mensah had his first contact with Brazil in 2020 through the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia Vila Sul virtual residence. Born in 1982 in Lomé (Togo), Mensah is a longtime resident of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). One of his projects, in which he portrays African public figures on canvas, prompted a multidisciplinary group of keen members of the public and experts in Brazil to analyze his works and dialogue (online) with the artist. Through a process of recognition and homage, regarded as an act of tribute, Mensah reaffirms the presence of African political and cultural figures who contributed to the shaping of his continent’s identities.

“I work to restore the memory of African politicians and musicians who did important and positive things for the continent, but who have simply been forgotten,” says the artist. His work, of significant metaphorical power, makes it possible to resist forgetting these figures whose images and narratives would normally have been erased from popular memory, something that renders them almost absent from the “official” version of African history. In other words, the characters portrayed by Mensah escape the limbo of collective memory, having been erased from the story routinely told with a hegemonic Eurocentric viewpoint.

By portraying only Black and African personalities, the artist visually reshapes the “official” history taught and propagated on the continent, since, “in African schools, for example, students learn little about our own history. Much more is taught about Western history and Western people, in a kind of upholding of colonialism. With my work, I want the viewer to remember African people and our own history,” suggests Mensah.

Rewriting pan-African historiography

Haile Selassie (Emperor of Ethiopia and a central figure in the Jamaican Rastafarian Movement), Amílcar Cabral (political leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde) and musicians Manu Dibango (Cameroon/France) and Akon (United States/Senegal) are some examples of the figures to whom Mensah pays tribute. With these portraits, the artist takes the reins of African historical narratives that were—and still are—buried due to Eurocentrism and “coloniality”.

The artist rewrites pan-African historiography, starting from social bodies that become emblematic fragments of a new international cartography, thus challenging Western hegemonic historical writings on the African continent. Mensah also draws attention to figures from different countries, thus evoking a new way of looking at Africa, and distancing them from images of precariousness, expropriation, or exploitation, as are commonly reported.

Manu Dibango, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Historical figures that reconstruct collective imagery

“I believe that an artist, with his creative work, has to invest in both society and politics, because I see art as a political cause,” observes Mensah. This view leads him to consider his art “artivism”— a conceptual neologism of shaky consensus in the field of social sciences and the visual arts, which links art and politics and thus encourages the potential intent of art as an act of resistance and subversion.

As acts of resistance, Mensah’s portraits excavate and bring to light the history held in the archives of collective social memory. If we study these bodies under the magnifying glass of Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall (1932-2014), they would also be considered surfaces or canvases, on which it is possible to explore the interior landscapes of Black subjectivity. The Black body is no longer a mere object of contemplation or desire, but is treated as a subject.

Through subjects portrayed in the foreground, Mensah offers viewers eyes that look back at them, telling their own stories. In this exchange of subjectivities, a constant flow of coming and going unfolds, symbolically turning the viewer into a portrait for the one being portrayed. The hand-carved canvas surfaces—a reference to traditional engraving techniques that give his portraits a lacy texture—makes the viewer’s eye linger on the work, searching for a balance between subject matter, memory and concept. In this relationship between figure and foreground, there is an uneasiness in the viewer’s gaze and post-Pangea forms: each sculpted face pushes boundaries, expands stories, turning into a unified territory that moves and scatters into smaller, hollow portions.

From the method of superimposing sculpted and overlapping canvases, a weft peels away, a web of information composed of fragmented traces of the self, through which Mensah constructs faces as a passage, points of diffusion and connection of African knowledge beyond the continent’s geographic confines. With this fragmented view, Mensah points to the pluralization of African existences that, through the perception and re-signification of the gaze of the other and with the other, seek to rebuild the threads of their own identity.

Authored by: Bruna Tupiniquim, Filippa Jorge, Kelvin Marinho, Lorenna Rocha, Marta Georgea Martins de Souza, Renata Martins, Rogério Felix.

This article is the result of work fostered by the workshop entitled “Art Criticism as Writing Exercises. Analysis of the works of Thó Simões and Koffi Mensah Akagbor”, organized in May and June 2020 by Renata Martins, as part of her virtual residence, Vila Sul 2020, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Salvador-Bahia. Over the course of six weeks, participants from different cities and areas of expertise met virtually in groups, where they were able to engage in online dialogue with Koffi Mensah to produce this work of collective knowledge on the Burkinabé artist’s creations.

Translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry.