Some Kind of Sorcerers

On the one hand, reviewing this exhibition can be a way to reopen the debates on stereotype, invisibility, racial discrimination and cultural violence towards people of African descent. These debates are indispensable in a country experiencing an escalation of violence in the collective territories of “the black communities”, who defend themselves against dispossession by economic interests, and who are being assassinated, as in the case of the leader of Tumaco, Maritza Ramírez Chaverra, or social activist Temístocles Machado who was murdered in Buenaventura a little over a year ago.

On the other hand, a new look at this project could also be an opportunity for a historical assessment of the self-liberation and the resistance to enslavement on the part of Africans and African Americans, as forebears and determining forces for the libertarian struggles in America, drawing off the 2019 commemoration of the bicentennial of the Colombian Republic.

In the same way as the show ¡Mandinga Sea! emerged within the independence celebrations in Antioquia, the birth of the republican utopia in our country may act as context for rethinking our present as a “multi-ethnic and multicultural” nation. I propose to take a brief look at four pieces from ¡Mandinga Sea! that allow us to reflect on the structures of (self)representation of Afro-descendant individuality in the country in times of new historical accounts.

In the first part of the exhibition, dedicated to geocultural cartographies over the areas of origin of the African people who arrived in Antioquia; between Tshokwe, Yaka and Pendemasks, was the work Angola: Objects and Connections (2009) by Mercedes Angola. The work is a series of four photographs of the homonymous archive which the artist developed during the process of compiling documentary information. In the piece, two photographs of wooden carvings of female bodies are contrasted with two other images in which the artist herself and her two sisters assume a pose identical to the wood carvings. The connections that are suggested here paradoxically respond to the fact that the name Angola, given to many of the slaves according to the record books in America, is an African toponymic – not a family or ethnic ancestry in that territory. As such, the piece is a critical comment on the imaginaries that tie together the historical origins and the construction of identities of Afro-descendants in the diaspora.

The second piece, an oil painting Familia Negra (Black family, 1958) by Afro-Antillian artist Rodrigo Barrientos (1931-2013), renders a matrilineal family with a raw and warm chromatic palette. Two adult women, one portrayed from the back and carrying a baby, and the other, under an umbrella facing the camera. The women appear, perhaps, as mother and aunt of two other infants in the foreground of the composition. In the words of art critic Eugenio Barney Cabrera in his book Geografía del arte en Colombia (Geography of Art in Colombia), the “hieratic frontality of the figures” suggests “a particular way of being” which can be related to a number of portraits of black people in the plates of by the Chorographic Commission from 1850 as well as watercolors by European travelers in the XIXth century.

Here, the representation leads us to ponder the “creolization” of African families as a result of a demographic policy of reproduction of slave labor in mines and on haciendas since the eighteenth century. This policy contributed to a reinforcement of the leading role of women in extensive kinship networks, above all on the Pacific coast.

The piece Retrato de Lucy Rengifo (Portrait of Lucy Rengifo, 2007) by Liliana Angulo, continues on the path of the representation of Afro-Colombian women’s space. Staging the watercolor of Henry Price for the Chorographic Commission, Retrato de una negra. Provincia de Medellín (Portrait of a black woman. Province of Medellín 1852), Angulo’s series of photographs accentuates the features of a non-anonymous woman. The portrait by Price, created in the very year in which the abolition of slavery was declared in Colombia, is then questioned as a historical document and reinterpreted as an act of memory and not of a granted freedom, but of the multiple ways in which enslaved descendants of Africans managed to free themselves from captivity. The names of self-liberation activists come to mind such as Paula de Eguiluz, Pedro Antonio Ibargüen, Barule, or of course the Biohó dynasty.

Finally, the engraving by Heriberto Cogollo, Untitled (1985), is perhaps the piece that best allows us to conclude this brief panorama. The portrait of a naked black body, suspended in a vacuum and crossed by lines and spaces in different colors, refers to the gaze of the Nohor, a creature that – as referred to by Cheik Anta Diop in Nations Négres et Culture – is known in Senegal and Uganda as a “sorcerous medium which, endowed with supernatural vision, can easily contemplate the viscera and entrails of its conspecifics”. Heriberto Cogollo came to define himself in France as a ‘Nohor’, and to a large extent it is this vision that we lack in Colombian art in order to unravel the traits that we have yet to recognize in our African genesis.

Nicolás Vizcaíno Sánchez is an artist, writer, curator, political scientist and/or historian in training. He lives in Colombia.

Translation from Spanish by Zarifa Mohamad Petersen.