Bongore[1], on the path of hospitality in Africa and Japan, delineating and capturing new configurations of cultural identities.
“What is at the bottom of critical awareness other than an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?” Edward Said
In March of this year a young European artist set out a long journey, bound for Senegal.
Bongore travelled light to this chosen destination, but his bag and his gear, his camera and other appliances, had questions attached to them, one of which was how to steer clear of the essential motifs of European imaginary geography, which still offers us an Africa re-presented as an exotic and dangerous body (its landscapes and its women), which supplies Europe with a large number of illegal immigrants; hardly ever revealing the multiples influences in the complex cultural map of Africa, with a memory marked by its involuntary interrelationship with other peoples, cultures, nations and states, alien to its territory, and their predation on various aspects of what constitutes Africa.
BUILDING A BOAT- Kayar Beach, Senegal
Bongore 2009
In Hola, soy Europeo, ¿Me das trabajo? (Hi, I'm European, Can you give me a job?) (Senegal, Africa, work in progress, video documenting the action, 6 fragments of 1 minute each), the artist undertakes a project that takes shape as he goes about as an equal to an average citizen in any part of Africa in need of a decent job so as to be able to live and provide for his family.
The artist in Senegal[2], asks several times for a job, and jobs are given to him.
Accordingly he performs a series of tasks, those performed by the man and women of this land, which he films and offers us in this sample. The images are disquieting by their subtlety, and the artist's movements are no more important than those of this fellow workers, and the tasks performed are shown in the full extent of what they are accompanied by the ambient noise of each place and by subtitles recording the date and place where they were recorded.
In each case, in the various scenes, the artist engages in collective actions, sorting and packaging salt, building a boat, washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen, hanging out washing, crushing millet and going to get water from a well. In this territory these last four activities are mainly women's work, and the women find it odd and amusing that the artist as a man should be doing it.
HANGING OUT WASHING - Europa Square, Gorée Island. Senegal
Bongore 2009
The wages for his work were the same as those earned by a citizen of this country, except when Bongore requested as payment for processing salt the corresponding amount in that substance, in view of this commodity's importance in the domestic economy of many Senegalese families, as in antiquity for the Romans, when salt was worth its weight in gold. The artist's emoluments were respectively, taking into account the hours worked: roughly 1 kg of salt, a meal with the team of workers, a meal with the village inhabitants, a meal in the restaurant, and a meal with the village women.
In these actions the artist asks what art can do to seek to relocate its viewers in an active relationship with what is involved today in seeing and understanding the world, and to which we have to react. In this connection Bongore presents us in this work with a reconfiguration of the cultural identity of a young western European as he seeks and gets work in various fields. This relocation is achieved by the total absence of arrogance in the artist's acts, by his ability to fit into each community, as is apparent in the sequence where he is crushing millet, where the shot shows only the container, the instrument used for crushing and the blows given, and we cannot clearly distinguish Bongore's body from that of his interlocutor, and by the sings of hospitality given by and accepted from his workmates, who take him in as an equal. The concept of hospitality of which we are speaking here, and which Bongore uses in this work, is opposed to the concept of tolerance, for as Derrida says, the latter notion is unsuited for use in secular politics, as its religious overtones, rooted in the Christian tenet of charity, undermine any aspiration to universality, whereas hospitality from an ethical and political viewpoint, as conceived by Derrida, recovers the singular obligations that any one individual has to any other, and where hospitality is “...pure and unconditional, it does not consist of such an invitation (I invite you, I welcome you into my home [chez moi], on condition that you adapt to the laws and norms of my territory, according to my language, tradition, memory, and so on”[3]), and open, and is open in advance to anyone who is not invited, who is not expected.
HI, I’M SPANISH. CAN I KISS YOU? - Tokyo
Bongore 2008
In this work, as in Hola, soy español ¿Puedo besarte? (Hi, I'm Spanish. Can I kiss you?) (Tokyo 2008, video documenting the action, 8 min., 23 sec.,Japan), Bongore abruptly confronts us with a study of meetings, making us feel and converse with others, forming a connection that neither rejects nor conceals the wounds, scars, contradictions and difficulties characteristic of each culture, and of intercultural relations. In the second work, produced in Tokyo, the artist respectfully, in an almost ritual gesture, investigates apparently subtle cultural differences by requesting a kiss of greeting, so common in western Europe but so alien to everyday Japan, as demonstrated by the young people of the country.
Thus in this artist's work we witness the capturing of the history's inscription in social customs, with all their beauty, their dignity and their simplicity, with the weight of the everyday present in the gaze of their protagonists, whose habits show the historical layers partaken in by their contemporary spirits. And in them we see how images may exceed the channels that link them to the worldly circuits of mere consumption, which demand that they almost immediately be discarded and be politically and ethically indifferent.
But in Bongore's case, this almost tactile documentary filming of the problems addressed leads him to explore the fact that events never manifest themselves without the form that presents them to the gaze of others, as has been well understood by design and advertising: hence his work in progress, such as Anuncio Falsificado. Limpiando mi adidas blancas de negro (Fake advert. Cleaning my white Adidas shoes black). (Dakar-Senegal, 2009), which highlights the new complications and indifference of certain representations in this media age.
Because of all this, because of the alternative he offers, Bongore gets away from an aesthetic tradition inherited from intellectuals such as Flaubert, Scott or Nerval, who created constipated works when they referred to other cultures, in their cases the East, for their political views of reality accentuated the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the foreign (The East, “them”[4]).
Lynda E. Avendaño Santana[5]
Art Historian
Madrid-Spain. July 2009
[1] José Luis Aguilera Castrillo
[2] Location Chosen Keeping in mind that form 1536, when the first slave House was built, it was an important enclave for the transatlantic slave trade, and from which millions of Africans were taken to America; the former French colony in Africa which has retained most economic, political and Cultural links with France; a country that has contributed no small number of legal and illegal migrants to Europe. It is now know that the boats built in this area are likely to be used for emigration to the Canary Islands. The new boats are reckoned to be bigger than the older ones; which is grounds for believing that they are not for fishing. “An underage Senegalese told h is parents in a Canary island newspaper: “Here I'm given food several times a day, and they even let me hand out yoghourt!” Another, form a centre for minors, said, “At weekends they give me 10 Euros to have fun with.” The lad sends the money to his parents. Ten Euros is equivalent to 6500 CFA francs, which is more than adults get in a month”. Bárbulo, Thomas (special correspondent). Senegal puts the number of boats ready for emigrants at 15.000. The new boats are much bigger then fishing boats.www.elpais.com, Dakar-Senegal, 09/07/2006.
[3] Borradori, Giovanna. La Filosofía en una Época de terror (Philosophy in an Age of Terror). Dialogues with Jünger Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Taurus. Navalcarnero-Spain. October 2003, p.43.
[4] Said. Edward W. Orientalismo (Orientalism), Editorial Debols!llo, Barcelona-Spain, 2006, p.73.
[5] avesanta@gmail.com
