Pub Date : 2023-12-01Epub Date: 2022-02-25DOI: 10.1097/WNO.0000000000001443
Valérie Touitou, Natalia Shor, Adam Mainguy, Sara Touhami
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Written over a period of fifteen years but really the distillation of four decades of work, One Who Dreams Is Called a Prophet is an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career.1 The story is about the epic walk of Alama, a pastoralist elder from northern Kenya, who is an alter-ego of the author; his arduous pilgrimage to find the source of peace is a journey that Dr. Somjee has also undertaken. Somjee lived among various pastoralist communities during his field work at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s. He then helped to introduce material culture into the Kenyan school art curriculum as part of the 1985 educational reforms, wrote a guidebook for art teachers on how to teach African material culture, served as Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya (1994–2000), and from 1994 established sixteen village peace museums based partly on principles derived from the acclaimed Kamirithu Community Theater and Education Center that was destroyed in 1977 (for an overview of Somjee’s work, see Somjee 2008). This project has evolved into the Community Peace Museums Heritage Foundation (CPMHF) and has spread from Kenya into Uganda and South Sudan. The museums affirm the role indigenous languages and the visual arts play in establishing peace in and across communities—contact information and a list of twenty-nine current peace museums and their curators are included at the end of the book. These methods of reconciliation have been threatened by colonialist and post-independence atrocities, but they are not extinguished, and remain more effective than conflict resolution methodologies imported from Euro-American academic traditions (see Somjee 2018).2 This is one of many insights embedded in One Who Dreams for a deeper understanding of African art. Somjee’s literary development was spurred when he left Kenya for exile in Canada in 2003 and he is now an accomplished historical novelist. One Who Dreams is a companion of sorts to his Bead Bai (2012) and Home Between Crossings (2016), even though its origins precede them. Alama is a very different narrator to embroidery artist and beader Sakina/Moti Bai, whose story unfolds in the other two novels, but all three are linked by their emphasis on reciprocal exchange and dynamic relationality in enunciating profound understandings of the art of East African personal adornment. Indeed, the art of the personal is illuminated by Somjee as the art of the “interpersonal” and in this respect, One Who Dreams does for walking sticks and leketyo (beaded waist belts that support pregnancies) what the earlier stories did for bandhani, emankeeki, and kanga (see Pandurang 2018). Yet “historical novel” is an inadequate term for the complex interweaving of personal memory, communal biography, parable, history, fiction, and poetry in all three books; Somjee’s writing has been linked to such genre-bending labels as “ethnographic creative nonfiction,” but even this falls short of conveying its potent blending (
{"title":"One Who Dreams Is Called A Prophet by Sultan Somjee","authors":"Jonathan Shirland","doi":"10.1162/afar_r_00725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_r_00725","url":null,"abstract":"Written over a period of fifteen years but really the distillation of four decades of work, One Who Dreams Is Called a Prophet is an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career.1 The story is about the epic walk of Alama, a pastoralist elder from northern Kenya, who is an alter-ego of the author; his arduous pilgrimage to find the source of peace is a journey that Dr. Somjee has also undertaken. Somjee lived among various pastoralist communities during his field work at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s. He then helped to introduce material culture into the Kenyan school art curriculum as part of the 1985 educational reforms, wrote a guidebook for art teachers on how to teach African material culture, served as Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya (1994–2000), and from 1994 established sixteen village peace museums based partly on principles derived from the acclaimed Kamirithu Community Theater and Education Center that was destroyed in 1977 (for an overview of Somjee’s work, see Somjee 2008). This project has evolved into the Community Peace Museums Heritage Foundation (CPMHF) and has spread from Kenya into Uganda and South Sudan. The museums affirm the role indigenous languages and the visual arts play in establishing peace in and across communities—contact information and a list of twenty-nine current peace museums and their curators are included at the end of the book. These methods of reconciliation have been threatened by colonialist and post-independence atrocities, but they are not extinguished, and remain more effective than conflict resolution methodologies imported from Euro-American academic traditions (see Somjee 2018).2 This is one of many insights embedded in One Who Dreams for a deeper understanding of African art. Somjee’s literary development was spurred when he left Kenya for exile in Canada in 2003 and he is now an accomplished historical novelist. One Who Dreams is a companion of sorts to his Bead Bai (2012) and Home Between Crossings (2016), even though its origins precede them. Alama is a very different narrator to embroidery artist and beader Sakina/Moti Bai, whose story unfolds in the other two novels, but all three are linked by their emphasis on reciprocal exchange and dynamic relationality in enunciating profound understandings of the art of East African personal adornment. Indeed, the art of the personal is illuminated by Somjee as the art of the “interpersonal” and in this respect, One Who Dreams does for walking sticks and leketyo (beaded waist belts that support pregnancies) what the earlier stories did for bandhani, emankeeki, and kanga (see Pandurang 2018). Yet “historical novel” is an inadequate term for the complex interweaving of personal memory, communal biography, parable, history, fiction, and poetry in all three books; Somjee’s writing has been linked to such genre-bending labels as “ethnographic creative nonfiction,” but even this falls short of conveying its potent blending (","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":" ","pages":"95-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42310069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The retrospective Sane Wadu: I Hope So was the inaugural Kenyan show of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) (Fig. 1). It was plentiful in themes of self-reflection, self-parody, resistance and Wadu’s artistic brilliance. In a career spanning forty years, the painter, educator, and poet (b. 1954) initially depicted everyday struggles and ideals of the lives of ordinary Kenyans in watercolor and oil paint. After five years of painting fulltime, Wadu started to reveal wider sociopolitical “manifestos”—often satirical—in impasto oil paint. Viewers of this retrospective were constantly implored to reevaluate their own understanding of Kenyan histories and narratives through Wadu’s lens. Originally named Walter Njuguna Mbugua, Wadu renamed himself Sane Mbugua Wadu as a typically wry response to his critics who labelled him “insane” for leaving a stable job as a teacher to make art that “did not fit” what gallerists were looking for in the 1980s (Nyache 1995: 185). As a whole, the exhibition made it evident that Wadu is a pioneer of the African modernist art movement, forging ahead with sensitive subject matters in a time of censorship of the arts in Kenya, where “safe” subjects were preferred by gallerists and the government (Mboya 2007). Wadu has been internationally recognized, featuring in the 1995 exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa and mentioned for his innovative modes of expression in publications such as Contemporary African Art (Kasfir 1990: 81–83), Angaza Afrika: African Art Now (Spring 2008: 316; see also Pruitt and Causey 1993: 135–55; Nyache 1995: 183–87). The paintings gleamed in the new space of the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI), designed by the multi-award-winning architectural firm Adjaye Associates. Situated in the beautiful—but slightly empty—Rosslyn Riviera Mall, Nairobi, a ten minute-drive from the largest mall in East Africa, one could see why Wadu’s work was chosen as the inaugural show for NCAI in Kenya. His egalitarian philosophy (Londardi 2020) diffused the international elitism of the NCAI and the mall itself. Curated by US-based Mukami Kuria and Nairobi-based Angela Muritu, the first room, entitled “The Early Years,” showed Wadu’s experimentation with painting styles. There were successes in Bless This Our Daily Bread (1984), which referenced the arduousness of absolute faith, and in Come Closer (1984), where hens were exquisitely revealed with a few confident watercolor brush strokes. In the following room, “The Next 30 Years,” Unidentified Fear (1989), Black Moses (1993) (Fig. 2), and the haunting Night Shift (2000) (Fig. 3) showed Wadu thriving in his lucid artistic eloquence. Furthermore, a collage of eight observational works featuring natural subjects, beamed joyfully from one wall (Fig. 4). This collection included Wadu’s familiar recurring anteater image, showered by stars in a night sky, and a sunflower (Less Nectar, 2004) as a commentary on food production systems and labor. Th
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| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 During a talk on his 2022 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, South African artist Igshaan Adams was told by an attendee that many children felt the urge to touch his work: “it’s so interactive and your body feels like dancing” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Younger viewers, less concerned with posturing at a museum, often respond to artwork with their bodies, a reaction Adams’s oeuvre seems to particularly evoke. I cannot blame them. My first face-to-face encounter with his work sparked a rare sense of awe toward its luxurious sensorial quality. Edmund Husserl writes that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing body” (Husserl 1989: 158). Touch is a necessary sense for our experience of the body and its image, which is why children’s tactile impulse around Adams’s work is an obvious response to an oeuvre in which embodiment is everywhere to be found. “Touch localizes us in the world in a way that seeing does not,” explains Dermot Moran (2010: 138). No wonder, then, that the prospect of touching the work makes the children want to dance. Adams’s installations and tapestries— works made of mundane materials like plastic beads, wires, and nylon—exude a liveliness that seems palpable. Handwoven using a detailed and time-consuming practice, the artist’s work spurs a tension between the bodies of its producers, the artist and his studio assistants, and the bodies of the viewers. The tension emerges from the potential of these interactions to produce new meanings mediated by the work but not predetermined by it.1 For the young children, tension arises from the conflicting impulses to maintain the expected position of distant viewing and the temptation to break that norm. Adams, who was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist award, was born in 1982 and raised in Bonteheuwel, a township at the periphery of Cape Town in an area known as the Cape Flats.2 The child of a Christian Nama-Khoisan woman and a Muslim man, he grew up identified as “Cape Malay” under apartheid’s racial classification system.3 Perhaps due to his multicultural upbringing under segregation, he has shown a keen sensibility to the violence of confinement and categorization, investing instead in experimentation, expansion, and diffusion as the modus operandi of his practice. When asked about children’s interest in touching his works, he responded, “if it was my studio, I would say ‘touch as much as you want’” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Bonteheuwel/Epping (2021; Figs. 1–2), which was on display at the 2022 Venice Biennale, captures an aerial view of Bonteheuwel’s train station and its informal foot trails to Epping, an industrial neighborhood where many go to seek work. Known in urbanism as “desire lines,” these spontaneous means of connecting areas designed to be apart create an anarchist relationship to space. They are informal paths that developed withou
|《2023年非洲艺术秋季》第56卷，第3期。在芝加哥艺术学院举行的2022年展览上，一位与会者告诉南非艺术家Igshaan Adams，许多孩子都有触摸他的作品的冲动：“它是如此互动，你的身体感觉像在跳舞”（Adams and Folkerts 2022b:n.p.），他们经常用身体来回应艺术作品，亚当斯的作品似乎特别能唤起这种反应。我不能责怪他们。我第一次面对面接触他的作品，对其奢华的感官品质产生了一种罕见的敬畏感。埃德蒙·胡塞尔（Edmund Hussell）写道，“一个只有视觉的主体根本不可能有一个显现的身体”（Hussell 1989:158）。触摸是我们体验身体及其图像的必要感觉，这就是为什么儿童对亚当斯作品的触觉冲动是对作品的明显反应，在作品中随处可见。Dermot Moran（2010:138）解释道：“触摸使我们在世界上定位，而视觉则不然。”。难怪，触摸作品的前景会让孩子们想跳舞。亚当斯的装置和挂毯——由塑料珠、电线和尼龙等普通材料制成的作品——散发出一种似乎显而易见的活力。艺术家的作品采用了细致而耗时的手工编织，在制作人、艺术家和他的工作室助理以及观众的身体之间引发了紧张。紧张感产生于这些互动的潜力，以产生由作品介导但不是由作品预先确定的新意义。1对于年幼的孩子来说，紧张感产生自维持远距离观看的预期位置的冲突冲动和打破这种规范的诱惑。亚当斯是2018年著名的标准银行青年艺术家奖的获得者，他出生于1982年，在开普敦外围的一个名为Cape Flats的小镇Bonteheuwel长大，在种族隔离制度下，他成长为“开普马来人”。3也许是由于他在种族隔离下的多元文化成长，他对禁闭和分类的暴力表现出了敏锐的敏感性，转而投资于实验、扩展和传播，作为他的实践方式。当被问及孩子们对触摸他的作品的兴趣时，他回答说，“如果是我的工作室，我会说‘想触摸多少就触摸多少’”（Adams and Folkerts 2022b：n.p.）。在2022年威尼斯双年展上展出的Bonteheuwel/Epping（2021；图1-2）拍摄了Bonteheuvel火车站及其通往Epping的非正式步行道的鸟瞰图，许多人去找工作的工业区。在城市主义中被称为“欲望线”，这些自发的连接区域的方式被设计成分开的，创造了一种无政府主义的空间关系。它们是在没有基础设施的情况下发展起来的非正式道路，是由当地人口不断走的路线形成的，这些路线避开了官方限制流动的努力。在种族隔离之后，非官方和非正式的行动方式尤其令人痛心，种族隔离试图将生活的各个方面置于其种族化的空间渲染之下。亚当斯作品中的欲望线证明了对官方地理的抵制，以及通过种族隔离对阶级剥削的长期强制执行，在这种情况下，邦特休厄尔以有色人种为主的居民更难获得体面的工作。4他的欲望线不仅仅是一个严格的城市化定义；他们还传达了尼克·谢泼德和诺琳·默里所说的
{"title":"Igshaan Adams: A Body of Work","authors":"Á. Lima","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00722","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 During a talk on his 2022 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, South African artist Igshaan Adams was told by an attendee that many children felt the urge to touch his work: “it’s so interactive and your body feels like dancing” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Younger viewers, less concerned with posturing at a museum, often respond to artwork with their bodies, a reaction Adams’s oeuvre seems to particularly evoke. I cannot blame them. My first face-to-face encounter with his work sparked a rare sense of awe toward its luxurious sensorial quality. Edmund Husserl writes that “[a] subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing body” (Husserl 1989: 158). Touch is a necessary sense for our experience of the body and its image, which is why children’s tactile impulse around Adams’s work is an obvious response to an oeuvre in which embodiment is everywhere to be found. “Touch localizes us in the world in a way that seeing does not,” explains Dermot Moran (2010: 138). No wonder, then, that the prospect of touching the work makes the children want to dance. Adams’s installations and tapestries— works made of mundane materials like plastic beads, wires, and nylon—exude a liveliness that seems palpable. Handwoven using a detailed and time-consuming practice, the artist’s work spurs a tension between the bodies of its producers, the artist and his studio assistants, and the bodies of the viewers. The tension emerges from the potential of these interactions to produce new meanings mediated by the work but not predetermined by it.1 For the young children, tension arises from the conflicting impulses to maintain the expected position of distant viewing and the temptation to break that norm. Adams, who was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist award, was born in 1982 and raised in Bonteheuwel, a township at the periphery of Cape Town in an area known as the Cape Flats.2 The child of a Christian Nama-Khoisan woman and a Muslim man, he grew up identified as “Cape Malay” under apartheid’s racial classification system.3 Perhaps due to his multicultural upbringing under segregation, he has shown a keen sensibility to the violence of confinement and categorization, investing instead in experimentation, expansion, and diffusion as the modus operandi of his practice. When asked about children’s interest in touching his works, he responded, “if it was my studio, I would say ‘touch as much as you want’” (Adams and Folkerts 2022b: n.p.). Bonteheuwel/Epping (2021; Figs. 1–2), which was on display at the 2022 Venice Biennale, captures an aerial view of Bonteheuwel’s train station and its informal foot trails to Epping, an industrial neighborhood where many go to seek work. Known in urbanism as “desire lines,” these spontaneous means of connecting areas designed to be apart create an anarchist relationship to space. They are informal paths that developed withou","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"72-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46236147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 K anga cloths have been central to the lives of east Africans for over a century, serving primarily as affordable wrappers for the majority of women. Existing scholarship on kanga design has focused on the communicative potential of texts on these affordable, printed cloths (Yahya-Othman 1997; Beck 2000, 2001, 2005; Parkin 2000, 2003; Ong’oa-Morara 2014). Discussions of design are largely anecdotal and do not chronicle change over time (Trillo 1984; Amory 1985; Spring 2005; Zawawi 2005; Bijl 2006; Ong’oa-Morara 2014). This essay utilizes over 5,000 examples of full-cloth kanga cloth, chronicling the design and production of Vlisco, the Dutch textile printer in Helmond, the Netherlands (Figs. 1a–b). Specific regional demands, changing text script, and innovations such as commemorative, advertising, and overtly political kanga can be dated. Women’s unceasing demand for new designs is often repeated anecdotally; this study offers analysis of representative designs alongside growing numbers of imports to give specificity and weight to these assertions across the colonial period. Port cities of the Swahili coast have long been cosmopolitan in nature, with global links increasing in frequency across the nineteenth century (Arabindan-Kesson 2014; Meier 2009, 2016; Longair 2018). Kanga cloth developed and flourished in this Swahili world, and the cities of Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam served as coastal entrepot for inland distribution of kanga. These cities can be used to determine differing regional demands within east Africa, as each belongs to different political regions during the colonial era, ca. 1880s–1960s. Mombasa was part of British East Africa (1895–1920); then the Protectorate of East Africa, administered by the British (1920–1963); then independent Kenya (1963–). Dar es Salaam was part of German East Africa (1885–1919); then Tanganyika Territory, administered by the British (1916–1961); then independent Tanganyika (1961–1964); then union with Zanzibar to form Tanzania (1964–). Zanzibar is an island previously ruled by the Omani sultanate (1698–1897, with a resident sultan from 1832 or 1840), until it became a British protectorate in 1890. Zanzibar merged with Tanganyika in 1964 following the Zanzibar Revolution, and today remains a semiautonomous region within Tanzania. Such varied colonial rule enabled textile printers working through changing merchant-converter firms and local Indian kanga designers and sellers to flourish. In the case of Tanzania, for example, between 1890 and 1914, German merchant converters such as Hansing & Co. handled kanga imports to German East Africa, commissioning Dutch textile printers in greater numbers than British. Leading Dutch textile printers at this time included Vlisco (P.F. van Vlissingen), HKM (Haarlemsche Katoen Maatschappij or Haarlem Cotton Company), and LKM (Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij or Leiden Cotton Company). This shifts to parallel the changing p
{"title":"Kanga Cloths at Vlisco: An Object-Based Study of Dutch Printing for the Colonial East African Market, 1876–1971","authors":"Mackenzie Ryan","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00721","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 K anga cloths have been central to the lives of east Africans for over a century, serving primarily as affordable wrappers for the majority of women. Existing scholarship on kanga design has focused on the communicative potential of texts on these affordable, printed cloths (Yahya-Othman 1997; Beck 2000, 2001, 2005; Parkin 2000, 2003; Ong’oa-Morara 2014). Discussions of design are largely anecdotal and do not chronicle change over time (Trillo 1984; Amory 1985; Spring 2005; Zawawi 2005; Bijl 2006; Ong’oa-Morara 2014). This essay utilizes over 5,000 examples of full-cloth kanga cloth, chronicling the design and production of Vlisco, the Dutch textile printer in Helmond, the Netherlands (Figs. 1a–b). Specific regional demands, changing text script, and innovations such as commemorative, advertising, and overtly political kanga can be dated. Women’s unceasing demand for new designs is often repeated anecdotally; this study offers analysis of representative designs alongside growing numbers of imports to give specificity and weight to these assertions across the colonial period. Port cities of the Swahili coast have long been cosmopolitan in nature, with global links increasing in frequency across the nineteenth century (Arabindan-Kesson 2014; Meier 2009, 2016; Longair 2018). Kanga cloth developed and flourished in this Swahili world, and the cities of Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam served as coastal entrepot for inland distribution of kanga. These cities can be used to determine differing regional demands within east Africa, as each belongs to different political regions during the colonial era, ca. 1880s–1960s. Mombasa was part of British East Africa (1895–1920); then the Protectorate of East Africa, administered by the British (1920–1963); then independent Kenya (1963–). Dar es Salaam was part of German East Africa (1885–1919); then Tanganyika Territory, administered by the British (1916–1961); then independent Tanganyika (1961–1964); then union with Zanzibar to form Tanzania (1964–). Zanzibar is an island previously ruled by the Omani sultanate (1698–1897, with a resident sultan from 1832 or 1840), until it became a British protectorate in 1890. Zanzibar merged with Tanganyika in 1964 following the Zanzibar Revolution, and today remains a semiautonomous region within Tanzania. Such varied colonial rule enabled textile printers working through changing merchant-converter firms and local Indian kanga designers and sellers to flourish. In the case of Tanzania, for example, between 1890 and 1914, German merchant converters such as Hansing & Co. handled kanga imports to German East Africa, commissioning Dutch textile printers in greater numbers than British. Leading Dutch textile printers at this time included Vlisco (P.F. van Vlissingen), HKM (Haarlemsche Katoen Maatschappij or Haarlem Cotton Company), and LKM (Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij or Leiden Cotton Company). This shifts to parallel the changing p","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"56-71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45180117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
and the Kong and Korhogo regions in northern Côte d’Ivoire. The study aims to unravel the intricate regional and global web in which weaving and trading centers in Ghana, Togo, and Côte d’Ivo-ire form hubs through which cloth and weavers move. By focusing on the relationship between weaving and trading centers, the networked relationships between and among locations, people, and products can become clearer.
{"title":"Unravelling Regional and Global Connections: Historical Kente and Related Textiles in Ghana, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire","authors":"Malika Kraamer","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00717","url":null,"abstract":"and the Kong and Korhogo regions in northern Côte d’Ivoire. The study aims to unravel the intricate regional and global web in which weaving and trading centers in Ghana, Togo, and Côte d’Ivo-ire form hubs through which cloth and weavers move. By focusing on the relationship between weaving and trading centers, the networked relationships between and among locations, people, and products can become clearer.","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"8-19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48189657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 Flowing tendrils and rigid geometrics trace intricate patterns across the surface of a wide belt encircling the waist of a Moroccan bride. Worn by women during special ceremonies, the Fes hizam (plural: ahzima) was a heavily patterned silk belt historically woven by Jewish male artisans whom scholars assume to have roots in al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Few primary sources on the belts exist outside of French colonial era ethnographic texts (Gallotti 1939; Le Tourneau and Vicaire 1937; Vogel 1926). Contemporary literature on ahzima is limited to exhibition catalogues and survey texts that draw from an overlapping body of secondary sources and often repeat claims about the “origins” of the belts’ motifs, ranging from European (especially French) floral brocades (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106), Ottoman and Persian floral fabrics (Spring and Hudson 1995: 57, 2002: 37), and even Chinese cloud designs and Japanese fan patterns (Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). However, the prevailing account is that the designs primarily derive from Andalusian artistic heritage (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Schroeter and Mann 2000: 176; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). This assertion aligns with the prominent “myth of al-Andalus” which permeates scholarship on Moroccan artistic production and which has recently come under criticism (Calderwood 2018; Shannon 2015; Rosser-Owen 2012). Lauding the artistic prestige of al-Andalus, this narrative of Moroccan history perpetuates the idea that, following the collapse of Islamic Iberia in 1492, the culture of al-Andalus was simply transplanted to Morocco along with its Jewish and Muslim exiles. Thus, as Jean Gallotti asserts, “in Morocco art is identical with that of the Mohammedans of Andalusia” (1939: 738). This belief lingers in contemporary scholarship on Moroccan artistic production, and in the case of the belts, it endorses a narrative of directly copying from Andalusian prototypes without consideration of design ingenuity by Moroccan artisans. Outside of Andalusian antecedents, few scholars have seriously contemplated other factors in the development of the belts’ distinct design aesthetic. Specifically, these scholars have overlooked the possible role of embroidery pattern books, which originated in central Europe in the 1520s and which exhibit clear design similarities to ahzima, highlighting Morocco’s involvement in networks of exchange beyond al-Andalus. Developed with the aid of the printing press, pattern books were published throughout the sixteenth century in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, and France (Fig. 1). They consisted of dozens of folios of pattern inspirations of diverse geographical associations to be incorporated into the embroidery and weaving of domestic and industrial textile workers (Speelberg 2015: 19). Since the books widely circulated t
{"title":"Motifs in Motion: Fes Belts (Ahzima) and Moroccan Design Innovation in the Mediterranean World","authors":"Morgan Snoap","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00720","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 Flowing tendrils and rigid geometrics trace intricate patterns across the surface of a wide belt encircling the waist of a Moroccan bride. Worn by women during special ceremonies, the Fes hizam (plural: ahzima) was a heavily patterned silk belt historically woven by Jewish male artisans whom scholars assume to have roots in al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Few primary sources on the belts exist outside of French colonial era ethnographic texts (Gallotti 1939; Le Tourneau and Vicaire 1937; Vogel 1926). Contemporary literature on ahzima is limited to exhibition catalogues and survey texts that draw from an overlapping body of secondary sources and often repeat claims about the “origins” of the belts’ motifs, ranging from European (especially French) floral brocades (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106), Ottoman and Persian floral fabrics (Spring and Hudson 1995: 57, 2002: 37), and even Chinese cloud designs and Japanese fan patterns (Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). However, the prevailing account is that the designs primarily derive from Andalusian artistic heritage (Spring and Hudson 1995: 34, 2002: 9; Schroeter and Mann 2000: 176; Gillow 2009: 137; Paydar and Grammet 2002: 106). This assertion aligns with the prominent “myth of al-Andalus” which permeates scholarship on Moroccan artistic production and which has recently come under criticism (Calderwood 2018; Shannon 2015; Rosser-Owen 2012). Lauding the artistic prestige of al-Andalus, this narrative of Moroccan history perpetuates the idea that, following the collapse of Islamic Iberia in 1492, the culture of al-Andalus was simply transplanted to Morocco along with its Jewish and Muslim exiles. Thus, as Jean Gallotti asserts, “in Morocco art is identical with that of the Mohammedans of Andalusia” (1939: 738). This belief lingers in contemporary scholarship on Moroccan artistic production, and in the case of the belts, it endorses a narrative of directly copying from Andalusian prototypes without consideration of design ingenuity by Moroccan artisans. Outside of Andalusian antecedents, few scholars have seriously contemplated other factors in the development of the belts’ distinct design aesthetic. Specifically, these scholars have overlooked the possible role of embroidery pattern books, which originated in central Europe in the 1520s and which exhibit clear design similarities to ahzima, highlighting Morocco’s involvement in networks of exchange beyond al-Andalus. Developed with the aid of the printing press, pattern books were published throughout the sixteenth century in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain, and France (Fig. 1). They consisted of dozens of folios of pattern inspirations of diverse geographical associations to be incorporated into the embroidery and weaving of domestic and industrial textile workers (Speelberg 2015: 19). Since the books widely circulated t","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"44-55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49055974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 In August 2019, Ajibade Gbadegesin Ogunoye was installed as Ogunoye III, the 32nd Olọ́wọ ̀ of Ọ̀wọ ̀ and Paramount Ruler of Ọ̀wọ ̀Kingdom.1 The steps leading to his coronation involved numerous ceremonies and ritual acts that transpired over more than two weeks. Several variations of attire were required over the period of intense ritual activity. On the day of his investiture (September 8, 2019, seventeen days after his installation), Ogunoye was crowned with the coral bead ade (crown) selected for the occasion from the collection of royal headwear in the palace (Fig. 1). The crown was topped by the urere oken, the tail feather of the bird associated with royalty among many Yoruba groups, perhaps the African Paradise Flycatcher, a tiny forest bird with long white tail feathers (okin in Yoruba but oken in Ọ̀ghọ)̀. Beads of office around his neck, wrists, and ankles were noticeable as he danced before the joyous people of Ọ̀wọ.̀2 Two elaborate ape (dancing swords) made for the occasion bore his name along with the lion and unicorn emblem in cutout designs. Two large cloths called ipanmeta3 (each made of three panels of locally woven, blue-striped fabric) crossed over each other, one tied on the left shoulder, the other on the right. The crossed panels covered an elaborate ensemble of a tunic or gown (ewu egha) over trousers (efa), also crafted from panels of local women’s weave in the pattern known as ṣeghoṣen. Neither of the textiles here, the blue-striped cloths or the elaborate ṣeghoṣen, are considered “royal,” but each carries deep meaning. The indigo-striped panels are significant to Ọ̀wọ ̀history and to the textile industry of Ọ̀wọ.̀ Similar striped fabrics have been used over time as uro (wrappers), drapes such as ipanmeta (three-panel cloths worn as togas) and ugbero (cloths woven to mark the Ero celebrations marking the retirement of a man from public responsibilities), gele (head tie), and uborun (stole). Historically, almost all cloths of ritual significance are woven by women. It is the ṣeghoṣen cloth used here for the Olọ́wọ’̀s ewu egha and efa that is the focus of this article. The textile has been referred to as senwonsen by Yoruba researchers not attuned to the Ọ̀wọ ̀(or Ọ̀ghọ)̀ language (Akinwunmi 2005; Asakitikpi 2005; Lamb and Holmes 1980).4 Ṣeghoṣen is the most admired and the most expensive of cloths produced by women in Ọ̀wọ.̀ Ṣeghoṣen has been esteemed for countless years, and in spite of the availability of imported fabrics, its value as a cultural icon continues into the twenty-first century. Over the last half century, changes in its manufacture and in its use as prestige clothing have taken place. In the 1970s and earlier, ṣeghoṣen (or any cloth woven by women) was never cut and tailored. It was used whole as wrappers, head ties, or stoles by women or wrapped toga-like by men. Today it is sometimes cut and used as fabric for sewn and constructed garments, and it has even been use
{"title":"The Cloth That Eats Money: Ṣeghoṣen as a Symbol of Prestige","authors":"Babatunde Onibode, R. Poynor","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00718","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 In August 2019, Ajibade Gbadegesin Ogunoye was installed as Ogunoye III, the 32nd Olọ́wọ ̀ of Ọ̀wọ ̀ and Paramount Ruler of Ọ̀wọ ̀Kingdom.1 The steps leading to his coronation involved numerous ceremonies and ritual acts that transpired over more than two weeks. Several variations of attire were required over the period of intense ritual activity. On the day of his investiture (September 8, 2019, seventeen days after his installation), Ogunoye was crowned with the coral bead ade (crown) selected for the occasion from the collection of royal headwear in the palace (Fig. 1). The crown was topped by the urere oken, the tail feather of the bird associated with royalty among many Yoruba groups, perhaps the African Paradise Flycatcher, a tiny forest bird with long white tail feathers (okin in Yoruba but oken in Ọ̀ghọ)̀. Beads of office around his neck, wrists, and ankles were noticeable as he danced before the joyous people of Ọ̀wọ.̀2 Two elaborate ape (dancing swords) made for the occasion bore his name along with the lion and unicorn emblem in cutout designs. Two large cloths called ipanmeta3 (each made of three panels of locally woven, blue-striped fabric) crossed over each other, one tied on the left shoulder, the other on the right. The crossed panels covered an elaborate ensemble of a tunic or gown (ewu egha) over trousers (efa), also crafted from panels of local women’s weave in the pattern known as ṣeghoṣen. Neither of the textiles here, the blue-striped cloths or the elaborate ṣeghoṣen, are considered “royal,” but each carries deep meaning. The indigo-striped panels are significant to Ọ̀wọ ̀history and to the textile industry of Ọ̀wọ.̀ Similar striped fabrics have been used over time as uro (wrappers), drapes such as ipanmeta (three-panel cloths worn as togas) and ugbero (cloths woven to mark the Ero celebrations marking the retirement of a man from public responsibilities), gele (head tie), and uborun (stole). Historically, almost all cloths of ritual significance are woven by women. It is the ṣeghoṣen cloth used here for the Olọ́wọ’̀s ewu egha and efa that is the focus of this article. The textile has been referred to as senwonsen by Yoruba researchers not attuned to the Ọ̀wọ ̀(or Ọ̀ghọ)̀ language (Akinwunmi 2005; Asakitikpi 2005; Lamb and Holmes 1980).4 Ṣeghoṣen is the most admired and the most expensive of cloths produced by women in Ọ̀wọ.̀ Ṣeghoṣen has been esteemed for countless years, and in spite of the availability of imported fabrics, its value as a cultural icon continues into the twenty-first century. Over the last half century, changes in its manufacture and in its use as prestige clothing have taken place. In the 1970s and earlier, ṣeghoṣen (or any cloth woven by women) was never cut and tailored. It was used whole as wrappers, head ties, or stoles by women or wrapped toga-like by men. Today it is sometimes cut and used as fabric for sewn and constructed garments, and it has even been use","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"20-33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47130057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 It began with a business partnership and grew to a research collaboration. In 2014 I met a group of weavers in the village of Waraniéné, Côte d’Ivoire (Fig. 1). Vali Coulibaly, one of the master weavers and president of the village workshop, shared their interest in collaborating with someone who could help market cloth woven at Waraniéné to Global North consumers. Six master craftspeople, an American designer, an Ivorian operations manager, and myself founded a partnership in 2016 as a mechanism for weavers to sell their strip-woven textiles directly to global consumers.1 In 2020, we officially registered the partnership as a nonprofit organization, with the goal of investing all profits in arts-based initiatives ideated and managed by the craftspeople at Waraniéné.2 My role began as a business partner and transitioned, through my developing relationships as well as academic study, toward a scholarly interest in the creativity of contemporary Indigenous handweaving and the global circulation of art objects. This partnership established relationships, mutual trust, and investment that laid the groundwork to foster a successful research dynamic that would have been out of reach in many other fieldwork contexts. My research would not exist without this partnership.3 I am deeply invested and acutely interested in the ways in which weavers’ innovation in motifs and patterns change the reception of West African textiles in the Global North.4 Not only am I able to situate and critique myself—as researcher and partner from the global North—but I am also in a unique position to understand the market dynamics from the perspective of someone who actively engages with the circulation, sale, and consumption of these cloths. In this analysis, I use my role as researcher, scholar, and advocate to consider contemporary handwoven cloth from Waraniéné through the overlapping lenses of scholarly research, curatorial interpretation, connoisseurship, and commerce. I investigate the creative cycle that individual weavers harness through the weaving process by treating textiles as both individual and alternative archives through a practice I call motif mapping. By drawing multiple iterations of handwoven pattern across time, motif mapping identifies and analyzes numerous, seemingly minor designs that contribute to major shifts in the mastery of the Indigenous weaving process. This practice creates a third digital archive that provides a way to see beyond the commercial or connoisseurial focus of global markets and situates these designs within a visual provenance, without recontextualization or categorization. I navigate the vast field of contemporary handwoven cloth circulation, their complex geometric motifs, and weaver creativity through these overlapping sites of investigation, which operate simultaneously and sometimes paradoxically. By focusing on an individual contemporary handwoven cloth industry—Waraniéné—this researc
{"title":"Complex Geometries: Creativity, Motif, and the Study of Contemporary Handwoven Cloth from Côte d'Ivoire","authors":"Emma C. Wingfield","doi":"10.1162/afar_a_00719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00719","url":null,"abstract":"| african arts AUTUMN 2023 VOL. 56, NO. 3 It began with a business partnership and grew to a research collaboration. In 2014 I met a group of weavers in the village of Waraniéné, Côte d’Ivoire (Fig. 1). Vali Coulibaly, one of the master weavers and president of the village workshop, shared their interest in collaborating with someone who could help market cloth woven at Waraniéné to Global North consumers. Six master craftspeople, an American designer, an Ivorian operations manager, and myself founded a partnership in 2016 as a mechanism for weavers to sell their strip-woven textiles directly to global consumers.1 In 2020, we officially registered the partnership as a nonprofit organization, with the goal of investing all profits in arts-based initiatives ideated and managed by the craftspeople at Waraniéné.2 My role began as a business partner and transitioned, through my developing relationships as well as academic study, toward a scholarly interest in the creativity of contemporary Indigenous handweaving and the global circulation of art objects. This partnership established relationships, mutual trust, and investment that laid the groundwork to foster a successful research dynamic that would have been out of reach in many other fieldwork contexts. My research would not exist without this partnership.3 I am deeply invested and acutely interested in the ways in which weavers’ innovation in motifs and patterns change the reception of West African textiles in the Global North.4 Not only am I able to situate and critique myself—as researcher and partner from the global North—but I am also in a unique position to understand the market dynamics from the perspective of someone who actively engages with the circulation, sale, and consumption of these cloths. In this analysis, I use my role as researcher, scholar, and advocate to consider contemporary handwoven cloth from Waraniéné through the overlapping lenses of scholarly research, curatorial interpretation, connoisseurship, and commerce. I investigate the creative cycle that individual weavers harness through the weaving process by treating textiles as both individual and alternative archives through a practice I call motif mapping. By drawing multiple iterations of handwoven pattern across time, motif mapping identifies and analyzes numerous, seemingly minor designs that contribute to major shifts in the mastery of the Indigenous weaving process. This practice creates a third digital archive that provides a way to see beyond the commercial or connoisseurial focus of global markets and situates these designs within a visual provenance, without recontextualization or categorization. I navigate the vast field of contemporary handwoven cloth circulation, their complex geometric motifs, and weaver creativity through these overlapping sites of investigation, which operate simultaneously and sometimes paradoxically. By focusing on an individual contemporary handwoven cloth industry—Waraniéné—this researc","PeriodicalId":45314,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN ARTS","volume":"56 1","pages":"34-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48280204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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