Architecture as Colonial Discourse: Ângela Ferreira's Maisons Tropicales

ARCHITECTURE AS COLONIAL DISCOURSE ANGELA FERREIRA'S MAISONS TROPICALES An ge l a Fer r eir a, Maison Tropicale, 2 0 0 7 , Manthia Diawara I n March 2007,1 met with Angela Ferreira at the I sculpture garden of the Musee Rodin in Paris to I discuss her new project for the Venice Biennale. I have always been an admirer of Angela's work. Her sculptures and photographic installations often put subjects that are central to my own work into play, such as the modalities of narrating the diaspora, and postcoloniality. Her most influential installations—Sites and Services (1992), Emigracdo (1994), and Case Study House #21 (2001)—provide powerful reconfigurations of the modernist subject/object relation by opening up a new possibility for our relations to art, architecture, and the politics of representation as a whole. By defamiliarizing our relation to modernist art in general and minimalist sculpture in particular, Angela's installation vi ew (detail), Port uguese Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Phot o: Mar i o Valent e. aim is to deconstruct the autonomy of the artistic "object," and to raise new questions about the role of art concerning the new and unprecedented issues of globalization, porous frontiers, transnationalism , private and public spaces, and home and homelessness. I have often wondered whether the energy and cutting-edge quality of Angela's work comes not only from her critique of the self-referential object in modernist art but also from her determination to let the non-Western voice be heard in her bracketing and mise-en-abime of the modernist project. Insofar as Angela draws some of her inspiration from her origins in Mozambique and her double nationalities as Portuguese and South African, we can see in her art a political detournement of Eurocentrism. Following Leopold Sedar Senghor, we can say that her art is a metissage between 20* N k a Jo u r n al o f Co n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c an A r t An ge l a Fer r eir a, Maison Tropkaie (Brazzaville) #4, 2 0 0 7 . Light Jet print on alum inium , 120 x 150 cm . Europe and Africa, and that it constitutes a poetic relationship between subject and object, a movement away from an optical relation to the object, toward a relation of bodily sensation; a relation of proximity, instead of distance. The Other is no longer someone foreign to us, but ourselves. The object is no longer separated from us through a rhetoric and aesthetics of distanciation, but becomes part of us through an animistic poesis of identification. Prouve: The Thoroughbred of Modernism While sipping coffee in the sculpture garden at the Musee Rodin, Angela told me that she had decided to do her project on the Maisons Tropicales by Jean Prouve. She added that she was going to Niamey (Niger), and Brazzaville (Republic of Congo), to see the places where Jean Prouve's aluminum houses were located, before they were disassembled and returned to France. She wanted me to come along and write an essay about the project. "Who's Jean Prouve?" I asked, confessing both my ignorance and interest. "Oh!" answered Angela excitedly. She dug into a large bag and pulled out long sheets of paper with drawings, and a hardcover book bound together with plastic spirals. "Prouve was what I'd call the thoroughbred of modernism. He was a genius of modernist architecture, even though he A n ge l a Fer r eir a, Maison Tropkaie (Brazzaville) # ?, 2007. Light Jet print o n alum inium , 120 x 150 cm . was better known as a builder. He and his brother, Henri Prouve, had their studio in Nancy, France, between the 1920s to the 1950s. Jean Prouve was interested in designing and building prefabricated assembly-line houses in aluminum and steel. Working with the Pechiney Aluminum Company, he made large-scale spare parts for houses, airport hangars, and train stations. He believed that the time had come for architects to think of building houses like cars: lightweight, easy to assemble, and disassemble, put into wagons and to be transported from place to place. Jean Prouve was...