Georges Adéagbo's Voices of Silence

32 • Nka Journal of Cont em porary Af rican Art GEORGES ADEAGBO'S Nadja Rottner I cannot talk of the future without the presence of the ancestors. Georges Adeagbo in Georges Adeagbo—Conversations with Muriel Bloch, editions au figure, le Quartier, Quimper, 1998, p. 60. While that ultimate essence, pure language, in the various tongues is tied to linguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy, alien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language— —which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator" (1923) in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1982) pp. 79-80. .gwiMag. eorges Adeagbo, abundant marveller of a collective JHrjII imaginaire, is a flaneur of the flea market and the I m r a street, the secondhand bookstore and the antique HE jHj shop; in short, he is a tireless scavenger of the living ^ H J B P archives of human civilization and the ample legacies of colonialism as they affect identity politics. Adeagbo's uniquely site-specific installations are thought out and executed within the contingencies of the geographic and institutional circumstances of the hosting art institution in relation to existing imperatives of control and desire. It is the site that triggers mutating chains of meaning as a temporary parameter, an informational resource that is structured intertextually rather than spatially. Adeagbo's comparative aesthetic relies heavily on groups of formal vectors such as the condensed and the dispersed, the horizontal and the vertical, the straight and the curved, the flat and the bodily. This seemingly benign, stable semiotic dimension of his installations propels the found character of the random objects they contain, in an attempt to purposefully furthering a quest for meaning. Recontextualized through either museological detachment or photomechanical reproduction, the popular paraphernalia in Adeagbo's ephemeral multimedia installations devolve information to the level of the abbreviated, the quote, and the slogan. Meaning circulates freely in this heterogeneous mass of harmoniously coexisting narratives as the documents become shifters scuffling with their dependency on the overall syntagmatic unit of the installation. Flat book covers, empty record sleeves, and excerpted magazine pages accompany objectlike novels and hand-crafted artworks: each document potentially hosts a transient center. Always moving, distracted, we are faced with an excess of constantly shifting registers of reading and looking. Engulfed in an outmoded, melancholic array of unprecious, unpretentious, and decrepit references, a truly labyrinthine space emerges that simultaneously destabilizes the white-cube parameters of the gallery/ museum space and the individual interpretative capabilities of the viewer. The predominance of the textual over the visual yields a polyphone chit-chat of voices, murmuring their own ideologies, political attitudes, stereotypes, cliches, and religious convictions; their own tragedies, hopes, and fears. These fragments of text are polysemous , and as discursive1 items they not only passively document but also become an active component of the constitution of the real by sustaining as many low, human, emotional, and expressive relationships as possible, thus taking their part in a Sum m er / 2 0 0 4 Nka • 33 The Story of the Lion «Venise d'hier et Venise d'aujourd'hua, inst allat ion vi ew at Cam p o d el l 'Ar sen al e. La Bi en n al e di Ven ez i a, d APPERTu t t o , 1 9 9 9 . neverending dramaturgy of power. A collector in his own right, Adeagbo, whose name translates into "he who has seen nothing cannot be tolerant," remained invisible to the forces of the art market until 1994. In the early 1970s he began to amass printed debris in an enigmatic, yet systematic , fashion in the backyard of his Benin home. The artist's personal history of himself being subject to discovery resurfaces self-stylized in his writing and his installations as a core theme in the...