Conversation between Aimé Ntakiyica and Maxime de Formanoir: AfricaMuseum reopening Tervuren, Belgium

The Burundian artist Aimé Ntakiyica recalls his first visit to the Tervuren Museum when he was a child. For him, as for the generations of Belgian school children who have read Tintin au Congo, the museum's caricature of central Africa was taken for granted. The artist arrived in Belgium when he was two years old and was only able to rid himself of such ideas much later, through contact with friends in the African diaspora. As a result, he has scarcely any nostalgia for his early museum meanderings, nor sympathy for the pilgrimage-like relationships that some visitors continue to have with this place, decades after decolonization. "Whether they grew up in the Congo or have never been there, their understandings have been fashioned by the Royal Museum. Belgian colonizers were never numerous, yet the impact of the colonial enterprise on Belgium was total." It was not without reticence, then, that Aimé Ntakiyica accepted to participate in the opening of the Tervuren Museum to contemporary creation. "When my intervention was proposed through the exhibition Persona (2009), I was interested because the oeuvre that I presented, Wir [for Wir sind die Anderen, "We are the Others"], permitted me to confront this place. This work, which presents clothing associated with social identity [Tyrolean attire, a bullfighter's outfit, a Scottish kilt], functioned all the better in a museum that is all about stereotypes."

Aimé Ntakiyica's discovery of objects from his own family in Burundi in one of the museum's vitrines helped him to conquer the place. "Tervuren is something special to me. Between the days when I came as a pupil and the moment that I learned that things of my own family are found there, all of this began to take on completely different import for me. You may be Congolese, Burundian, or Rwandan and recognize objects from these countries.

But when it is something that once belonged to your own family, it's altogether different. And it is because of this that the idea to reveal my genealogical tree was sensible, and nothing else was needed."

As an installation, Histoire de famille. Arbre généalogique no 1 (Fig. 21) is displayed near a photograph of Aimé Ntakiyica's uncle, echoing an intimate relationship between the artist and the Museum that purchased his work for its reopening. "These are pots containing colored yarn. By no means did I want to intercede regarding their placement. In other words, museum staff found themselves with pots bearing the names of persons in my family and holding colored substances. They placed the pots as they chose. It was therefore a surprise for me, especially because the curators knew nothing of these names: They didn't

21.

Aimé Ntakiyika's Histoire de famille. Arbre généalogique n°1 [Family History, Family Tree No. 1]; glass jars, labels and wool, Coll. RMCA, Tervuren, inv. 2017.6.1.

Photo: © Philippe de Formanoir, 2019

know whose they were, nor the relationships between one and another of them. It was up to them to play with the names or colors. I am very happy with the result. On the other hand, members of my family have asked me why they have not appeared in the genealogical tree or why they found themselves placed beside this person instead of another. I answered that I was not responsible, it was the Museum!"

The curators' arbitrary and provisional display of the artist's named pots reveals a subtle mise en abyme. Indeed, Aimé Ntakiyica delivers a remarkable illustration of the irreducibility of objects to the classifications so often proposed and imposed in museum spaces, thus retaining said objects' "capacity … to resist us" highlighted by Thierry Bonnot (2014: 114–17) referring to James Clifford (1988: 229). Even though Histoire de famille was seen at the Dak'Art Biennale of 2016 and so was not commissioned by the Royal Museum, it encapsulates the purposes of the institution's new Afropea gallery in which...