Interview of Michèle Magema, Mixed-media Artist
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Looking at your work, I was like, “Wow, yes, there are other ways of thinking about history, of thinking about memory in a theoretical fashion that isn’t anchored in a dialectical European tradition or the Western academic world.” It seemed to me that your creative progression is a theoretical development that can enrich all of us, that could provide us with a sort of globality. Art may be about creating beauty, but you do more than that. I wanted to know about the moment that you decided that art would allow you to make an important contribution to questioning the status quo, the diverse systems of oppression, but at the same time that celebrates the cultures and histories of your country. I want to avoid saying the culture, the history. When I look at your work, it’s really that multiplicity.
Very early on, I became conscious that the migratory path that my parents had taken was going to have an effect not only on my own vision of the world, but that even as little as I was, I was actually going to lead them to change their understanding of the world, too. My father was pretty politically active when he came to France as a political refugee. Much later, I understood that I had [my grandfather’s] name and so I had that invisible heritage. That connection and realization of my situation—making use of my position as an artist, as a woman, and coming with all these stories and putting them into the artistic sphere in order to interrogate them, to elevate them and to ask questions—happened at the moment when I was at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School for Fine Arts) at Cergy [Paris, France; Magema recived her diploma in 2002]. I was in the library, sitting on the floor, looking for African artists, female Congolese artists, among others. Obviously, Renée Green (an African American artist, writer, and director), and then male [End Page 146] artists like David Hammons, were references at that point, but I didn’t find female Congolese artists from the continent who could express themselves. At that time, the biennial catalog of Dakar already referenced an avant-garde that exists today in artists like Barthélémy Toguo. But this was the year 2000, and in 2000, I decided that that female Congolese artist would be me. It was also this heritage that obligated my ancestors to break the taboos, that allowed me to continue nourishing myself and bringing these stories into this sphere. I’m not going to get into the debate about the function of art, but we are in another space where people can, if they want to, cross paths and meet each other. For me, that’s very important because, at a certain moment, when you go stand in front of a piece, it’s that encounter that will allow you to start the discussion, break those taboos, and be able to reach everybody.
A question that might be problematic, then, is: How do you, as a Black woman who is between several spaces, who often puts on shows in non-African spaces, conceive of this idea of connection without running into the commodification of what you do?
Yes! There are two things that I’ve done about this. The first is through this relationship to time. I offer a space that is almost outside of time. We’re in another temporality, on another frequency. That’s how we’re going to find the relationship to slowness, almost choreographed, this movement as a shift. We’re in a system where everything moves fast. I think that one of our ancestors’ riches and fundamental pieces of knowledge was this connection they had with time, temporality, and the spaces that they inhabited. So I provide these spaces outside of time that will perhaps lead us to question ourselves or to share an idea, an action, a symbol at that level. Sometimes we’re in Africa, in Morocco...
