Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie

WHAT CANNOT BE USED IS FORGOTTEN

Artists: APT artist Uriel Orlow , Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sven Augustijnen, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Lynch, Pauline M’barek, Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Jorge Satorre.

Uriel Orlow, for his part, deals with the production of metal cast artefacts with the lost wax technique in Benin City, Nigeria in Lost Wax, 2007. These objects are produced with scraps of metal and are often considered by Western buyers as cheap imitations of the objects looted by the British in 1897, thus sitting awkwardly in the international market of “African” art. A Very Fine Cast (110 years), 2007, a series of 28 engravings that use the description of the objects in Museum labels and catalogues from 1897, when they arrived in Europe, up to 2007, traces the change in the European view of these precious spoils.

“Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie” deals with the mutating statuses of objects in relation to possible historical narratives, especially those related to colonial past and present and the layers of cultural, spiritual, and identity production that stem from them. Objects carry a wealth of immaterial aspects in and around their materiality, constituted by means of the relations they form with others, both human and nonhuman. They are granted meaning, but they do not contain it in themselves: it is through language that we as Humans provide them with it. These layers of meaning are sometimes concealed and can be disclosed through particular enquiries that grant further interpretations to their existence: for instance, the act of restoration in Western culture, which aims at making repairs invisible, erasing a potentially traumatic event on the surface of the object. But objects are not passive observable entities; on the contrary they also interrogate us, seduce us, repulse us, that is to say, they transform us.

“Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie” seeks to understand how our relation to the material world entails endless processes of assimilation, acculturation, re-appropriation, ritualization, which in their complexity witness and embody the historical binds in which they are caught. The title evokes a particular relationship in which subjects and objects affect each other, objectify and “subjectify” each other constantly. Processes of acculturation are somewhat entropic, they are not reversible. Even an effort to restore nature to its original state is a cultural fact that will not be able to erase the history of a place. The same logic applies to the transformation of objects through time: they build a biography that cannot be erased. In this way, by bringing together objects, and narratives about objects as well as reflections on the production of material traditions, both new and old, we attempt at further understanding their multidimensionality.

Catalina Lozano, Guest curator