Pélagie Gbaguidi
Pélagie Gbaguidi was born in Dakar, Senegal, but has Beninoise roots. Gbaguidi graduted from th École des Beaux-Arts Saint-Luc in Liege in 1995. She lives in Brussels.
It was around 2000 that Gbaguidi asked herself how she could make her mark on the world as an artist. The digital revolution had reached a tipping point and began to change our perception of reality. The answer hit her like a bolt from the blue and stemmed from the dual consciousness she had inherited from her parents.
Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary griot and uses the various media art proffers her, ranging from paintings, drawings, texts, and installations to performances to fulfil her task. Dwelling in the visible as well as the invisible gives her strength. In West Africa, griots are the custodians and recounters of oral history and myths. They pass on the stories, events, traditions, and legends from generation to generation. At the same time, they are nomadic figures who ensure that ancestral images, metaphors, music, and poetry live on in the present generation.
Griots are also mediators of present and past, connected to the ancestors, nature, and the elements. As the artist says herself, ‘The present is not an old thing...the present is the past.’ She never felt like this dual consciousness was in conflict. ‘It was inherited treasure.’ ‘The future doesn’t exist if we don’t dwell in the present. The griot helps us touch the present moment, to enter the world as it is now, with all its contradictions and disasters. Yes’, she concludes. ‘This is our world.’ (Pélagie Gbaguidi in an interview with Sandrine Colard and Sammy Baloji on the Congoville exhibition, Middelheimmuseum, 2021)
During her 2004 residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Nantes, Gbaguidi accidentally came across Le Code Noir at a local book fair. Le Code Noir was a decree passed by King Louis XIV of France in 1685; it is a codex or catalogue of laws, codes of conduct, and penal provisions on the handling of human ‘commodities’, the labour force open to trade, called the slave, and enforceable throughout the French colonies. To nail down the legislation on their trade in predominantly cane sugar and slaves, the drafters required more than a night’s work. Colbert and his committee drafted and edited the ‘legal’ provisions for three years. Gbaguidi was shocked and dumbfounded by the content met out by sentences scrawled in an icy, officious, methodical tone. After several readings, faces, images, associations and piecemeal memories began to surface from those who could no longer recount them. Gbaguidi resolved to demystify slavery and view it as part of a universal heritage.
In 2015, Gbaguidi’s 100 drawings were included in the exhibition on permanent display at Mémorial ACTe – the Caribbean centre and monument in remembrance of the victims of slavery.
Her oeuvre forms a new timeline of colonial and post-colonial history on which traces of trauma, symbols, associations, and new, composite archetypes counter the official version that skirts that period’s oppression, horror, and legacy. She uses her knowledge of the archives to recontextualise past events, to break the chain of injustice that has cycled unbroken ever since.
‘We must write a different history because right now, we know that the official story blots out several aspects of the truth. Now, many things are being lost to obscurity. So, it is essential to collect those stories. Anyone can lend a hand in shattering this kind of dystopia, to build something different and stop repeating the mistakes of the past.’
Gbaguidi’s work has long flown under the radar in the Belgian art world, despite her international run at the Dakar, Lubumbashi, and Berlin Biennales and her exhibitions at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. Curator Sandrine Colard also ensured that her work made an appearance in the WIELS (Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age, 2019) exhibitions, as well at the Middelheimmuseum (Congoville, 2021).
The performative nature of her work is reminiscent of her fellow artist and good friend Philippe Vandenbergh (1952-2009) in the sense of urgency to crack open the world and reveal the stories buried by the mainstream. These stories shuffle lost through our collective memory. Gbaguidi sees the body as a living archive. Every human being is an archive in a world that has been shoddily built, to put it mildly, by human beings.
Gbaguidi often uses parts of her body to apply paint or pigment to the canvas. She writes an intimate diary. And the works often transcend their own genesis. She situates the banal in the light of love and beauty to escape the world’s tragedy. The driving force pouring forth from her brushstrokes interprets what isn’t depicted at first glance. The emotional, physical undercurrent transports the viewer back to the space in time when Gbaguidi stood before the canvas, pouring her soul into the art to create the piece. In a Western art history class, that aspect of her craft might be referred to as neo-expressionist in the tradition of Edvard Munch.
In Le jour se lève (Xeno X Gallery, Antwerp, 2022), her outrage and indignation at the post-colonial era’s disappointing shortcomings trickle through in Chaine Humaine, a series of pastel drawings. Simultaneously, we see many hands open and extended and, for example, a world of protest against established values emerging. This is her hope and confidence in the younger generation. In the painting, The Mutants, three women’s bodies are depicted from the waist down. They stand side by side in a row, urinating on the ground. The woman in the middle has the darkest completion with her arms akimbo, hands firmly planted on her hips, while the women to her left and right seem to have their fingers interlaced in prayer as if they aren’t entirely sure what statement they are making, given their lighter complexions. Even the hue of the three streams of urine also varies slightly, from yellow to white or light blue. They urinate in tight streams from the three bodies, flowing from a distance but emptying out much closer as though they could seep from the bottom of the canvas at any time, dripping onto the viewer’s shoes.
The Missing Link, Decolonisation Education by Mrs. Smiling Stone (Kassel, 2017 and Middelheimmuseum 2017-21) is an installation with school desks and huge lengths of paper depicting the results of a workshop with schoolchildren. The smiling stone referred to in the title was the skeleton that appeared to Gbaguidi and said: ‘You know what? Even if you can fly to the moon, if racial ideology isn’t eradicated, then the world will keep wearing the same old clothes, achieved by torture.’ The smiling stone’s image manifested after her trip to the archives on Apartheid and the memorial in Soweto, South Africa.
Gbaguidi set up an educational project next – a work in progress – to decolonise education through art and purge metaphors, binary archetypes, and conceptions of the toxic constructs of the past. To this end, she also provided material from several archives, such as Le Code Noir, a few dolls and caricatures from the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the emancipation manumission acts of former slaves inscribed in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi (Greece), photographs by Peter Magubane of the 1976 Soweto school revolt, and a few remnants of pottery from WWII. The schoolchildren’s artworks were included in the exhibition and installation.
School is the most superlative place to rid society of the antiquated notions we are conditioned with. They bar the road to a new worldview, a reality where people treat each other more ethically and sustainably. Experiencing these archaic mechanisms in an educational setting can go a long way towards helping us progress in the here and now.
DE