How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions

How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions

Inhalt

9 Vorwort 13 Grußwort 17 „Die ganze fühlende Schöpfung“. Ökologie – Umwelt – Empathie Ina Dinter 27 Wie spricht man mit Vögeln, Bäumen, Fischen, Muscheln, Schlangen, Stieren und Löwen?

Aleksandra Jach 171 KünstlerInnenbeiträge* 189 Einladung. Ein Gespräch* 215 Biografien 218 Verzeichnis der ausgestellten Werke 226 Impressum

* zusammengestellt von Antje Majewski

Content

11 Preface 15 Foreword 23 “The whole sensitive creation”: Ecology – Environment – Empathy Ina Dinter 41 How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions?

Aleksandra Jach 53 Artists’ Contributions* 203 Invitation: A Conversation* 215 Biographies 218 List of Exhibited Works 226 Imprint

* compiled by Antje Majewski

How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions?

Aleksandra Jach Listen more often to things rather than beings.

Hear the fire’s voice, Hear the voice of the water.

In the wind hear the sobbing of the trees.

It is our forefathers breathing.

Birago Diop “Breaths” (extract) He said he’d show us. Xu Guirong had a way of treating the tree like a foster father. We followed him through the village of Yang Wu Sha (Huizhou), passing bamboo woods and houses large and small. Eventually, we came upon a partially dried-up pond. Litter and waste lay about in the mud. Across the pond, we saw a tree. This had to be the one. The tree was gigantic, leaning to the side just so, with its lower section slumped against the ground. Coming closer, we saw that the entire tree was overgrown with plants of various kinds. One section of the tree had been damaged, perhaps by a storm, although you could hardly see the damage since the dried-out branch was home to so many species. Antje set up the camera and the man began to talk. He spoke of his childhood, the loss of his mother, and his father’s advice that he find someone to care for him in his mother’s stead. Yes, it was his father who showed him the tree. Both needed the support of someone else. He would turn to the tree whenever he felt his problems were too large.

Strewn around the foot of the tree were red and golden cards, glasses filled with wine, and other offerings. A placard identified the tree: Ficus superba. A tree. An epiphyte. A plant that grows on other plants. A parasite of sorts, albeit a self-sustaining one. Unable to move on its own, it disseminates all critical information

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through its roots. It relies on animals to transport its seeds, and the ficus becomes a nesting place in return. When Hui Shuxian, our guide and interpreter, translated Antje Majewski’s question of what would happen if the tree were to be cut down, Xu Guirong answered, “But that’s impossible. Sure, some of its branches die from time to time, but others are growing in the meantime. The tree will live forever.”1 The tree stands for extra-human time, for the subversion of all laws, institutions and norms contrived by man. Rooted in the earth, trees are the ideal material for a passive protagonist—a witness to human histories. Or so it seems at first glance. A second look, provided that it is attentive, shows us how the plants in fact move and respond to various stimuli.

As urbanized Homo sapiens, most of us strive to cultivate “plant blindness.”2 The brain is programmed to scan for possible threats. To detect movement. To detect color, patterns.

Faces and recognizable objects—these things take priority. Plants are static. They are rooted in place and do not prey on people, so they give us no reason to consciously register them.

Plant blindness is the human default condition of the “Concrete-Man.”3 So it goes in a globalized world of “cheap nature,”4 it must be said.

A tree is felled in Issa Samb’s courtyard.

A group of artists claimed a courtyard off a

Antje Majewski, La Court, 2017.

narrow street in central Dakar. They made their studio in the space between modest buildings.

It would be a place to meet and experiment.

For several decades, the artists associated with Laboratoire Agit’art cultivated friendships and made art there. Rue Jules Ferry is more than a concrete location in the Dakar-Plateau arrondissement. It is a place where people live, converse, and stage artistic interventions.

“This site attested to the many solutions found to help prepare, enlarge, help, guide and foster humans and their environments,” 5 says ­Abdoulaye Ba. Issa Samb, the site’s permanent tenant, has turned the place into his studio and archive. Newspapers, clothing, clotheslines strung up with bones, dried seed husks, X-ray images of lungs, drawings, sticks wrapped in yellow fabric, a feather nested in a knot of rope, and here and there, stacks of paper and other sundry objects. A microcosmos. When asked about a certain person, Samb would disappear into a nearby room and later emerge with some clipping or note associated with that person.

Stories and objects accumulated. This is how a memory of the world comes together: gathering in dusty courtyards, during meetings,

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conversations, as we sit together and observe the things around us.

Antje Majewski looks for meaning in her own collection of objects: a shell, a meteorite, a wooden box with a black ball… This is how she finds herself on Rue Jules Ferry, in 2010.

Samb had agreed to meet with her. Majewski asks him about several of the objects whose meaning she wanted to grasp—one from China, the others from France, Poland and Senegal.

“The object speaks,” Samb says. You have to listen to it, closely.

Majewski returns to Dakar a few years later. Again she meets with Samb. She wants to put together an exhibition about nature.

Samb asks Majewski to elucidate the theme.

She reads aloud what she sees written in the air between them: “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions?”

“That’s good,” Samb replies, jotting down the title in his notebook.

The courtyard is a habitat for art, for all that grows there, and finally, for trees. Life plays out between the large Ficus elastica and Ceiba pentandra trees. These are “palaver

How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions?

March 1 , 2017

Dear Paweł, I was still in Dakar on Monday; I went to say goodbye to my friend Issa Samb one more time. He is in a good mood and encouraging his nurses and his guards to paint. They put guards in front of his door because they have started to destroy his place, and left him only a little corner where he is with all of his things. I think the new owner of the place is afraid that some of his friends could start a protest, so they control who can come to see him now. Issa can hear the smashing of the buildings right next to him. I think it’s so heartless that they do this to someone with only a few weeks left to live. But he is in a good mood and we spent some nice days together, and I came back happy, not sad.

He always says that the work of Laboratoire Agit’art never stops. I could see it’s true.

Many greetings, and awaiting your additions!

All the best, Antje

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Artists’ Contributions

J a nu a r y 13 , 201 8

Dear Antje, I propose to attach the [email] thread starting with the words library, libraries (in the exhibition) the UNESCO description of the Memory of the World Register (or the fragments that are most important in the context Issa Samb’s life and the How to talk with… exhibition) as laid out in following link https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Memory_of_the_World_Programme, available in several languages. Besides the international list, there are national and regional lists, as well as studies and databases with compiled information about heritage threatened and lost.

Please see the suggestion above as my contribution to the exhibition (on the margin).

So far.

All the best, Paweł

January 14, 20 18

Dear Paweł, Here are some thoughts about Issa and his archive: He had many, many documents in several rooms around the courtyard where he was living and which is now destroyed, including letters, newspaper clippings, invitation cards and photos…

Whenever you asked him about someone, he would go to his rooms and return with the correct documents, and tell you about that person and all the events surrounding him or her. He was a living memory of all that had happened in Dakar in the last half-century: art, literature, music and politics. With him, this memory is gone.

Without Issa to tell us about it, the documents don’t have an order. He was their keeper and he knew where to find them. Now it will be like a heap of old garbage.

He also had books and stacks of newspapers lying around in the open courtyard,

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Artists’ Contributions

March 11, 2018

Dear Paweł, We are back from China, where we were visiting villages, and I found some people that venerate trees as their foster parents. These are very big trees with many roots, and they bring them offerings of incense and paper money at the New Year.

They think the tree can protect them, because it is so much bigger and older than they are.

As it happens, these trees look exactly like the tree that was in the middle of Issa’s courtyard, which was not a Senegalese tree. Once a person (who caused a lot of damage) told me, “This tree is not important, it’s just a decorative plant that arrived here in a pot; it has no significance!”

But for Issa and others, it was very important. It was a Ficus, a variety of banyan trees. Some banyan varieties (the strangler figs) fall as seeds on other wood and start to grow. They often strangle the original tree that was in their place. The first tree dies and rots away, and leaves a hole in the middle. This is also why the tree in Issa’s courtyard had a hole, into which Issa (and filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty before him) would go—inside the tree.

You find these trees all over Asia, and they can become extremely old and very big.

One man that I interviewed told me that this tree is his “mother,” because his own mother died when he was a kid. So the tree looks after him. I asked him what would happen if the tree dies. He replied that it was impossible, because the tree was immortal. It could not die or be killed. In some way, this is true because these Ficus trees can make air roots that come down somewhere else, even if the main trunks are cut. But of course if you really cut down everything, as they did in Issa’s courtyard, and build a concrete building on top, then it’s gone…

It was also interesting to me that the same people in the village who respect these trees also live in a complex relationship with other trees. They are surrounded by a natural preserve, but their job is to make things from bamboo and wood, and today they are not allowed to cut the trees on their hills any more. Now they’ve discovered that by using the Ali Baba platform, they can import wood from all around the world—Africa, Canada, Poland or Germany—and make door knobs, lids, toys and other small things from wood on demand. Then they export to Dubai, Canada, North America or Europe. So they also have a very unromantic relationship with wood…

The man that has a “tree mother” used to make bamboo ladders. He was very poor in the beginning. Now he is also working with wood and has a big house with a TV. His son became an artist who works with wood. He makes Chinese paintings by “tattooing” the wood with a hot needle, and he makes seats and tables for drinking tea from old wood. His brother is an art critic and organizes exhibitions. I find all this development remarkable. You have to imagine that in the 1960s, they really didn’t have enough to eat in this village… I would like to go back and film some more; the time was too short.

I hope that you’re also well. Today seems like the first day of spring; it will get warmer now! I can’t wait!

Sending my best spring wishes, Antje

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Artists’ Contributions

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Artists’ Contributions

Antje Majewski, Bäume und Menschen 树木和人, 2018.

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Artists’ Contributions

Xu Tan, Social Plants and Thought Spasm, 2012.

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Artists’ Contributions

Xu Tan, Who Was Talking To My Mother When She Was In The Forest, 2018.

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Artists’ Contributions

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Artists’ Contributions

Hervé Yamguen, L’enfant et les esprits, 2014.