AMSTERDAM — When Dutch artist
Renzo Martens presented his film “Episode
III: Enjoy Poverty” at Tate Modern in London in 2010, he couldn’t help but
notice the many Unilever logos painted across the museum’s white walls.
اضافة اعلان
Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch company that owns Axe,
Dove, Vaseline
and other household brands, sponsors the Unilever Series, in which an artist is
commissioned to make a site-specific work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
“Unilever, Unilever, the Unilever series,” Martens says in his
latest documentary, “White Cube,” recalling that moment. “The greatest, most
famous artists of the world, financed by Unilever.”
Unilever was once nearly ubiquitous, too, in the region of Congo
where Martens has worked since 2004. “Episode III: Enjoy Poverty,” from 2008,
documented dire conditions on the country’s palm oil plantations, where workers
earned less than $1 a day. In “White Cube,” he follows up by visiting former
Unilever-owned plantations in the villages of Boteka and Lusanga. (Unilever
sold the last of its plantations in Congo in 2009.)
To Martens, Unilever represents a system of global exploitation,
in which Western companies extract resources from poorer countries, generate
income, and then use some of that wealth to finance high culture elsewhere.
Some of the artists they support, he added, also make works focused on
inequality, but the benefits of those works rarely go to those in need.
“People on plantations are desperately poor, and they work for
the global community,” Martens said in a recent interview in Amsterdam. “They
even work, indirectly, for exhibitions in the Tate Modern. Art is sterile if it
proclaims to be about inequality but doesn’t bring benefits to those people.”
“I wanted to make sure that a critique of inequality would, at
least partially, and materially, redress that inequality,” he added.
Martens’ art career took off after “Episode III: Enjoy Poverty,”
and he said that he decided at that time to use his new position of influence
in the art world to attempt a “reverse gentrification project.” The aim was to
bring art directly to the plantations, to stimulate economic development there.
“White Cube,” a 77-minute film that is screening in art centers across the
world this month, including in Eindhoven, Netherlands; Kinshasa, Congo; Lagos, Nigeria;
and Tokyo, documents that process. The movie will also screen in the Copenhagen
Documentary Festival, which runs April 21 through May 2.
“White Cube” is both a film and a record of a project seeking to
transform a community through art. By linking the wealthy international art
world directly to an impoverished African plantation, Martens demonstrates how
fortunes across the globe are intertwined. Central to the endeavor are issues
of restitution, repatriation and perhaps even reparations. The underlying
question that “White Cube” poses is: What does art owe to the communities from
which it has extracted so much?
“White Cube” begins in
2012, when Martens attempts to bring art to an operational plantation in
Boteka. It quickly goes wrong, and he is chased out of the community under
threats made by a Congolese company that took over running the plantation after
Unilever pulled out.
He is more successful when he tries again in Lusanga, a village
once known as Leverville, after William Lever, founder of a company that later
became Unilever. Lever established one of his first Congolese plantations
there, in 1911. The Leverville operation closed down in the 1990s, leaving
behind buildings that became derelict and soil that had become unworkable after
a century of intensive single-crop farming.
In the film, Martens says that Unilever obtained its plantations
in Congo through a land grant from Belgian colonial administrators in the early
20th century, reaped the profits and depleted the soil, then sold the land and
abandoned the enterprise to contractors.
Unilever declined to comment on Martens’ film or on the
accusations of exploitation he makes against the company. “Unilever has had no
involvement in the DRC plantations since selling them well over 10 years ago,”
said Marlous den Bieman, a Unilever spokeswoman, referring to Congo by the
acronym for Democratic Republic of Congo.
As part of “White Cube,” former agricultural workers volunteered
to be part of an art studio producing sculptures, which they cast in chocolate
— a rarely tasted delicacy for the workers, despite the fact that they once
produced palm oil, a key ingredient — and then sold at an art gallery in New
York. The local sculptors formed a cooperative, the Congolese Plantation
Workers Art League, and shared the proceeds of the sales. So far, the “White
Cube” project has generated $400,000 for the local community, said René Ngongo,
the Congolese president of the cooperative; it has used half of that to buy
more land.
As the centerpiece of the project in Lusanga, Martens has
enlisted the pro bono assistance of The
Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the firm of the Dutch architect Rem
Koolhaas, to design an art museum — the “White Cube” of the film’s title.
Behind the scenes, he negotiated with a Dutch philanthropist to pay for it, and
worked with Congolese architect Arséne Ijambo, who adapted the design and hired
local construction workers. In total, about $250,000 of private investment was
raised to build the museum, art studios, a conference center and lodgings,
according to Martens.
In a recent video interview from Congo, Cedart Tamasala, one of
the locals who makes the chocolate sculptures, said that he had aspired to be
an artist from a young age but had been forced to drop out of art school in
Kinshasa for lack of funds and went to work on his uncle’s family farm for no
pay. The “White Cube” project has given him an income, stability and a sense of
autonomy, he said.
“One of the important aspects is that we have our space now; we
have our land and we can decide what we want to do with it,” he noted.
“The film, like the white cube, is a tool,” Tamasala added. “It
tells what we are doing, and it makes it visible, and it also connects us to
the world, to other plantations, to other artists, and it gives us access to
things we didn’t have access to before.”
The museum has been closed during the coronavirus pandemic, but
there are plans to exhibit local artists’ work there, including, ultimately,
art returned from European museums.
“My most ardent wish for the Lusanga museum is that it be a
support for the repatriation of our hijacked art,” Jean-François Mombia, a
human-rights activist who has worked with Martens since 2005, said in an email
exchange, “but also a support that will allow us to express ourselves through
art. We would like the Lusanga museum to be a base for the artistic blossoming
of museums throughout Congo.”
Read more
Culture and Art
.jpg)
.jpg)
