Nicola Lo Calzo, memories of slavery documented by photography
Nicola Lo Calzo, Paris, June 2021 © Olivier Favier
Text by: Olivier Favier
5 mins
“
Memories of slavery are memories of the abyss,
” explains Nicola Lo Calzo, who for more than ten years has been documenting photographically what remains of four centuries of trade between Africa, Europe and the American continent.
This summer, several exhibitions and a book pay tribute to this monumental work.
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Cham, the Bible tells us, one day saw his father Noah drunk and naked.
He warned his brothers who dressed him.
Coming to himself, Noah condemned Ham's son, Canaan, to be the slave of his uncles.
Late, at the beginning of the Christian era and then in Islamic literature - but not in the Qur'an, it was added to this story that Ham, Canaan and their descendants were condemned to have black skin.
The "curse of Canaan", thus become "curse of Cha", was brought up to date to serve as a religious guarantee for slavery and for the construction of a racist ideology at the time of the Atlantic slave trade.
The "Cham project"
Nicola Lo Calzo points out that the name Cham derives from the term Kam or Kem, a name that the Egyptians used to designate their country and the African continent.
It is also the root of the word "black" in several African languages.
Finally, this is the name he gave to his photographic survey, labeled by Unesco.
“
Ten years ago, people didn't even understand what I was talking about,
” explains the man who first trained as a landscape architect.
“
But for the past year or two, there has been real interest in these issues.
"The relationship of human beings with their environment - and all the signs that History has left there - haunts his images, most of which were taken on the shores of the Atlantic area, in West Africa, in the Caribbean and the southern United States.
More surprisingly, there is also a long immersion in
the memory of Benedict the More
, a son of a slave born in Sicily, who was the object very early of a popular cult and today considered as one of the saints. protectors of Palermo.
To recount his presence, he photographs both the processions and the people for whom his story has been decisive, the places where he is represented.
This figure, he finds it in São Tome-et-Principe, where it was imported by the Franciscans.
His Sicilian origin has been completely forgotten there, as is often his African ancestry in Sicily.
"
Rather than laundering, as the forgetting in Palermo of his slave parents might suggest, I prefer to speak of the loss of the genealogy
" he explains.
The minority experience as the seed of a common identity
The memory of slavery is essentially oral, it is often expressed through rituals, at the cost of constant reappropriation.
Thus Nicola Lo Calzo was interested in the complex relations maintained within the Afro-Brazilian community of
Agoudas
, descendants of Luso-Brazilian slave traffickers or freedmen who left Brazil to return to several countries of the former Slave Coast: Benin, Togo, Nigeria.
In Mississippi and Louisiana, he confronted conflicting memories, similarly haunted by the breakdown of the Civil War, which ended slavery.
In Togo and Benin again, he went in search of voodoo Tchaba, the spirit of slaves, which comes back to haunt the descendants of the old masters.
In Guyana, it testifies to communities resulting from marronage, therefore descendants of runaway slaves who themselves conquered their emancipation.
“
Each of us needs the memory of the other
”, writes Nicola Lo Calzo, who, in an intersectional approach, brings together diverse minority experiences, to shape a common identity.
"
I left with the very intimate conviction that it was only in the darkness of the hold of a slave ship and of her injured, scarred, obscured or brandished memory that I could find the true quid of my humanity
" continues -he.
Many of his images speak in this sense, which beyond the context they describe, touch by their evocative power.
At the frontiers of art, history and sociology, Nicola Lo Calzo joins the universal.
► Nicola Lo Calzo,
Binidittu
, L'Artière, 2020 (texts in English and Italian), € 45.
Current exhibitions
Photo-festival in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc: Mythologies of resistance: a counter-mapping of memory in the Caribbean from June 5 to August 29, 2021.
Binidittu, at the Camera Foundation, Italian Center for Photography in Turin: from May 27 to July 18, 2021 then in Gibellina in Sicily from July 30 to August 30, 2021.
Archaeological Museum of Aosta: The families of men, collective exhibition, from May 29 to October 10, 2021.
Also to be discovered on RFI
Africans in world history.
The Memoirs of Slavery, on RFI Savoirs.
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