Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumè: "From the West to Africa, I return intelligence"
Beninese visual artist Romuald Hazoumè in the exhibition “Ex Africa - African presences in art today”, at the Quai Branly museum, in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
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Video by: Siegfried Forster Follow
7 mins
Beninese visual artist Romuald Hazoumè is exhibiting his famous masks made of plastic cans until July 11 at the Quai Branly museum in Paris.
And his new installation, “No Return”, is at the heart of the “Ex Africa - African presences in art today” exhibition.
Interview with this autodidact of Yoruba origin who grew up in Porto-Novo in a Catholic family before conquering the art market with his sculptures deeply marked by the voodoo spirit.
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: The exhibition is called
Ex-Africa - African presences in art today
.
Do you see yourself as an “
African presence
” in contemporary art
?
Romuald Hazoumè
:
My work, yes.
Always.
That of my ancestors, mine.
And tomorrow, it will be that of other artists or that of my offspring.
For me, being in
Ex-Africa
today is not just the past.
It is the present and the future of contemporary African art.
A very large and impressive installation by you,
No Return
, takes center stage in the exhibition.
What does this “
snake
” made up of flip-flops
mean
?
It's a snake for you. It is a serpent for the Fons of Abomey, for the Luba, but it is the infinitely small and the infinitely large for other peoples, such as the As'hendo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo who say that it it is the first movement of the soul. Among other peoples, such as the Baluba, it is the beginning movement. So, this snake you are talking about, this spiral, is a universal symbol among many other peoples, especially in Central and West Africa.
This fairly powerful symbol of the spiral shows movement.
Without it, there is nothing.
With him, there is everything.
Today we use this symbol to make a similarity between immigration, the past of immigration which is in fact a forced immigration of slavery, the past of immigration of Europeans to the United States under form of a conquest.
A lot of people are mistaken about immigration, because they mix things up to deceive the people and to take power.
I simply made a piece of universal symbolic value that asks the questions that everyone is concerned with today.
Romuald Hazoumé's “No Return” installation is made up of 5,111 flip-flops washed up on the Benin coast and having belonged to migrants.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
Why did you use flip flops for your sculpture
?
Flip-flops represent the individual, the people, all the peoples of the world.
There is no (main) color.
There is no black, no white, no blue, no yellow.
Everything is mixed up, quite simply to say: we are all in the same boat.
And this boat is called
No Return
.
We have no choice, the coronavirus has shown us.
We are all subject to the same problem.
How to get out of it?
We have to find an answer to that.
[In the snake], it is not the individual who is targeted.
It is the world that is there.
We could have separated from each other, put blacks on one side, whites on the other side, Asians on another side.
No, the problem we face today is a universal problem that all peoples have the right to respond to.
We can compare the answers.
This is what is happening in this expo today.
Who do you consider to be your master in the field of art
?
I am self-taught and my teachers are long dead.
Those who inspired me are my ancestors who have always made masks specific to our culture.
Me, I do not come from a School of Fine Arts.
The great European masters, I know them very little.
I live in Africa and I sweat my culture.
I am the itinerant who moves from kingdom to kingdom to transmit this knowledge.
This is how we had master sculptors in the great palaces of Abomey, great weavers or great stonemasons in certain regions.
So, we must understand that our tradition must remain our tradition, close to the community.
Because we have always thought about and worked for the community, at the service of the community.
Detail of the work “No Return” by Romuald Hazoumé.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
You strongly subscribe to your tradition, at the same time, are there artists, works of modern or contemporary Western art that have marked or influenced you
?
Influenced, I don't think so, but that caught my eye, yes.
But I am not able to give you a fair reference.
In your works, you sometimes send back “
waste
” transformed into work towards the West.
What are you sending back from the West to Africa
?
From the West to Africa, I send intelligence back. By studying the way things are going today. I am not an “environmentalist” at all, but I am saying that we are really facing a disaster. We get garbage every day and we don't know what to do with it. And what we see is that we are neglecting our own culture, our own way of life. We neglect our ancestral know-how which had always protected us. We neglect this in favor of the trash that we receive every day.
Me, in my work, it is only resistance.
It is only art.
Others will say it is provocation.
But behind this provocation, there is intelligence and artistic creation.
There is also humor behind this work.
It's not to be mean.
I do this work where I say: I send the trash back, because our masks, they were taken from us.
Our real masks, we ourselves have sold them, we have given them voluntarily, our governments have given them to heads of state.
We don't have any more.
When you tell me, what are you bringing back to Africa?
Me, I bring back intelligence.
I bring back this knowledge that I have of the current situation by saying: guys, we are wrong!
Let's learn our culture.
Let's reinvest in our past.
Mask made by Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé and exhibited in the exhibition “Ex Africa - African presences in art today”, at the Quai Branly museum, in Paris.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
►
To read also:
“Ex Africa”, “rewrite history” between current art and ancient arts of Africa
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