This issue of Fucking Good Art – of which Lucia Babina and Zoe Gray are proud to be the guest editors – is designed to be inserted inside DiARTgonale. The format is adapted to fit the size of its Cameroonian sister publication, yet it retains its signature pink paper and design. The same articles that appear here in English will appear in French in DiARTgonale, with certain differences due to the differences between our editorial decisions and those of DiARTgonale’s editor.
Within the pages of Fucking Good Art – Writing About! you will find the transcript of an artwork by Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, a story of one young Cameroonian’s attempt to cross the Sahara desert and make it to the promised land of Fortress Europe. As a counterpoint, artist Goddy Leye – in conversation with Emiliano Gandolfi – narrates his European training and how he decided to invest his career in a life-long project in the district of Bonendale in Douala. Goddy Leye and his frequent collaborator Ruth Afane Belinga each present a short text ruminating upon ideas encountered during Talking About!, in relation respectively to art and gentrification, and to the professional practice of curating. Achille Atina also explores certain ideas that came to light in Rotterdam, in his examination of public art and what it could mean in a Cameroonian context. Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma present the transcript of their harbour tour with Achillekŕ Komguem and Lionel Manga. Musing together about art’s possible functions in such a massive, industrial context, their conversation ranges from the situation in Rotterdam to that in Douala. Annette Schemmel meditates upon retellings of history in the light of the 50th anniversary of Cameroonian independence, whilst Lionel Manga and Alexander Vollebregt explore what it might mean to take things to the ‘next level’.
Never Swallow the Past
Annette Schemmel, contribution to Writing About!
Never Swallow the Past was produced for Writing About! a publication edited and compiled by Lucia Babina and Zoe Gray as a result of Talking About! published in March 2010.
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„Kameruner“, a pastry speciality from Berlin, here spelled phonetically, seen in a bakery in Berlin-Neukölln, my neighborhood.
Never swallow the past
During our discussion at Enough Room for Space art activist Lionel Manga brought up the notions of Memory and History as useful topics for a joined project by European and African artists. Of course he is referring to Cameroon’s colonisation, I thought, linking us together if we like it or not. But the main reason for Lionel’s suggestion was the 50th anniversary of Cameroon’s independence coming up in 2010 as I learned soon after and the inevitable public celebrations planned for this event that would enable Cameroon’s undemocratic government to present 50 years of unfulfilled promises as a history of success to the people. Can you imagine that I can’t remember having heard about Cameroon’s history during 13 years of school, although it had been Germany’s colony? And yet, Memory and History are domains in which Germans consider themselves world-champion.
Histories that are not fully dealt with are not visible, not spoken about and not commercialised? © Marjolijn Dijkman
One of the effects of the lately regained national self-esteem in Germany — due to the peaceful re-unification in 1989 and the celebratory football world-cup in 2006 — is the often heard idea that Germans have “successfully” dealt with their loaded past and are thus now back on stage, fully rehabilitated. The German re-unification that is equivalent with the gain of full political autonomy as a nation state, conceded by the Allies of World War II, is here often misunderstood as a national achievement that allows to end a period of public remorse about the Holocaust and to start “moving forward”, to wherever that might be.
By the middle of October I attended a conference in Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) that took the 20th anniversary of 1989 as an occasion to rethink the notions of Memory and History. The end of Apartheid in South Africa that equally dates back to this year gave reason to invite historians, psychologists, ethnologists and artists from (South) Africa and Germany to exchange publicly. The conference’s English title, “Dealing with the past, Reaching the future”, suggested that “the future” was a foreign land that could only be reached when the past had been dealt with; Just as if you told your child that it first has to eat up yesterday’s vegetables before it can go back to play or else it will spend the next ten years on your lap, facing the dreadful spoon. It also suggested that dealing with the past meant to let it be digested in order to get history as a result. I don’t think the past is something to leave behind in order to then proceed to something more pleasant. Actually the past is always already a part of us, shaping our personalities, our lives, we cannot get rid of it. Those who try to present it to us in a handy portion deserve our suspiciousness.
From flames to the light, the event-show of the battle of Verdun, France, 2009
Slightly nervous about my 6-months-old daughter’s patience span I sat down in this somewhat grandiose, now scarcely populated main auditorium of HKW, situated at an arm’s length from the new governmental district of reunited Germany. A re-occuring voice on the stage belonged to an elderly science historian from the University of Essen who repeatedly and quite self-content presented this same idea, that Germany’s way of dealing with the (Nazi) past and the steps historiography had taken in this process, had been so successfully accomplished that South Africans should take it as an example. Now I was happy that my daughter was too little to understand a word. We weren’t going to swallow this easy and pre-chewed version of history that was brought forward in this patronising manner.
My daughter Lilo and me watching a colonial painting of the old harbour of Douala in the book „Deutsche Architektur in Kamerun, 1884 – 1914“ (Stuttgart, 1988)
So, if we agree that we don’t want to be spoon fed with the popular/public version of Memory and History because we don’t want to delegate the decision about what and how to remember to historians and officials, I guess we have found a perfect starting point for engaging in an artistic and intellectual co-production: The ambivalence and openness of art works is a perfect medium to negotiate these topics, just as Lionel suggested.
Annette Schemmel, November 2009