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Beninese visual artist Romuald Hazoumè is exhibiting his famous masks made of plastic jars until July 11 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. And his new installation “No Return” is the core of the exhibition “Ex Africa – African presences in art today”. Interview with this self-taught Yoruba native who grew up in Porto-Novo in a Catholic family before conquering the art market with his voodoo-inspired sculptures.
RFI: The exhibition is called Ex-Africa – African presences in art today. You see yourself as a “African presence»In contemporary art?
Romuald Hazoumè: My job, yes. Always. My ancestor, my. And tomorrow it will be the offspring of other artists or my offspring. For me, it’s not just the past to be in Ex-Africa today. It is the present and the future of contemporary African art.
A very large and impressive installation of you, No Return, is at the center of the exhibition. What does this do “snake»Composed of flip flops?
It’s a snake for you. It is a snake for Fonsd’Abomey, for Luba, but it is the infinitely small and the infinitely large for other peoples, such as As’hendo from the Democratic Republic of Congo who say it is the first sentence of the soul. Among other peoples, like Baluba, it is 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 rather 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 resemblance 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 in the form of a conquest. Many people are wrong when it comes to immigration because they mix things up to deceive the people and seize power. I simply made a piece of universal symbolic value that asks the questions that everyone is interested in today.
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, simply to say: we are all in the same boat. And this boat is called No Return. We have no choice, coronavirus has shown it to us. We are all subject to the same problem.
How do you get out of it? We must find an answer to that. [Dans le serpent], 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, Asians on another. No, the problem we face today is a universal problem that all people have the right to answer. 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 dead for too long. Those who inspired me are my ancestors who have always made masks specific to our culture. Me, I’m not from an art academy. The great European champions, I know them very little. I live in Africa and sweat my culture. I am the itinerary that moves from kingdom to kingdom to transfer this knowledge. So here we had masters of the great palaces of Abomey, great weavers or great stonemasons in some regions.
So we must understand that our tradition must remain our tradition, close to society. Because we have always thought of and worked for society, at the service of society.
You subscribe strongly to your tradition, at the same time, are there artists, works of modern or contemporary Western art that have marked or influenced you??
Affected, I do not think so, but it caught my eye, yes. But I can not give you a fair reference.
In your works you sometimes return “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 how it goes today. I am not an “environmental activist” at all, but I say that we are really facing a disaster. We get rubbish every day and we do not know what to do with it. And what we see is that we neglect our own culture, our own way of life. We neglect our ancestral knowledge that has always protected us. We neglect this in favor of the trash we receive every day.
I, in my work, it’s just resistance. It’s just art. Others will say it is provocation. But behind this provocation is intelligence and artistic creation. There is also humor behind this work. It’s not to be mean. I do this job where I say: I send the trash back, because our masks, they were taken from us. Our real masks, we have sold them ourselves, we have given them voluntarily, our governments have given them to heads of state. We have no more.
When you tell me, what are you taking back to Africa? Me, I’m taking back intelligence. I take back this knowledge I have about the current situation by saying: guys, we are wrong! Let’s learn our culture. Let’s reinvest in our past.
► To also read: “Ex Africa”, “rewrite history” between contemporary art and ancient arts in Africa
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