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“Memories of slavery are memories of the abyss,” explains Nicola Lo Calzo, who for more than ten years has photographically documented the remnants of four centuries of trade between Africa, Europe and the American continent. This summer, this monumental work pays homage to several exhibitions and a book.
Cham, says the Bible, one day saw his father Noah drunk and naked. He warned his brothers who were dressing him. When Noah came to himself, he condemned the son of Kam the Canaan to be a slave to his uncles. Late, in the early 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 the Canaanites”, ie “The Curse of Cha”, was updated to serve as a religious guarantee for slavery and to build a racist ideology at the time of the Atlantic slave trade.
“Cham project”
Nicola Lo Calzo points out that the name Cham is derived from the term Kam or Kem, a name used by the Egyptians to denote 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 study, branded by Unesco.
“Ten years ago, people did not even understand what I was talking about,” explains the man who first trained as a landscape architect. “But in the last year or two, there has been genuine interest in these issues. “People’s relationship to their environment – and all the evidence that history has left it – haunts his images, most of which were taken on the shores of the Atlantic, in West Africa, in the Caribbean and in the southern United States.
More surprisingly, there is also a long immersion in the memory of Benoît le More, the son of a slave born in Sicily, who was the subject of popular worship early on and is today considered one of the patron saints of Palermo. To tell about his presence, he photographs both the processions and the people for whom his story has been decisive, the places where he is represented.
He finds this figure in São Tome-et-Principe, where it was imported by the Franciscans. His Sicilian origins have been forgotten there, as has often been his African ancestry in Sicily. “Instead of washing, as the oblivion in Palermo of his slave parents may suggest, I prefer to talk about the loss of genealogy,” he explains.
The minority experiences as a sourdough of a common identity
The memory of slavery is mainly oral, it is often expressed through rituals, at the expense of constant reuse. Thus, Nicola Lo Calzo was interested in the complex relations that were maintained within the Afro-Brazilian community. Agoudas, descendants of Luso-Brazilian slave traders or freedmen who left Brazil to return to several countries on 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 searched for voodoo Tchaba, the spirit of the slave, who returns to haunt the descendants of the ancient masters. In Guyana, it testifies to communities derived from marriage, therefore descendants of fleeing slaves who themselves conquered their liberation.
“Each of us needs each other’s memory,” writes Nicola Lo Calzo, who in a cross-sectional strategy brings together different minority experiences to form a common identity.
“I went with the very intimate conviction that it was only in the grip of a slave ship and her damaged, scarred, hidden or twisted memory that I could find my real pound of humanity,” he continues. Many of his images speak in this sense, which beyond the context they describe touches on 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
Also to be discovered at RFI
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