Freddy Tsimba, Mabele Eleki Lola! The Earth, Brighter than Paradise

There were several reasons to celebrate the temporary exhibition of Freddy Tsimba's work at the newly renovated AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, a stone's throw away from the center of Brussels. It was an important occasion as it was the museum's first large-scale exhibition of contemporary African art and its first one-man show. It is also significant that it was an event recognizing an artist living and working in the Congo, unlike many shows that draw upon selections of works of so-called diaspora artists settled in Europe and North America. What is more, it was curated by In Koli Jean Boffan, an accomplished novelist of Congolese origin, who was not only instrumental in the conceptualization of this exhibition, but whose texts of a book in progress featured as a verbal echo of Tsimba's life and oeuvres.The opening on October 28, 2020, sadly fell during the pandemic, just the day before the second lockdown in Belgium due to COVID-19. But, in keeping with Freddy's trajectory, battling patiently and persistently for years to make his creative endeavors known beyond his Kinshasa compound, the event reopened on December 1 in defiance of COVID's relentless onslaught and much to the pleasure of surprisingly many curious visitors. According to some of the attendees, word of mouth spread quickly about this exhibition as it was something new and different for an institution associated with African arts of the past.The exhibition was showcased in the large polyvalent space, off the wide, underground corridor connecting the new entrance pavilion to the old museum building. This huge, white cube, devoid of any mise en scène,1 was appropriated by thirty-seven sculptures, fifteen metal masks, four paintings, and a small selection of historical pieces from the museum's collection chosen by in-house staff and offered to the artist for selection. Upon entering, one was struck by the monumentality of many of these metal sculptures. For me this stark, sterile space actually enhanced the effect of their dramatic themes and materials relating to conflict and oppression (Fig. 1). The whitewashed environment contributed to an almost palpable silence, periodically disrupted by Freddy Tsimba's voice at the back of the space, recorded during a work session in his studio. This aural aspect, bridging sound and image, rendered the creative process real and personalized. Also, at the forefront a video of Kinshasa street scenes from the film Système K (2020) by Renaud Barret provided the backdrop to the large-scale sculpture of a vehicle being pushed by people, metaphorically representing a Congo without an engine, going nowhere (Fig. 2).In keeping with his early creative beginning, Tsimba's sculptures in this exhibition are figurative. They have progressively grown in scale—as compared to the pieces on display of some twenty years ago (see Fig. 14)—thus making their message even more audible to a world that forgets too easily as atrocities continue to be repeated. The artist depicts largely female figures, many of whom are pregnant, engaged in interaction with each other, with male figures, and with infants, capturing fragments of real experience. His concerns extend to sinister events beyond the Congo, as with the two enormous figures of lovers separated by a grid (Fig. 3). They recall the World War II transit camp of Fort Romainville near Paris, requisitioned by the Nazis from 1940-1944, where hundreds and thousands of French women of the Resistance and hostages were detained before being deported to well-known extermination camps. Those figures are positioned at the beginning of the exhibition display; toward the end we encounter them again. The man holds an infant for the woman to breastfeed her child through the grid (Fig. 4). The circumstances of their involvement, her pregnancy and the subsequent custody of the child with the father, remain unclear. But what transpires through this painful recollection is the celebration of women, motherhood, and the power of love that penetrates all manner of grids and barriers.Not surprisingly, one vitrine exhibits the museum's Phemba mother and child sculptures from the Yombe region of DRC. Though all of these are not among the finest examples of the Tervuren collection, they highlight the importance of this iconic representation to Tsimba, one that encapsulates procreative, social and political continuity attributed to female power (Fig. 5). But, while paying tribute to women's strength of character, reflected in the beauty of their forms and proportions, some of Tsimba's examples, both female and male, are reduced to half-figures or are just headless, unidentified human specimens that reference victims of slavery, migration, war, and unthinkable violence (Figs. 5–6). Some of this imagery may be shocking, yet it is inextricably linked to an uncanny sensuality.Apart from their figural representations, the works attest to lived reality through their constituent materials collected in zones of war, torture, hunger, illness, and deprivation in the Congo and beyond: used cartridges, machetes, scissors, keys, forks, spoons, bottle caps, and even mouse traps (Figs. 6a–e). All of these items, associationally and symbolically linked to ongoing tragic conditions in the Congo, are welded together and transformed into forms that bring into view alternative realities. One almost fails to see the composite elements except on close-up view. A paradox is set into play between the sensitive and sensual sculptural realizations and the materials of horror and poverty. This is clearly an ode to the excellence of craftsmanship, to the power of technical process referred to by Alfred Gell, that allows us to see the real world in enchanted form (1999: 163).Freddy Tsimba's work lies in between traditions of African historical art and contemporary expressions. He is not a self-made artist or a product of “traditional” workshop training, like those preferred by some Western dreamers of exoticism. Tsimba studied at the Académie de Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, but what seems to take precedence in certain writings about him is the fact that he subsequently underwent six years of apprenticeship with local smiths and welders in the capital and in rural areas. There is no doubt that the excellence of his sculptural execution benefited from those prolonged practical experiences and that it establishes him as a cultural transformer like smiths celebrated in Central African myths and verbal lore. Indeed, like those culture heroes, Tsimba transforms, almost miraculously, materials into otherness. But unlike “traditional” smiths, these are not the raw materials of nature fashioned into socially useful objects; rather, they are industrial products, used debris, soiled by perverse human use or simply cheap products made for mass consumption and trashing. He gives them new life and longevity as constituents of beautiful creations that challenge us to look beyond ugliness and traumatic experiences of so many in the Congo and to hope for healing and revival of an ailing society. In some sense Freddy Tsimba shares a communality with the celebrated African American jazz musician Louis Armstrong, who is remembered singing in the 1960s about “a wonderful world” while the United States waged a deadly war in Vietnam and racial injustice on its citizens. Similarly, after an eternity of violent conflict in DRC, Tsimba cried out Mabele Eleki Lola (the title of the exhibition), meaning, loosely, “the beauty of the world surpasses paradise,”2 and invited visitors to express the dreams of their earthly paradise in an installation at the end of the exhibition. He attempted to inspire us to survive tragedy and despair by grasping on to the strengthening, positive features of the here and now. As he implied during an online artist's talk (December 13, 2020), you do not know what paradise holds so it is better to seek beauty in this earthly existence.But such a demand is not easy, as Tsimba provoked us with contradictions between the visual and the contextual. The bodies in this show were indeed beautiful but they were all nude and some were “trapped” in humiliating poses suggestive of torture and rape. A series of female figures with arms and legs spread was aligned against an outside wall of the old museum building (Fig. 7), providing a poignant reminder of colonial dominance and territorial conquest, too often associated with the abuse of women's bodies as in other conflict zones and genocides in Central Africa and elsewhere. The suffering was brought into view by a series of heads—significantly made of melted cartridges entitled “survivors”—which depicted haunting expressions of despair inspired by the fierce-looking Salampasu masks of DRC from the museum's collection (Fig. 8).3 Like many Western and African contemporary artists, Tsimba draws purely formal inspiration from these historical pieces. The borrowing does not translate the ethnographic and historical reality of these masks; it provides food for thought for more contemporary issues that preoccupy the artist.The theme of violence and genocide was similarly evoked by the life-size structure of the machete house, a piece particularly important to Tsimba as it marked an unforgettable public event in Kinshasa (Fig. 9). Unlike the artful creations on display of knives of the past that served as emblems of power and prestige or the throwing knives with their inventive and aesthetically pleasing shapes of blades that circulated as currency, the machete was, and is, a common and widely used tool. Yet, it has also become a sign of the most horrific acts of violence, associated especially with the Rwandan ethnic cleansing in 1994 of Tutsi by the Hutu. Freddy Tsimba created a complex memorial; while referencing those memories he dared to produce a metamorphosis of those killing tools, weaving the blades into surfaces that created an embracing, safe domestic space. At the inauguration of this piece in 2012 it acquired notoriety throughout Kinshasa, having been celebrated and carried on the shoulders of young people throughout the Matonge neighborhood of the city to be installed significantly at the large, public “Market of Liberty.”Religious icons provided another powerful leitmotif in Tsimba's work. A monumental representation of a crucifixion was suspended in the midst of the exhibition space (Fig. 3), but it was particularly one smaller cross made of mouse traps (Figs. 10, 6e) which revealed the artist's view of the impact and imprisonment of religious movements from domestic cults to the introduction of Christianity, and to contemporary syncretic and revival churches that are at times an invasive presence, as in the artist's neighborhood. To gain peace from ongoing chanting and drumming of one such church next door and to encourage his pious neighbors to move, Tsimba placed a sculpture of a seated headless and pregnant female with her abdomen brutally pierced by a cross in front of his compound (Fig. 11). For him, praying and waiting for heavenly bliss is an illusion. Beauty and love can be found on earth, as in the case of two angels who fell from heaven and were transformed, acquiring human gendered aspects. They discovered sex and in the process each lost a wing, thus being confined to terrestrial pleasures. The male figure nonetheless expresses regret and shame (Fig. 12) while the female seeks to leave—”but where?” said Tsimba to me. As he explained amusingly, “she scurries to pack off with her suitcase, because women always want to take everything with them”—clearly, even demoted angels (Fig. 13).Such resilience to religious imposition was also referenced by a selection of crosses of indigenous facture from the collection, recalling the Kongo kingdom's conversion to Catholicism in the early contact period. The choice in this exhibition of including representations relevant to the artist's work, depicting crucified female figures with children and ancestors, showed the stronghold of Kongolese beliefs and the capacity to reconfigure imposed religious ideas and symbols, appropriating them culturally and creating indigenous emblems of power and prestige.In the midst of this exhibition space, the paintings and early small scale bronze figures, provided a sort of respite to the emotionally overwhelming large-scale works. They also showed Tsimba's capacity to think in different three-dimensional scales and to explore the abstract in two dimensionality, distancing himself from the more specific figurative contexts and narrations. The paintings are nonetheless silhouettes and reflections of his figures (Fig. 14).It is evident that Freddy Tsimba is devoted to his Congo and continues to speak out artistically and repeatedly about the realities and political injustices of his homeland society, as if forgetting is not on his agenda. “We are being led nowhere and yet there is still little protest,” he says (Fig. 15). While all his large-scale sculptures and much of the thematic content may evoke an image of a rough individual, Freddy Tsimba is a kind, gentle soul. After being in detention in the Congo and in Brussels, having his sculptures confiscated and his works at times misinterpreted,4 he soldiers on, shrugs his shoulders, more concerned about those less fortunate than he, like the street children in Kinshasa, whom he engages to scour the streets collecting the materials for his works. That is what makes Freddy Tsimba's repertory a relevant continuing story.The exhibition was accompanied by a 41-page catalogue in French entitled Freddy Tsimba, Mabele Eleki Lola! La Terre, Plus Belle Que le Paradis by In Koli Jean Bofan with contributions by Pascal Blanchard, Henry Bundjoko and Bogumil Jewsiewicki (Brussels: Kate'Art Editions, 2020).An online artist talk (https://www.africamuseum.be/fr/discover/museumtalks/mabele_eleki_lola) with the same title as the catalogue, with Freddy Tsimba, curator In Koli Jean Bofan, and their guest Nadia Yala Kisukidi, was held on December 13, 2020 and moderated by Ayoko Mensah

Art · Art history · Diaspora · Event (particle physics) · Exhibition · Institution · Paradise · Pleasure · Political science · The arts · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Cultural Identity and Heritage · History · Law · Psychology

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