Next month, Renzo Martens,
along with his wife, son and baby daughter, are going to live in
eastern Congo so he can continue his five-year plan to gentrify the
jungle. The 41-year-old Dutch artist is trying to create an arts scene
in one of the most impoverished parts of the world.
It sounds like a sick joke. “It’s not,” Martens tells me when we meet
in London. “I mean, it’s funny to call your programme a central African
gentrification programme, but I’m basically putting a white cube in the
forest to see what it does.”
There’s a little more to it than that. Martens is artistic director of an outfit called the Institute for Human Activities,
which has helped artists from Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, establish a critical curriculum akin to a
foundation arts course for plantation workers. The Congolese Plantation
Workers Art League has now started to organise exhibitions of
self-portraits. At workshops, workers’ children drew what they imagined
their futures would be. “Most of these kids had never had a pencil in
their hands before,” he says.
Some critics have compared Martens to Klaus Kinski,
the German actor who – in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo – built an
opera house in the Amazon rainforest. There are parallels. “I think this
will be central Africa’s most extravagant and beautiful arts centre,”
says Martens. Perhaps in the future, he muses, Congolese artists will
sip cappuccinos in the jungle while discussing, say, critical strategies
in contemporary art practice, just as they do in Shoreditch and
Brooklyn.
Why is he doing this? “Clearly these people can’t live off plantation
labour. But I think they can live off critical engagement with
plantation labour.” By which he means workers making saleable art
expressing their feelings about their lives. As we talk, Martens offers
me a chocolate head, a reproduction of a self-portrait by a plantation
worker. The original was made from river clay in eastern Congo. That
clay bust was scanned, a 3D digital print was then used to make a mould
into which chocolate was poured in Belgium. Some of the cocoa used came
from the artist’s plantation.
Nibbling a chocolate ear, I tell Martens I feel awkward, even
implicated in a kind of economic cannibalism. “Maybe you feel that
you’re eating the soul of that person,” he replies, laughing at my
compunctions. “But you’ve been eating it all along, so don’t worry.”
Part of the Artes Mundi exhibition with Martens’s chocolate sculptures in Cardiff.
This has long been the artist’s concern: we in the west have been consuming Africa
and Africans for centuries, sometimes titillated by our reactions of
compassion, guilt and shame. Not only do we pay, say, Congolese workers
pitiful salaries ($1 a day, Martens tells me, is the norm on palm oil
plantations) to supply us with cocoa, rubber, coltan, or diamonds. But
also, he says, poverty has itself become Africa’s leading export
product, and one from which Europeans and Americans profit – images of
such suffering accumulating cultural capital in the old centres of
empire, rather than in the places they are supposed to critique.
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In 2008, Martens made a film about these inequalities called Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty.
Wearing a silly straw hat, he appears as himself, self-consciously
performing “an artist on a mission”. The latest white man voyaging to
the Conradian heart of darkness, Martens journeys into the jungle,
accompanied by Congolese men carrying mysterious crates. Arriving in a
village, he opens the crates to reveal neon signs. He straps them to
bamboo frames, plugs the lights into a generator and turns them on. The
words “Enjoy Poverty” shine out electric blue as locals dance in seeming
celebration. Martens is a godless missionary come to teach the natives
capitalism’s harsh gospel: how to monetise their poverty.
Accordingly, we see him coach village photographers, who hitherto
have been taking happy pictures of locals at birthday parties, to sell
images of starvation and death. But the Congolese photographers’
pictures of their neighbours’ malnourished children and dead babies
don’t meet the demand from European and American media outlets as well
as those by western photojournalists.
Still, if he was useless at helping Africans, Martens was brilliant
at helping himself. He left Africa after two years with a film that was
seen and discussed by western aid workers, NGO functionaries, academics,
artists and critics. In 2013 he became a Yale World Fellow; in 2014
he’s been shortlisted for the £40,000 Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s most
lucrative art competition.
But the film was still a failure, he says. “However critical it is of
labour conditions in Congo, in the end it only improved labour
conditions in Berlin’s Mitte and in New York’s Lower East Side. Because
that’s where people see it, talk about it, write pieces about it -
whether for or against doesn’t really matter.”
Martens has so far made two films. The first, called Episode 1,
was made in 2000 in the Chechen war zone. As women in headscarves
queued for aid packages in bombed-out Grozny, Martens asked them: “What
do you think of me?” The point was that those doing the looking in the
war zones were probably more interested in their own image, lives and
loves than those of the suffering people whom they’d ostensibly come to
depict. Like Enjoy Poverty, the film was about “its own conditions and
dependencies and financial structures”. All art since the early 1900s,
he argues, has become self-referential, and his films follow that
tradition: “My job is to highlight the codes by which we live,
including, in this case, what is watched by whom and for which agenda.”
Perhaps Martens should give up his art if he believes this, since it
is premised on exploitation. He thinks not. “You can’t afford to be
critical and then leave the real effects of art to real-estate investors
and politicians.”
Hence Martens’s return to eastern Congo in 2012 with another idea of
how to make plantation workers rich. Following American urban studies
theorist Richard Florida,
who has written about how art can revive depressed areas, Martens
established his gentrification project. He thinks the Institute for
Human Activities is tapping into a tradition in African art that can be
marketed overseas. “Their work inspired the entire European avant garde –
Picasso, Matisse – and that was great, but locally many of the pieces
were destroyed because they were heretic[al] or something. So art
production doesn’t play an active role in society any more, I would
say.” Maybe it will. Consider the chocolate head I’ve been eating. “We
can sell these for £40 a piece, they cost maybe £2 or £3 – so £37
profit.” The IHA has only sold 10 so far, but Martens hopes they will be
sold on a much bigger scale through western department stores.
Renzo Martens’s workshop in Congo, before it was evicted. Photograph: Institute for Human Activities
Only one problem. Earlier this year, Martens and the IHA were evicted
from the plantation where they have been operating by Feronia, the
Canadian firm who bought the business from Unilever in 2008. “We’re in
exile, at an undisclosed location.” Feronia, Martens tells me, is
supported by the British bank CDC. Both, he believes, are worried about
what his project means for their business models.
He hopes they will allow him to return, but irrespective of what they
decide, in January Martens is going back to pursue jungle
gentrification, backed by European galleries, museums and chocolate
producers. He’s already planned a conference at which the celebrated Cameroonian postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe
will speak; he’s brokering links with galleries, such as the Van
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, so there will be temporary exhibits of
contemporary western artworks. “It’ll be the same sort of art you’d see
at the Unilever series at Tate Modern,” he says. He’s also planning a
residency programme for western artists. “If you really want to come to
terms with the role of art in society, this is the place to see it – not
hopping between New York and Berlin.” Eventually, with western art
world grants and – fingers crossed – prize money, there will be a white
cube of a gallery, just like the ones in western art capitals. “Except
it will be made of bamboo,” he says.
Why is he doing all this? “I’m not a revolutionary and I’m not
particularly close to these plantation workers. I just try to openly,
overtly and consciously perform the role God has for me.”
I think he may joking about God, but not about his hopes for Congo’s
new art scene. “It’s ridiculous that they’re doing this manual labour
when they have so much to teach us about all the changes we’re going to
go through. If it’s true that we’re going to have climate change and
imploding social democracy and growing inequality, and I guess it is,
then they know all about it. They’re years ahead of us.”
• Renzo Martens is one of 10 shortlisted
artists for the Artes Mundi 6 prize. The prize show is at National
Museum Cardiff, Chapter Cardiff and Ffotogallery, Wales, until 22
February. Details: artesmundi.org
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