bonaventure soh bejeng ndikung - bridging the gap [african + world art]

NOMADIC SETTLERS – SETTLED NOMADS

INTRO

Ever since, man had the urge to wander, to travel, to glance beyond his familiar horizon. Literature and art are full of works thematizing this human desire for foreign places. Yet, at least as manifold are the works dealing with the opposite subject: the human need for a home, a fixed, intimate centre of life where one can settle down and find shelter and security. Being settled and nomadic wandering, the desire for foreign places and the desire for a home are two sides of man that seem to contradict each other, but still cannot be separated from each other.

Almost paradigmatically in thematizing this paradox is Romanticism in which both human desires became central motives. Many paintings and texts focused wandering and going out into the world; an example is Caspar David Friedrichs’ “Kreidefelsen auf Rügen / Chalk Cliffs on Rügen Island” (1818): three figures, standing with their backs to the viewer, looking out over the far sea. At the same time, the late 18th and early 19th centuries are politically disturbed, thus the need for a real home, the search for the original core of the world as the home of all people is a central motif of Romanticism (example: poem by J. v. Eichendorff, Mondnacht / Moon Night, 1837).

Es war, als hätt der Himmel / Die Erde still geküßt, / Daß sie im Blütenschimmer / Von ihm nun träumen müsst. / [... ] / Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus, / Flog durch die stillen Lande, / Als flöge sie nach Haus.

It was, as if the sky had / quietly kissed earth, / thus she in flowers’ shimmer / of him now must dream./ [...] and my soul spanned / her wings wide, / flew through the calm lands, / as if it flew home.

NOMADIC SETTLERS VS. SETTLED NOMADS: HOME

What is home? Where is home?

Is home the place of birth or the place of residence? The village, the city, the country, the continent where you live? Or is the spatial home not just one facet of a very complex phenomenon that is familiar to everybody, which one, however, only seldom thinks about consciously? Does not the social home, friends, family, traditions play at least a similar role?

Once you start to think about the question about “home” – apparently sounding simple at first –, there are numerous, subjective answers possible.

Having developed a settled way of life in the course of time, the major part of Europeans, e. g., most certainly would localise home as a spatial retreat in some way. A nomadic people, however, would find different answers: the whole world is home wherein you live with your group of people. Home gets a temporal connotation.

The connection to a geographical home rises strong emotions, such as love, pride, patriotism, which have been propagated in a big campaign “Du bist Deutschland / You are Germany” previous to the Football World Cup 2006. These emotions are denied to nomads, not having a special localizable home.

Yet the sense of home can change and degenerate: The (too) strong fixation on home gives rise to an excessive need of protection one’s home. Then foreigners are intruders which have to be held off and one has to defend against “enemies and threats”. Home can cause discrimination, xenophobia and racism.

The nomadic way of living usually is approached with sceptisim, but is wandering around really that foreign to today’s sedentary settlers? Travelling, relocation, commuting between abode and work – don’t they also live certain forms of nomadism?

Nomadic Settlers? Settled Nomads?

NOMADIC SETTLERS VS. SETTLED NOMADS: WANDERING / MIGRATION

By travelling and meeting different places, countries and cultures, one’s understanding of the others rises. Moving geographically out of the habitual limits of home is accompanied by spiritual delimitation. Mutual acceptance and understanding grow. Not for nothing there is a figure of speech “Reisen bildet / Travelling educates”. At once travelling also offers the chance to recognize and value one’s own home. “Only when being abroad, we learn what home means to us” (Theodor Fontane).

Historical
Migration of both people and individuals is as old as mankind. The period of Migration (German terminus is “Völkerwanderung” / literally: peoples’ wandering/migration) as an transition period from Late Antiquity to Early Middle Ages has become an established term. But as these movements of resettlement have often been accompanied by wars, destruction and material loss, the term “Migration Period” is usually associated with negative connotations.

By doing so, one ignores the facts that the migration of peoples, individuals and groups has contributed considerably to the distribution of technical knowledge and culture. How else knowledge would have spread? Exemplary are the medieval stone masons’ lodges whose masters and craftsmen moved from one construction site to another. Otherwise gothic style would not have expanded so successfully all over Europe within that short a time.

During all times, it has been especially the artists who have resided on a particular home for a finite period – which they left to follow the call of a new client, like Leonardo da Vinci went to the French court, or Peter Paul Rubens, who worked as a diplomat and artist in Spain, France and England. Often artists also moved on their own accord, like the major part of artists of early Modernism, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst or Joan Miró, who were drawn to the metropolis of arts of their days, to Paris.

Today
Today, nomadism still determines global everday life. Chinese migrant workers are travelling from one megalomaniac construction project to the next one, just to work for a starvation wage and under perilous terms on often unsecured construction sites. In Dubai, Near Eastern low-wagers work on menial jobs, they live in barracks with miserable sanitary facilities outside the city and are transported to their workplaces every day. Once somebody loses his job, he has to leave the country within 30 days.

But even in Germany, migrant labor is a burning issue (again) – there even exists a German neologism: Jobnomadismus / job nomadism. Job nomads are forced to travel after work and money. They leave their families, their social life, their intimate surroundings. Not always does this happen voluntarily.

Nomadic Settlers? Settled Nomads?

EXHIBITION: NOMADIC SETTLERS – SETTLED NOMADS

The group exhibition Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads is part of an exhibit triptych dealing with the complex theme of the human sense of home and its manifold facets. Part 1 already took take place in autumn 2008: This world is not my home in Berlin, part 2 Consciences and Frontiers is to come soon.

The temporal and local difference offers the opportunity of a scene change which enables new perspectives on the subject. Thus, raised questions can be picked up again, and be thought about anew. Invited are young international artists, some of whom have already participated in the first parts, some of whom are newly taken on board. While the first group of artists can develop their approach to the subject, the new artists contribute new impulses and perspectives. A process of communication between artists and art works, between own and foreign, old and new starts in which the visitors of the exhibition actively take part.

Artists
Six international artists are invited to deal with this paradoxical trait of man, with his longing for foreign places and his desire of home. They approach questions this complex topic poses – global problems, the situation in their own country, their personal way of living, … – and with the means of art, they formulate their individual perspectives, their personal comment.

The aim is not to find answers, but to pose questions, to make aware of problems, to cause consideration.

The invited artists of different nationalities are living and working all over the world. They work with several mediums: photography, painting, installation, performance, sculpture. The visitors of the exhibition will have the chance to get to know innovative young artists and to gain manifold insight in an exciting and still burning subject through the art works.

Curators
The team of 2 young curators Simone Kraft and Bonaventure S. B. Ndikung have cooperated with young and innovative artists from all over the world. Both of them also personify the Nomadic Settlers – Settled Nomads themselves, as their CVs have led them to several places worldwide to study and work there.

FRONTIERS OF OUR I

Our psycho-social existence has been so very much attuned to boundaries and differences within and without our I. Not only do we have the physical boundary of the skin, which separates our interior from the exterior but also have we built virtual frontiers within ourselves as well as non-virtual barriers without ourselves.

Internal barriers
Emotional difficulties are known to put our internal unity asunder. The effects might range over many shades from discomfort, non-productivity to aggression, which are further reflected to our environment in the form of fear, shame, violence etc. Another common internal barrier, of which the causes and courses are as well multiple, is a personality conflict. This not only leads to a swanking of humours… from melancholic, sanguine, choleric to phlegmatic but expresses itself further as frustration, intimidation, societal misfit, unreliability etc and thus a personality complex of the napoleonic order as viewed by Alfred Adler or of the narcissistic order as defined by Erich Fromm or Sigmund Freud. These all culminate to other grave consequences that might build a bridge to external barriers like wars, racism, and colonisation.

External barriers
Apart from building boundaries between countries, tribes and races, we misuse the internal difficulties and complexes of our I as masks to justify our prejudices and misconceptions. As much as Iuvenalis’ “Mens sana in corpore sano” is of validity, so too is “an unhealthy esprit in an unhealthy body” valid and this resonates in the immediate environment as frontiers of all kinds. Ideological debates about Turkish women wearing headscarves or not, if Africans rob Germans of their jobs and women, if all Arabs are sympathisers of Al-Qaida, if Poles rob Germans of their cars and jobs, if juvenile delinquent Germans of foreign origin should be deported, if the black sheep in Switzerland are responsible for >70% of rapes and other criminal offences, if some human beings are superior to others just because of the colour of their skin, etc are just a few of these external barriers that arise from our deep-rooted inner disruption.

Exhibition
This exhibition toils on very subjective views of these internal and external boundaries. It focuses on mankind’s ignorance and arrogance towards his/her kind and nature, on the masks we all carry around to compensate for our inner rupture, on how we reduce our existence to our temperaments, on consequences of egoism, victimisation and exploitation, as well as on ART.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

THIS 'WORLD' IS NOT MY 'HOME'

It sounds like a tautology, as we usually associate our home to our world and vice versa. The phrase “this is my world” is often used as a reference to the four walls that define our home, our country or on a larger scale, a continent. Yet, it also has a contradictory connotation, as this world is actually a habitat to a wide variety of living beings and umbrella to our many small homes.

Identification
The need to confine our own living space harbours sentiments like pride, patriotism and belonging. Thus, a need for identification. This concept of identification is defined by languages or traditions of a place, where we were born, grew up or for some reason, feel particularly, physically and/or sentimentally affiliated to. The feeling of belonging to or owning a world is on the other side of the coin, accompanied by a habit of protection, which expresses itself in different ways; e.g., the tendency of xenophobia, which comes from the Greek “xenos”- foreigner and “phobos”-fear, arises as a protective measure to secure our base. This could lead to contempt to all that is strange and that might intrude our space. So is the case with racism, when the common denominator is colour of the skin, eye or hair, bringing about reproaches to otherness and “métissage”. The yearn to create small worlds for ourselves, to feel at ‘home’, does not only meet with our social needs but also resonates to seclusion and segregation.

Relationship
Our relationship to the world can be likened to a subject-object relationship, in which the subject perpetually consumes the object. While being the subjects and acting as ‘masters’ of the world, we put less value on respect towards other living beings, who share the same environment as we do. This can be illustrated by the following examples: the building of dams to provide us with energy, but also leads to the displacement and vitiation of nature; the deforestation to supply us with wood is still a disaster to natural habitats of millions of other living beings; the ecosystem is still afflicted by oil spills for our energy needs; the numerous scientific trials on animals for our cosmetics and medicines; And how are we yet to cope with our weaponry of mass destruction? If this world is our home, how can we walk in it without considering the scars we leave behind? If this world is our home, how can we be so nonchalant to other co-inhabitants of this home?

Exhibition
This group exhibition invites artists of diverse nationalities to pose questions, without an immediate urge for answers. It beckons artists to express themselves on issues such as togetherness, identification, phobia, nature or in short our psycho-social conditions. An appropriate line from a gospel hymn says: “this world is not my home, I am just passing through”.

Curator: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung Co-organiser: Fong Ponto, Silvio Streddi Telefon (Germany): 004917628781966 Telefon (France): 0033685148860 Email: ndikungen@gmx.de www.soh-bonny.com http://www.artou.de/magazine/berichte-thisworldisnotmyhome.html

CONSUME SOCIETY – CONSUMED SOCIETY
(KONSUMGESELLSCHAFT – KONSUMIERTE GESELLSCHAFT)

Wir befinden uns in einer 3,4 Millionen-Metropole, Berlin. Eine Gesellschaft mit einer Hülle und Fülle an Kultur und Geschichte und auch ein Knotenpunkt der Medien, Politik, Wirtschaft und vor allem der Kunst, Kultur und den Menschen aus aller Welt.

Metropolen sind meist von dieser Vielfalt gesegnet aber diese Vielfalt, um das Leben des modernen Menschen bequem zu gestalten, hat als Begleiterscheinung, die logische Folgerung: Konsum. Unter Konsum wird in der Volkswirtschaftslehre der Erwerb oder Verbrauch von Waren (Langenscheidts) zur Befriedigung persönlicher Bedürfnisse verstanden. Diese Bedürfnisse, die durch den Konsum gestillt werden sollen, reichen von den Grundbedürfnissen nach Maslow: [1) körperliche Grundbedürfnisse z.B Atmung und Essen; 2)Sicherheit z.B. Unterkunft und Gesundheit; 3)Soziale Beziehungen z.B. Freundeskreis und Liebe] (A.H. Maslov, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50 (1943):370- 96.) bis zum Luxus [Verhaltensweisen, Aufwendungen oder Ausstattungen, welche über das übliche Maß hinausgehen, die für einen großen Teil einer Bezugsgruppe zwar erstrebenswert sind, aber nicht erreichbar]. Natürlich funktioniert Konsum gemäß den wirtschaftlichen Prinzipien der „Nachfrage und Angebot“, was als Motor jeder Gesellschaft heutzutage gilt.

Dass Konsum oft eine negative Conotation hat, liegt nicht nur an der Tendenz des übersteigerten Konsumverhaltens unserer Gesellschaft (Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975), Freibeuterschriften. Die Zerstörung der Kultur des Einzelnen durch die Konsumgesellschaft, Berlin 1975) sondern auch an der Gefahr selbst von Konsum konsumiert zu werden. Dieses Phänomen wird bei den Konsumkritikern als „Affluenza“ (Influenza + Affluence) bezeichnet, eine Art Überflusskrankheit mit Symptomen wie Schulden, Unmengen an Müll, Angstzuständen, Gefühlen der Entfremdung und Verzweiflung, Abhängigkeit oder auch Bolemie etc. Ferner funktioniert Konsum auch nach dem Prinzip des Ausbeutens, z.B. wenn einer auf Kosten eines anderen konsumiert (z.B. Diebstahl oder politischer Mißbrauch). Trotzdem leben wir in einer Zeit, in der Konsum unabdingbar ist, da wir einen fast unersättlichen Hunger nach Mode, Fernsehen, Kunst, Großraum, Macht, Stolz, Ruf, Geld, Einfluß, Liebe etc. haben und so mehr oder weniger vom Konsum konsumiert worden sind. So kann Konsum als eine Art nicht-demokratisches Phänomen, das uns regiert, beschrieben werden.

Diese Ausstellung lädt zehn internationale Künstler mit verschiedenen Schwerpunkten (Malerei, Photographie, Installation, Perfomance) ein, ihre Eindrücke zu dem Thema „Consume society – consumed society“ darzustellen. Das Vorhaben der Ausstellung ist nicht eine Bühne zur Kritik des Konsums anzubieten sondern ein Podium zu offerieren, auf dem Künstler und „Nicht-Künstler“ sich mit dem Thema Konsum auseinandersetzen können und über „Konsum“ und „konsumiert werden“ als zwei Seiten derselben Münze nachdenken können.

Eingeladen sind folgende Künstler: