Behind the vibrant modernity of Africa lays the mystic powers of vodoo, masks, body art and ancient rituals for the better of the worse. It is everywhere but nowhere to be seen, but something in my roots connects me with the energy of the continent.
This series is a modern expression of the forces of nature and spirits, conveying the unspeakable with raw materials that only Africans use in tribal arts such as wool, bits and pieces of modern trash and traditional fabrics used in costumes and symbols of mystic power.
It is yet another “métissage” between old and new, tradition and modernity, East and West that constitue my torn identity.
Nyiragongo, the divinity volcano
I came across a series of engravings representing a couple of their paternal ancestors, I decided to do crossbreeding backwards. I Africanized this pot-bellied bourgeois and his melancholy wife. Our ancestors had to meet, they who could not even conceive that their blood would one day be mixed with that of the fierce Queen Zinga of the Congo.
I want my children to be proud of this colorful heritage. It is the demonstration that humans are barely getting to know each other. That the world is not just white and black. Our ancestors are the colors of the artist’s palette. The colors of which the divine breath makes the unique work that each of us is. But they also link us to the dawn of time. To this continuity of human life that started from somewhere in Africa, has strayed into cold and distant lands where only forests are black to meet again a few million years on the banks of the Congo River. We are the soul of the world, like the trees and stones that Africans worship as well as the gods.
I wondered, delicately putting tribal paintings on the faces of these somewhat stiff ancestors, what they thought. I think they were laughing looking at each other. All the ancestors of the world are benevolent. So I poured a little beer on the floor for their health, as it is in the lands of my ancestors.