ENGLISH


A conversation between Okwui Enwezor and Philippe Pirotte

Philippe Pirotte: Concerning the state of the visual arts in what has been deemed ‘the actual globalized stance’, you are often stressing on the creation of different discursive sites, to acknowledge the circulation and reception of differing forms of exhibition practices. Shouldn’t we rather talk about differing artistic practices and isn’t the nature of art and exhibition making essentially visualizing things?

Okwui Enwezor: In the tendencies we see in contemporary art, one can say, there is definitely the visual dimension and there is the discursive dimension; the ‘non-visual’. This does not mean that it is not visual at all or cannot be visualized, but its originary impetus is not visual. And this is not about certain kinds of classical methodologies of old conceptual art - this is not what I am talking about. It means that it is an operation that seeks to incarnate and to produce the very specific conditions within which the parameters of discourse could be taken on in a range of different platforms.

PHP: Do you mean the idea of the platforms for Documenta?

OE: The idea of the platforms, I think it is very clear. Again, one of the things that I feel compelled to say is that first and foremost - and this has been an ongoing discussion for the last two decades - there is a very clear epistemological crisis when it comes to the ways in which we deal with visual arts. We are not going to simply work on the notion that the world is now bigger so we need to add more ‘things’, and that we need to bring or to ‘rescue’ more artists from the margins, and sort of bring them in to the center. That is uncritical, that is not generating new processes of reflexivity. We want to really look at the contradictions of that kind of attitude or method. So the platforms in the first place want to answer a very basic question about an institutional exhibition like Documenta. What does an exhibition produce? I would like to believe that, whether it is visual arts, or otherwise, that an exhibition is specifically that place where a range of knowledges are produced. That is what I believe what Documenta XI is concerned too; this range, this broader area of knowledge production of which the contemporary visual arts is a very important one. But to do so, to be able to speak about this transitional period we are currently working in, we have to explore its conditions. How do we enact the rather difficult task of understanding the mechanisms of that play, in the ways in which cultural production or artistic production upon times are at war or in conflict with the movements of the broader tendencies of civil society. So the platforms were designed as that kind of moment where we could say very clearly that this is not the period where we immerse ourselves in ambiguity. We wanted to use a very principal research as a moment where we could enact that discursive relationship. And therefore that what we would like to see the platforms are is as ‘thinking spaces’. They are spaces that allow us to probe, albeit in a very small concentrated way, the conditions of the present global transition. You cannot do that simply by visualizing it. You really have to create the conditions for the understanding of what these processes are and how the participants of all kinds of critical productions tie into that or deviate from that. And therefore we see the locus of our work as that of ‘transparent research’. This very transparency in itself is about the production of information, the production of ideas. In this sense the platforms are in many ways a bonus to Documenta, because Documenta as an exhibition is not going to be any smaller, but I am often skeptical about the idea that you invite a philosopher to contribute a catalogue-text to an exhibition.

PHP: So you want to disconnect the discursive research from the exhibition; but as you mentioned in different statements, you meant the platforms as a research towards the exhibition…

OE: Towards the exhibition, yes, towards what it is Documenta…

PHP: But you distance the visual exhibition from the discourse?

OE: Well, it will not be distanced I think. The question we were very suddenly confronted with was the following one: what are the mechanisms for, or what could be the development of a methodology for how you produce a large-scale international exhibition that is deeply implicated within the logic of global capitalism. We cannot just merely logically critique of it, because I think that would be a little bit contradictory, we cannot just merely logic critique it and say “oh! Our Documenta will not be that”, because it inevitably is. But we need to use this as an opportunity. When we did the platform in New Delhi, we addressed a question that we clearly believe of to be one of an international and global scope: which is ‘Experiments with truth and the processes of truth and reconciliation’. For me this is one of the central and key issues that many societies are confronting today. How to live with difference, how to live with one another, and how to make or create a possible space. And this is indeed a utopian project, this idea of reconciliation. How to create a space where the work of the imagination, where difference could be an asset rather than whatever. But, what was remarkable? In New Delhi it turned into a very local debate, and so the quality of the discussions generated in New Delhi was for me particularly poignant, simply because it inverted the logic of the idea that we always export ideas from the south to the north. So it is really to deterritorialize this tendency of amassing more knowledge where there is already an excess and surplus of information. So we rather wanted to depart from that, maybe approach it from a different perspective. Let Documenta be a generator or to be a catalyst for new ways of really relating exhibitions to other places, rather than simply just the question of exporting work and ideas into the structure of the mega-exhibition.

PHP: You were talking about transparency, for example in a platform dealing with reconciliation and truth, but on the other hand you have visual art, which is in itself not necessarily dealing with truth or which can be highly ambiguous. How do you connect both aspects?

OE: I don’t think there is really a need to connect that. I think that it is very clear that Documenta XI has five stages, platform 1,2,3,4 and 5. One was dedicated to exploring the notions of ‘Democracy Unrealized’: to look at the very limits of the liberal democratic institutional sphere and how to reinvent this very notion; to see if there is a possibility to reinvent, to question or to analyze it. The second platform obviously deals with this very modest idea of experiments with truth, the process or notion of ‘transitional justice’. This notion came into being in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet-Union. Here are societies completely at drift; here are regimes that are now deformed, under which terrible crimes were committed. But the fact that this states have disappeared, does that mean that crimes committed under them are no longer there?
From the very notion of international jurisdiction that supersedes national sovereignty we go to the more difficult questions of issues of genocide, issues of gross human race violation, so many different questions like the post-apartheid moment… What does it enact in the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa? How do we confront the specters of this past, rather than just simply giving lip service and make an exhibition and call it ‘After the wall’.
And of course in New Delhi we didn’t just invite philosophers and psycho-analysts or theorists of juridical sciences and so on, we invited some filmmakers and artists, because it was very clear that these strategies are already very much contained in the work of certain artists. For example when we talk about ‘truth and reconciliation’ it might be interesting to ask why does Daniel Liebeskinds Jewish Museum seem such an important cultural icon? Or Rachel Whitereads monument in Vienna? Why are artists and architects and so on persistently called to service to give and produce an iconography for reconciliation?

PHP: But there are other tendencies too. I would not really talk about iconography, but don’t you think there are artistic strategies with a more perverse aim in the context of truth and transparency. They are already taking in account the ambiguous nature of art and the misunderstandings that go with it. These misunderstandings maybe produce another kind of knowledge…

OE: Well, I see that what I spoke about as a kind of cynical instrumentalization of art. And this cynical part being, that when artists are called to service for this kind of exercises, it comes I believe from the supposition that art has some ‘healing’ qualities about it, and this is a very cynical approach. I think this is a terrible way to instrumentalize the work of the artist, because what it does, is that it subtends the idea of a kind of critical operation, in which there is no possibility for doubt, there is no possibility for ambiguity. There is no possibility at all because a monument is precisely that moment in which the real has to be enacted in the service of the consecration of history and memory, but through symbolic expression. It is symbolized within this notion. And then it calls into question another set of values and issues. How is a monument constituted within the domain of the public? And what is the public? I think what we wanted to do is to give utterance to a critique of that. We wanted to be able to work against the grain of the received supposition that there could be such a thing as truth and reconciliation – I am not saying there couldn’t be – but I think that it is much more complex and complicated than raising monuments.
But let me just simply go back to your question about how these things find visual form. I am not interested in the illustration of these aspects. What I am interested in is the fact that when Documenta XI finally opens, that we can say, “here are the works that we have produced”. We have not spent five years running in and out of studios; this is not of interest to me. I am interested in the present circumstances of the global transition we were talking about. To really look at the conditions out of which culture is produced, to look at the processes of culture rather than at the places were the productions of culture come to rest, which is the institution. I am much more interested in exploring the incommensurable gaps that exist between our experience of artistic products and the ways they are really emphasized as autonomous vehicles of some kind of individual imagination. I don’t believe this is true, that it can only be seen in this kind of autonomous sphere.

PHP: You are stressing a lot on the idea of trying to define artistic practices within an expanded cultural field

OE: Yes

PHP: But maybe there is a crisis, in the sense that artists are trying to find their own domain. Do you still see the artistic as a different domain? Because for Documenta you are not only going to look at what is produced within this artistic field but also to other things, possibly more documentary elements. But I think that could provoke a lot of misunderstanding. How are you going to connect that in the exhibition?

OE: I don’t see a necessity to connect because they are already connected. We are simply saying very clearly, going back to this notion of what constitutes this transparency of our research, that to make an exhibition of the scale of Documenta, is to have the possibility to produce some kind of public sphere. And what do you put inside that public sphere? What are the questions, what are the debates that you want to see enacted inside that public sphere? And I believe that very simply the connection is a rather straightforward one. In the period that Documenta has been working, we have an interesting range of different issues and here are the ways that we have approached them; and here are the works we are offering our public in a range of different possibilities. Each of the platforms constitutes a very specific project. They are available on the web, they are open to the public free of charge and they are going to be edited as volumes that not only are going to be seen in the context of the exhibition but in the context of a broader intellectual discourse. So for us we are not merely appropriating the idea of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, we inhabit this space of interdisciplinarity. And we are not saying that Immanuel Wallersteins lecture equals the visual representation by mr. B or C in the exhibition, but to see the exhibition or the work of the artist in a very complex intellectual relationship, albeit with different tools and intentions or towards a different orientation.

PHP: So in fact it makes a difference with what Catherine David did. She tried to include the web-projects or the discourse program into the exhibition, which was in fact very demanding or even exhausting, because those things are not very ‘exhibitable’.

OE: And this is where we go back to the notion of discourse; that there are two domains I believe that contemporary art could occupy. It could occupy the domain of the visual, what we call the retinal and it can occupy the domain of discourse. And I think you cannot just exhibit ideas, just like that, but that does not mean that there is no ‘jouissance’ even if you will, in working with ideas. And I think that Catherines principle proposition was very basic: that it is not possible to disconnect the idea from the production. And I think this was the sheer genius of her exhibition. Of course it was exhausting, but what is important, I believe that she was trying to say - and what we are also trying to say - is that this are not simply commodities for consumption. You need to devote yourself. You have to make a commitment. And you choose, nobody is saying you must come. You have to choose. If you see, even in the most sophisticated museums with the greatest art and so on, there is a tinge of bad faith in the ways that they relate to audiences. What they show to audiences is the expected; the audiences’ notion of what great art is, which is something that is already been sanctioned by official culture. This may be fantastic. Every so often I like to walk into so-called classical museums. There is a comfort in the place, it’s a place that is familiar, a place that gives me the possibility to think about the majesty of certain ideas that are connected to visual art. I think that’s great but this cannot be the task of Documenta. Exhibitions like that have to be completely composite spaces and they have to be spaces that generate new possibilities for artists, for the institution and for ideas. It has to be a machine for thinking, a machine for production of new possibilities for artists and other people. It has to be a place to find the relationship of the audience to what it is that they are seeing. For Documenta XI, it is a range of knowledge that we are generating, let that be the products that we are generating, the ideas and the books and so on. I think for me it is simply boring, to make people travel all the way to Kassel and all we give them is just an exhibition. I am not saying that is not what people want and in fact we are going to do that because Documenta XI, the exhibition, which is platform 5, is not going to be any smaller than previous Documentas. We are working very hard in commissioning new works and this also has an element of risk in it but we want to do that. I think it is very clear that when the exhibition opens next year that it will have a clear visual dimension, but does it necessarily work according to the blueprint of the different platforms, no. I think that these five platforms represent a constellation of domains that establish the field that Documenta XI wants to create. And that field has a visual logic and it also has an intellectual philosophical, a theoretical logic behind it.

PHP: How can an artist elaborate a kind of artwork, an oeuvre, which has a critical potential within this challenge of a very broad, all manifest visual culture? In her new book, ‘A voyage on the North Sea’ Art in the age of the post-medium condition, Rosalind Krauss goes back to the idea of the medium, almost as a kind self-marginalisation of the artwork from this complete “image-permeation of social and daily life.” She tries to warn us for the risks of an art that mimics the way visual culture functions in the social field because…

OE: It can withdraw…

PHP: Yes, and she advances the idea of an investment in the ‘differential’ specificities of a medium…

OE: Well I think that has always been there. We cannot turn a painting into a picture. It is a painting; it’s not just an image, and so on… And I think that this argument is as old time itself, and she has been one of the great people who have really made a very strong critical case, for such approaches to visual art. However I don’t completely agree. I think that we have to be very clear and specific in which context such arguments are being proposed. When you are able to work for long term in an institution such as a museum that collects and presents art on an ongoing basis, you can follow this. They can create their space for artists. But this notion of medium-specificity should not also be a way to go sequester artists in some kind of sanctuary where the art suddenly is protected. The very fact is very clear. Artists today indeed are interested not only in this social sphere, they’re also interested in the political sphere, they’re also interested in the economic sphere… Nonetheless, they try to utilize whatever tools or technologies allowing them the possibilities to explicate some of these issues. But this lapse to medium-specificity is also the same kind of denial to argue against science-specificity. You know, science-specificity conceptually could be interesting, medium-specificity conceptually is interesting, but we know that when you put art in any kind of public space, whatever you make of it, it is already deeply inscribed in a social space…

PHP: …it is highly mediated…

OE: Yeah it’s already mediated, by the relationships of the institution, by the baggage and the historical viewpoint that the viewers bring to it. And you cannot become fundamentalist about this and say this is only the, this is how to generate a kind of immunity for art.

PHP: But formulated differently, some art needs a kind of slow attention, which is very difficult when it is highly mediated…

OE: But I think this is more the question of the specific curatorial approach, for me this is a question of how you display art. It is not how one makes an exhibition, I really believe this, it is more a question of how you display art, because if I am looking at communities that do not have this, that have this ‘non-visual visual’ sense of production, how do I talk to them? Do I say, well if you don’t paint, if you don’t have medium-specificity…

PHP: …no, no, that’s not what…

OE: …well I am just using this as… I am trying not to be reductive here. But I think this is important, Krauss’ question is a very important one, it is important for several reasons, that is for the reasons of how do we make an exhibition today and what forms of knowledge an exhibition generates.

PHP: But there is the danger that exhibitions become a mere illustration of a supposed idea of a globalization of the image. That was the kind of the thing she was very suspicious about.

OE: Well I think that one can also be very suspicious about her approach. The mere invocation of some of these questions does not mean that they have no value as a way of explore these questions. I don’t think that one can just dismiss the other side of it.

PHP: But you mentioned the danger yourself that the proliferations of the biennials and a lot of the art shown at those biennials become the illustration of a capital driven globalization. I think that Documenta will have to position itself towards that.

OE: This is precisely our critique. To sort of distance it from this high fever pitch that some people are driven in to some anticipation of a broad spectacular staging of the visual arts with no questions, with no possibilities of recuperating old models of reflexivity, vis-a-vis an exhibition. And I really think we want to recuperate some of these things, I think we really want to return back to what is proper to it. And that is to really give it a space of intensity, of concentration, of the possibility again to enact disjunctive, to really not follow the paths. For us we are only interested in artists really generating questions for us. And the possibilities of disagreeing with the parameters that were already established. And therefore to lead us in to deeper reflection of the conditions of not only the presentation of art but of the conditions of its production. We can not pretend that political or globalist questions have no impact on what artists are doing. For me in Dakar I can not begin to tell you, when I see a group of artists saying: “my god, our work as painters no longer makes sense anymore in our local spaces. We are not reaching the people we want to reach; we are completely disconnected. Our language is not sufficient enough. We want to find new tools to deal with some of these questions”. That says something to me, and that is coming from the artists themselves. We really have to be attentive to some of these questions.

PHP: I would like to connect this to an aesthetical question. You once mentioned in a text in the catalogue accompanying the Global Conceptualism exhibition that in Africa artists are ritualizing the experience of an artwork, in the sense that artworks as autonomous signifiers are permanently made contingent. The object is over and over again displaced through a strategy of mediation via language. There is a greater importance attached to non-visual codes and performative actions. This in contradiction with the western tradition were the finale of an artwork is more the sublimation in an exhibition. Is Documenta going to deal with this kind of questions? Although this would challenge the mechanism of exhibiting, Documenta remains an exhibition. How do you bring that into it? Even with certain traditions of painting this could raise difficulties. Some painting in Africa is indeed paradoxically antiperceptual, meant to be discussed in the streets. I am especially thinking about the now highly appreciated series on the History of Zaire (Congo) by Thsibumba Kanda-Matulu.

OE: The paintings you are talking about are already contained insofar as the medium is concerned but not insofar as what it enacts and that is how to reinscribe or to articulate the dimension of popular memory in the space of visual representation. This kind of move in and out of the frame in itself is very important. Well I think that for Kassel - obviously it is too early to say it - but we are willing to confront these questions. And that is why we wanted to set up this very basic parameter: that is ‘what is discourse and non-visual and yet very important and proper to the understanding of the conditions of an exhibition like Documenta?’ And then we go to the very question ‘what is an exhibition and how do artworks or images of different types function in such a space? How do you make such a space a place where artworks also find the same possibility of not only inscribing themselves within the already clearly understood logic of the institutional sphere, but how do they depart from that and yet bring the institutional sphere something more?’ It is a challenge. Catherine tried to do that with her 100-days program, and Beuys tried to do it with his Office of Social Democracy in 1972. But I think that we are in a period now that is very ambiguous; it is not so clear. I would go to Venice and a lot of Biennials in the last couple of years and suddenly I find myself completely unsatisfied because they are almost always meaningless. I have seen a range of exhibitions made by MOMA, about their collection, and there again, great individual pieces, but really meaningless as exhibitions.

PHP: You once mentioned the fact that with exhibition-making it is very important to contextualize an exhibition within its history, in narratives of the past. What are you going to do in the case of the history Documenta?

OE: Well, I think that when you make a Documenta, it already means that you are responding to the historical specificity of the institution itself. And that is to say that each Documenta has always brought to his given in a time, a range of questions, which for me naturally stands as the longer narrative of what Documenta as an institution has tried to demonstrate in the last 50 years. That is the fact that an exhibtion like Docuumenta has the possibility of generating a range of new positions and relationships that audiences have to contemporary art and that artists have to their own disciplinary procedures and so on. Let me just simply say that I see Documenta as really existing in 3 different periods. And this is one way that one can begin to approach this contextualisation. I haven’t really said that the exhibition has to be contextualised in the narratives of the past but that there are two ways of making exhibitions. Given the kind of historical shifts in the discourse of modernity and contemporary art that we have, you can work within the givens of an exhibition by curating it within ‘art history’. And that art history has already a clearly circumscribed system; understanding of what important visual contributions are and what is not important and what needs to be further explicated when it is admitted. The other, and I think it is a challenge for curators like myself, who are not really only interested in the grand narrative of art history and that is the possibility of making an exhibition or curating within culture. And that is not to say that you are not really looking at artistic practices. Curating within culture is a much messier affair. And that means that you really have to contend with a range of paradigm shifts and those are caught not only in the specialization of a range of object-relations in the exhibitional complex, but also understanding the histories of such productions and so on.
So for Documenta these three parts, three periods to my thinking; the first period I call the Arnold Bode years which is the years that Arnold Bode, the founder of Documenta, curated or was highly involved with the organization, i.e. Documenta 1 to 4. And then there is for me the second period of Documenta, this I call Documenta’s return of the questions of the Neo avant-garde. And this also brings up the very question of what I call the subjectivity of the curator. And I think it was very clear that with Arnold Bode it was more of kind of scientific thing; that there is a hierarchy of artistic excellence and you work from that base from top to bottom or from bottom to top….

PHP …But he had the idea that a Documenta should not be a ‘Lernort’. He also wanted to depoliticize it. Catherine David and you are stressing on the production of knowledge, but what with the connection with Germany? Bode had the strategy of eradicating everything, even almost all the painters of the Neue Sachligkeit, because they were directly connecting to the specificities of this German historical problem.
Are you going to deal with that or has Documenta survived itself in a way?

OE: Well I think I already partly answered to that question. That is why I made the distinction with the three different parts. The Bode years where deeply inscribed in the postwar anxieties of Germany and also the anxieties of people of his generation. And that’s why with Szeeman there was a new shift. I think that the paradigm shift is not only about the curatorial subjectivity and new approaches but also about the very moment of what an exhibition is. Artists made that already very clear in a sense extending the narrative time of the exhibition, the question of temporality of an exhibition became very different with the proliferation of new media. I think that for me this aspect came to a conclusion with Catherine David, because she reflected so much on this two previous histories, the legacy of Szeemans exhibition an the legacy of Bode and the legacy of post-war European consciousness.

PHP: Yes but on a cultural level – you mentioned making exhibitions within culture – I remember Luc Tuymans showing here in Berlin in the Hamburger Bahnhoff. His exhibition Signal which was dealing with the Holocaust and the German trauma if you want to say it like that, was a highly difficult show to digest for people here in Germany, especially for former Western Germans. So I am wondering if Documenta ever finally dealt with its initial promise?

But I think that one way that one can go beyond that is not to internalize the trauma of Germany as the central concern of Documenta. Maybe we can look at other possibilities. Like I mentioned very clearly, the second platform could be seen as clearly connected to this very issue; the post-Nurnberg questions. And no one would have thought that fifty years after that moment this process would have been exhausted. In fact it is only just beginning, because the demand for justice the demand for new articulations of the kind of erased or historical memories of different people are beginning to come back to haunt this questions. And I think that Germany has lived through two different transitions. The post-war transition and the post-wall transition. And it is in this perpetual space, but if we begin to see that this is not a unique history, that is very important. I think that Belgium is very much part of this. I mean Ludo De Witte wrote this book on Lumumba and so on…

But I have the impression in Belgium it is only a recent fabrication

Well whatever that is, but the fact that it is there is important…

But Belgium’s collective consciousness doesn’t care is not concerned

Yes absolutely, because Belgian people have been made to feel that this was the problem of the king, that it is not their problem. Because they are not the direct beneficiaries of colonialism, of course they were, but that is what they hear and want you to hear. Young Germans are also feeling that they are not responsible, but I don’t think that in Documenta we are really interested in Germany’s post-war trauma, I don’t think that this kind of site specificity is of interest to us. That’s why I said that Documenta now is in a third period, within the larger, the wider dimension of this kind of questions and hence to be able to look at this exhibition in a way that it makes sense we really have to look at this broader horizon. And that is open for us. And how do we do that? We cannot just simply do that through visual production, but in addition to that we want to raise significant questions for ourselves. And this is the only way that I can begin to describe our mode of working in between the idea of culture and the idea of the canon I am trying to find an objective, discursive method that can have some application in the exhibition itself.

PHP: What do you expect after Documenta?

OE: I don’t know, I cannot predict the future.

PHP: But there is this intention, the re-writing of art-history, the adding of new narratives to the canon-narrative. What do you expect about in the art-world which sometimes is still reluctant to this kind of changes where some people are skeptically saying that they still have to accept it….

OE: I have never given this any thought. And I think that you yourself as a curator have really been engaged with artists that are not only just working in the countries of Europe but also outside and you know in the last ten years the landscape looks very different. And we need not simply to proclaim this, I think it is very clear. What we really need to prepare ourselves for is how to get to the next level, of not simply integrating artists but also challenging those artists and letting those artists challenge the context in which we are working. Because I think there are no easy options anymore. And museums themselves are already grapped in with this… There is an anxiety now that it is no longer possible to posit only one centralized, institutionalized meaning of idea of art. I mean be a return to a certain revisionism in the name of maintaining high standards but I think that this question really can no longer fly…

PHP: Shouldn’t we concentrate on more small-scale projects to be able to engaging very specific questions?

OE: Small-scale projects are very important, working in much more intimate questions, deliberately working on more peripheral places but having maximum potential for generating new articulations. Again we go back to the question of the experiment, the question of the laboratory for thinking, for testing ideas and testing institutions. Do we just simply say ‘oh it is so good that MOMA is building a new museum for 700 million dollars’? I think we really need to ask them very serious questions: politically, ethically, historically and so on. We cannot just accept, simply because they are building a new museum, that the old attitude of they are the king of the hill should remain. The museums must also make their intentions clear and transparent.

PHP: Do you intend to start projects in Africa again?

OE: Who knows, Africa remains intellectually a very important part of my interest, but it has to be done in the right context. I’ve never made a multicultural exhibition, and sometimes people just don’t understand that. I never made an exhibition that is clearly about multiculturalism. They are always very specific, there is always a very specific historical context that I want to address and so on. But I think I will continue to work on a more individual level. I am interested in working with a number of individual artists to really maybe make long-term projects. I am also interested in pedagogy in Africa, the possibility of establishing a space for pedagogy in relation to visual art and theory and discourse. This could be possibly a new project I will embark on after Documenta, to establish a ground that allows people from so many different positions and places, to be able to meet in Africa in very specific but also highly productive exchange and interchange.

PHP: Considering the aspect of self-esteem shouldn’t an exhibition like The Short Century travel some venues in Africa

In the future for such a project as this I would like to originate it in Africa and have it travel from there to here, rather than as a gift from the European Union to Africa.
I think the future is very promising, we must not loose sight of that fact…

This interview is held in Berlin, 18/05/01

Philippe Pirotte (1972) is an art historian and independent curator based in Antwerp, Belgium. He is preparing a PhD-thesis on the inclusion of ‘Contemporary African Art’ in mainstream-exhibitions and contemporary art discourse at the University of Gent, Belgium. He is artistic coordinator of the Africalia project, initiated by the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. He is the author of several articles in books and magazines. As a curator he made several exhibitions and co-founded the non-profit organization objectif[…].