Stories are created by entanglement. Of a story, only its memory remains, a perpetual reformulation, a repetition of the spoken word, the trace printed, or the song that we are capable of reproducing in part. The artists Tuli Mekondjo and Georgina Maxim reclaim heard stories. Gleaning their sources from free time and geography, they now tell their own stories with powerful languages. In their ardent route to creation lies this desire to bring back bonds of attachment from times gone by.
The intricate symbols in their works mark the rhythm and direction of the lines on which they engage. Their movement attests to a regained vitality, a dignity, a dialogue with these rehabilitated forces. They share this desire to transcend gains, losses, and grieving, and reveal their heritage by way of intercession. Their artistic actions burst into the void left by the erasure resulting from the unfolding of runaway time. The traces of their works are then imprinted on their inhabited reliefs, witnesses of their quest for a reincarnated memory.
“Gleaning their sources from free time and geography, they now tell their own stories with powerful languages.”
Prêt de l’artiste et Guns & Rain, Johannesbourg | Courtesy of the artist and Guns & Rain
Mekondjo works on the national narrative of Namibia. Through the attention she pays to the languages of her country, to the meaning of land reconfigurations, cultural confiscations, and exile, she creates works that free themselves from space and time, such as free compositions taking root deep in her place of origin and beyond the generations that came before her. For her Afrotekismo performance, she creates a ritual from the inherited practices of her village, thus expressing the need to reanimate these powers.
In Windhoek, when crowds throng the shopping streets, everyday sounds from the shadow of a village ring out. They sneak in through a breach in the city, opened up by the artist’s presence. Mekondjo wears a raffia costume that refers to her clan’s totem: Ovakwanaidhi, “the grass people.” She moves like a wave, nothing hinders her passage. Her approach is unitary, precise, integrated as part of the process. Her action seems to contain millennia of repetitions of these gestures. Springing from this act is the urgent need to claim the voices of sacred customs before they wither into collective oblivion.
The film captures a fragmented world, sewn of transposed extracts, fragments brought together by the artist. Inserting a temporary probe, in minutes, within the enclosure of her movements, that draws the gaze through surprise. She takes over a place like a door through time. Could this moment bring back to everyone a fragment of their origin? Mekondjo celebrates the primordial event, the founding act. She invites us to imagine how to recompose narratives beyond any conformity to new platitudes. “We always remember home,” she says. Like a new start at the place where remoteness threatens to sink legacies into repressed areas of the mind, her story is loaded with past voices, with the ups and downs of existence within a clan, with lives before wanderings.
Project, France © Studio Shapiro
Georgina Maxim comes as close as possible to the relationship with familiar people by weaving unusual, altered shapes. Abstraction that has become clothing seems necessary to take precautions against abandonment. Her “memory works” restore her memories by addition, distortion. The artist fixes them during a creative process looking to resist oblivion. She gives shape to an extinct voice that still remains in the space of memory, in gratitude for these lives, these people who print on human existence their passage, their exceptionality, their immemorial presence. The artist is having a conversation beyond the physical world with these beings, as if they could resist their own end. She transforms
the state of absence through sewing, going against the inertia of accepting separation. The imprint of the embroidered, sewn, woven material stretches into sensory appeal. Untying knots and moving towards healing, she consolidates her relationships by patching up and sublimating what exists.
“MAXIM gives shape to an extinct voice that still remains in the space of memory.”
Prêt de l’artiste et Guns & Rain, Johannesbourg | Courtesy of the artist and Guns & Rain
Maxim works using worn clothes that belonged to her relatives. The artist names her works as addresses to them. Turning away from practical uses, starting from the initial structure that she reworks to a liberated aesthetic, she creates a tribute through the object they owned. Clothes become abstract materials again, to make our imaginations drift from them, like areas of vulnerability. She resharpens her skills and gains ascendancy over the original material through the accumulation of symbols, points, inherited techniques, without a sewing machine. Putting into focus sections of her memory through these totemic ornaments, well beyond the usual internal linking, the shape supports the background of her memories. With a free hand, bringing reminiscences to the surface, carrying evocations to restore their vitality and make their presence heard in the world, she calls on us to consider possible the homelessness of relationship’s inner memory.
What these two artists have in common is that they raise, through their freedom of creation, the need to reactivate the past and invite us to relive the significant events of a community, of a physical and symbolic life.
Inexorably moving away from pastoral life, Tuli Mekondjo brings back the sounds of her village to the urban space, carrying her cattle figurines that she melts to recompose a larger piece of clay. From family life eaten away by mourning, by absent flesh, Georgina Maxim summons the bonds that resist loss and the spirit of transmission in female genealogy.
“What these two artists have in common is that they raise […] the need to reactivate the past […]”
Prêt de l’artiste et Guns & Rain, Johannesbourg | Courtesy of the artist and Guns & Rain
The challenge of their work embraces the existence of myths and of what bodies need. What crosses countries, regions, and the lands of people. Their dreamlike truths and their hopes unfold with each artistic gesture. They intimately rebuild new conditions for the emergence of their autonomous systems of contemplation and affiliation to values injured by modern fables tinged with the drama of the past.
Written by Julie Diabira
Check Georgina Maxim’s Instagram : @vintageunhu
This text is an extract from the catalog “Memoria Yaoundé”, published to coincide with the exhibition Memoria: récits d’une autre Histoire, presented at the Musée national du Cameroun from 10 February to 31 July 2023, as part of the tour of the exhibition of the same name presented in 2021 at the Frac Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, and in 2022 at the Musée des cultures contemporaines Adama Toungara, Abidjan.
The catalogue can be downloaded free here: Memoria Yaoundé