Roxane Mbanga, Naked Underneath: Inhabiting nudity: when the garment reveals the body to affirm it better

The garment, in the sense of “clothing designed to show off and cover the body,” may have appeared about 170,000 years ago. Today, this idea of dressing implies taking into account several notions that, according to  societal models, moral values, religious, political, cultural positions, etc., will give a certain meaning to the choices made by this or that individual in society. Modesty, for example, which appeared in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, is not experienced and therefore perceived in the same way on the other side of the Atlantic. It did not form part of the vocabulary of the native peoples of the Amazon. Nor is it intrinsic to the Pygmies of Lolodorf. Since the history of humanity is not linear, customs and behaviour patterns can only follow the current traced by civilisations on any given territory.

We know, for example, that in Africa, in the northern part of the Sahara, the notion of continence is fundamental for the female body, which is, in many respects, absent from public space. Religion, for example, can sometimes force women to be completely covered to the point of self-erasure, depriving them of the freedom to “tell themselves” through their clothes. The energy released by the body that expresses itself without taboos is a source of vitality that we hardly suspect. This possibility for women to make their bodies visible—and not necessarily accessible—is sometimes, beyond the exaltation of their femininity and the contentment that could be associated with it, synonymous with the depoliticisation of morals: another way of telling the individual freedoms which characterise them.

It is this unmeditated possibility that we feel when heading to the equator and beyond. It is what one perceives, for example, in Congolese, South African, or Kenyan women who seem freer from the yoke of convention. Probably because they have migrated, helped by their socio-cultural context, towards living more fully with their feminine condition. The influence of colonisation and the degree of emancipation, here and there, have helped to (re)configure and condition social and psychological spaces on this continent, with globalisation accentuating this shift.

“[Memory] is seen here as a space for bringing magic back to platitudes, renewing the gaze, and weaving connections between the generations.”

The visual artist, Roxane Mbanga, who lives between three territories—Africa, the West Indies , and Europe— has chosen for this stage of the travelling exhibition.Memoria: accounts of another History to return to a problem she has dealt with before: that of woman’s self-affirmation via the body (and thus clothing). She presents an installation titled Naked Underneath : How to use clothing to affirm oneself ?, where she continues this reflection developed in her project Histories of women around the question of uninhibited nudity already addressed in Dakar and Lagos. Clothes are considered here as a filter placed between the naked body and the gaze of others. Mbanga solicits our senses to question this political relationship with the female body, whose nudity remains subject to many boundaries and controversies in Africa.

Three elements fragment the artist’s research work: the female body (as a medium / expressive surface), the city or street as a receptacle for this medium but also as a place where the components of this sensitive matter in motion jostle and are evaluated, and finally memory. The latter is seen here as a space for bringing magic back to platitudes, renewing the gaze, and weaving connections between the generations.

These three components intertwine in the artist’s work to express with force and poetry the tension which underlies the relationship between the female body and the gaze in our cities. It is by using memory precisely (and by extension, that of the body) and what the urban space of these theatre-cities suggests that Mbanga questions and reconstructs a place where the balance of power that animates them emerges.

The artist asks Nigerian and Senegalese women whom she casts to wear a boubou or a kaba without putting anything on underneath. In this way, they experience a chosen nudity while strolling in the
street. In a way, this is risk-taking or putting them in danger according to established socio-cultural conventions. Although this practice is already more or less widespread depending on the region and the moral code of the women, the experience still requires some courage.

Because by providing these women with a light garment with which they cover their body in what is most conspicuous and by allowing them not to wear underwear, the artist, in a sense, invites them to (co)inhabit (with) their nudity. This is clearly a political act in that it legitimises the narratives, via their bodies,of many women often excluded from public speech in a porous context to the subjugation of the second sex(1). Through this act, Roxane Mbanga shakes up convention, breaks down doors, and allows women to access more freedom.

Written by Landry Mbassi

To view the artist’s work on Instagram : @mbanga.mbanga.mbanga  @mbanga.creative.studio

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 

 

1 Referring to the work of Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, which came out in 1949. This is a philosophical work which examines the situation of women after the Second World War.