Let me begin again as a quiet thought
in the shape of a shell slowly examined
by a brown child on a beach at dawn
straining to see their future.
Let me begin
this time knowing the drumming in my dreams
is me inheriting the earth, is morning
lighting up the rivers…
These words belong to African-American poet Major Jackson’s “Let Me Begin Again” – written as a meditation on “the possibilities and joys of self-renewal, and the promises of a new tomorrow.” If a poem could capture the experience of meeting and engaging with the creative practice of Angolan artistic duo, Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, it would be this one.
A self-described combination of a maximalist and minimalist in their outputs, they are bonded by a shared interest in indigenous, spiritual and non-linear African ways in which we may come to understand ourselves in relation to our bodies, minds and spirits as well as to each other, the natural world and the universe itself.
This grounding is palpable in their ongoing practice as the artists in residence at LAPA’s Pan-African artist residency – an initiative of The Goethe-Institut. Located in the Breezeblock building in Brixton, Johannesburg, LAPA’s vision of nurturing the space for collaboration, public engagement and experimentation is anchored. This is where I am introduced to what feels like the LAPA family at any given time: artists in residence, resident artists of the wider creative community, researchers, writers, facilitators and a gentle ebb and flow of curious passers by on a sunny, unassuming afternoon. Sunny and unassuming is also how I encounter the duo of Wyssolela and Anita.
Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, Portable Paradise, 2023. Photo by Earl Abrahams. Courtesy of LAPA.
Art as re-remembering
In a community-oriented (yet deeply personal) research practice that cuts through colonial borders and Gregorian concepts of time, this pair is curating a vehicle for re-remembering and reclaiming a pre-colonial understanding of life and living. It is a collective practice that finds its roots in two individual processes.
Multimedia artist and photographer, Anita, describes her methods as “intuitive,” concerned with “translating dreams and visions,” depicting the “metaphysical and subconscious,” and of using her own body to “try to mesh into objects or nature itself.” Her resulting mixed media self-portraits are haunting, fleshy even, in their use of raw materials and image distortion.
On the more abstract end is Wyssolela’s work in digital collage: a practice she describes as one rooted in introspection. After interrogating why she was drawn to collage in the first place, she explains, she then found she could use collage as a process of peeling back the layers of her identity as a Black Angolan woman in a neocolonial context. This led her to identify a “big disconnect from what is indigenous,” but also viewed as “foreign, separate, or abstract,” to people raised in a Catholicised Angola.
Grappling with this existential, cultural disconnect (one that is perhaps all-too-familiar to children of empire everywhere) Wyssolela turned her practice toward “the cosmic subconscious realm of things.” “To what my people were saying before,” she says. In learning about African indigenous systems of knowledge – the kinds of systems that almost certainly do not factor into any post/neocolonial educational curriculum – she arrived at the dikenga of the BaKongo people who once spanned what is modern-day northern Angola, western Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of the Congo.
Also known as the Kongo Cosmogram, among many other indigenous names, the dikenga is a circular symbol with four cardinal points mapping the sun’s movements from east to west and a horizontal axis (the Kalûnga) that divides the upper half of the physical world (Ku Nseke) from the spiritual world (Ku Mpémba). Dating back long before European contact with the continent, it was used as a system governing the BaKongo’s understanding of time, nature and personal development.
It is here, between the physical and spiritual realms, where both Wyssolela’s and Anita’s practices would intersect to give them a base from which to build a collective research practice during their LAPA Residency. “We found a way to talk about it and invite the community in to have the conversations with us,” explains Wyssolela.
Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, Portable Paradise, 2023. Photo by Earl Abrahams. Courtesy of LAPA.
Art as re-education
In a knowledge economy where elders are often the keepers of the archives, and where most pre-colonial records were systematically destroyed by the colonial project of “civilisation,” Anita and Wyssolela were fortunate enough to be able to turn to key sources of information.
“Luckily, there is one person who is initiated into the system – Dr Bunseki Fu-Kiau – and he wrote many books,” explains Anita, referring to the late Congolese scholar Dr. Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau. His books, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo (2001) and Self-Healing Power and Therapy: Old Teachings from Africa (2003), have been critical to this duo’s work.
So, too, have conversations with family. “The whole time I’ve been working, I’ve been talking a lot to my grandmother – not necessarily about the cosmogram, but exchanging knowledge points because I’ve been doing some work that she likes to do,” says Anita.
In doing this ancestral work, Anita, herself, has found a vehicle for introspection. Wyssolela, with a wry laugh, testifies to the cosmogram’s impact on their lives in addition to their practice: “Life doesn’t stop for us. We’re here as residents, but all the other things that happen in our lives are still going on. We are still always able to find ourselves on that map [the dikenga].”
Through open studios and the recent public opening of Portable Paradise, the final exhibition of their residency, the duo have reintroduced a system of knowledge of personal significance to them, with the broader public impact of connections to cultures far, wide and centuries deep.
Through a series of dialogues and lyrical abstract works of geometric patterns hinting at scenes of water, earth, sky and more – the duo’s practice has facilitated the rediscovery of parallels to Zulu, South American and African American cosmologies at an accessible level that is not often found outside the confines of academia.
Given the anti-indigenous colonial methods of drawing the borders that make up present-day Africa, as well as the geographic extent of the Atlantic Slave Trade, such parallels are less surprising, but all the more affirming of a deeper interconnectedness that defies ideas of citizenship.
Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, Portable Paradise, 2023. Photo by Earl Abrahams. Courtesy of LAPA.
Art as public rite of passage
Personally moved by the education both Wyssolela and Anita have provided through their creative practice, I cannot help but marvel at the mirror LAPA’s Artist Residency holds up to the more dominant cycles of today’s art world: that of sales.
In a time when the role of art is increasingly, almost unquestioningly, conflated with the commercial value of artistic output (and, in turn, the artist), collective-based residencies like LAPA’s prove essential for the preservation and fostering of cross-cultural, knowledge-producing, practices that allow artists like Wyssolela, Anita, and LAPA’s growing network of residents, the opportunity to deepen their crafts and widen their reach. Such is the service that art also must offer. When practised in community, without a ticket-fee, appraisal value, or Fine Arts prerequisite, we may experience art to be that which allows us to “begin again” and again, and again.
Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, Portable Paradise, 2023. Photo by Earl Abrahams. Courtesy of LAPA.
LAPA’s Residency Season III opens with a call to African artist duos working in any medium across Africa or the diaspora to explore the theme of “‘Our people are our mountains’, and other conditions of life.” Phased into three well-supported residencies from September 2023 to November 2024, artists will have the chance to live and work at LAPA’s Brixton location. More information can be found on The Goethe-Institut website: www.goethe.de/lapa. Applications close on 31 May 2023
