MARTA MASSAIOLI: What do you think of the so called phenomenon of "Art of Diaspora" referring to the phenomena of African artists living and working abroad, do you think it's proper and actual and why?

OLU OGUIBE: Well, I’m not sure what the term means in this context, so, I wouldn’t really know. I doubt that the artists that are referred to consider themselves a Diaspora. I doubt that they consider themselves a group apart from other artists. If anything, I find them constantly exhibiting with those artists who live and work on the continent without distinction. Diaspora is a very specific register with particular implications and inflexions. It’s not a word to be cast about recklessly. I think that people are too quick to invent and put labels on anyone who is not of European origin, and that will continue to be very problematic. During the Nazi regime in Germany and during World War II, lots of European artists fled Europe and relocated to America. Strictly speaking, those artists would qualify as a Diaspora because they fled under life-threatening social and political circumstances. But they were never referred to as a Diaspora nor were their works referred to as Art of Diaspora. I’m yet to come across any such reference to Willem DeKooning, for instance, or Duchamp for that matter. So, I really do not have an answer. If the term was not applicable to the work of an artist like DeKooning, I don’t see why it would be applicable to anyone else’s.

 In your art work the theme of loss of memory seems to have a relevant place. Is this theme somehow linked to the theme of identity exchange or not? And why?

Themes of loss and memory would perhaps be more accurate. There are few works in which I have explored the nature of memory; the fragility and malleability of memory. In the installation, ‘Ashes’(2002) I explore ways in which memory is affected by tragedy and trauma, so that recollection becomes a new act of narration rather than a replication of exact facts from the past. In ‘Ashes’, which I installed in New York a few months after the events of 11^th September, 2001, there is a section comprised of witness accounts of a particular catastrophe. However, each one of the witnesses recalls the incident differently or shall we say, recalls a different incident. It is not clear. Some claim that the incident happened in the spring, others say it happened in autumn, some say it was predicted by Nostradamus, and hardly any of them agree on how it happened. The only thing that these different accounts agree on is that the site of the event was covered in ashes. The ashes are archetypal. It is the same ashes that buried Pompeii, the same ashes that obliterated St. Pierre, Martinique in 1902; the same ashes that covered Manhattan in 2001. It is the same ashes that we return to when we die, what Beckett calls “the final dust”. So, the catastrophe referred to in the work is not specific. It is all catastrophes. What is more significant is that in the wake of their traumatic experience, each individual has registered only enough to remember what is relevant or necessary without consigning themselves to the prison of memory. The question becomes: how do we bear the inevitable burden of memory?  How do we remember, what do we remember, and why?

A great deal of my work also deals with loss, that is to say, bereavement: the loss of a dear one through death. This is a theme that I have been exploring ever since I was in art school a quarter century ago. Some of my earliest paintings from the 1980s center on the theme of the widow and the orphan, and the irrefillable hole that bereavement creates in our lives and individual worlds. In many instances the loss is through war or political or social violence, but only so because those are the least understandable ways in which to suffer loss. You take for instance the carnage that we have unleashed in Iraq over the past couple of years—I say so as an American but the Italians are complicit in this, also—and you consider the unnecessary anguish that we pay to bring into people’s daily lives; the life-long anguish of a woman who loses her child to a bomb blast or a child who loses her parents to American or British bullets or a man who loses his family to a sectarian act of vengeance. You think how unconscionable one must consider such loss, but even more importantly, how deeply scouring it is. Half of my generation was annihilated in the Biafra war in the late 1960s, and those of us who survived still have siblings that we grieve forty years on. In other words, war is not simply statistics and collaterals and billions of dollars in war spending; it is also about families grieving lost ones; individuals suffering the anguish of losing a dear one, one man, one woman, or one child leaving a flower on a grave while crying their hearts out. The Bible says that Hagar was weeping for her dead children, and would not be consoled. That is the loss that I have explored in some of my work.

This returns us to memory, or more accurately, memorializing, that is, the act of commemoration or remembrance. You find that often, as a way to cope with loss, we create memorials, that is, spaces wherein to remember. If you have been watching the news this past week, you would notice that at the university in Blacksburg, Virginia where a gunman carried our a massacre last week, the first thing that students did, once they had some time to collect themselves, was set up memorials. We do that each time we suffer loss of dear ones. We find a spot to leave flowers, farewell notes, eulogies, personal items that connect us to or remind us of the lost one. That is what ‘Keep It Real’, my installation for the 52^nd Venice Biennale, is about. In the installation which is also called ‘Memorial to A Youth’, I present a fictional curbside memorial with flowers, a pair of sports shoes belonging to or reminding us of the lost one, and a farewell note that says, “Keep It Real, H. We love ya.”

Memorials serve not so much to honor the dead as designate a sacred space for reflection, because mourning is an act of reflection. When we mourn, we remember, but we also reflect on the meaning of things. We ask questions, we seek answers. We wonder why. And we repeat this ritual whenever or wherever tragedy occurs, which is why my work in the Venice Biennale is, I think, a timeless work with universal resonance.

You deal and play with globalization, I personally think that there is nothing as ethnic as the global culture...and its loss of consciousness about this condition of post-techno ethnicity and you? What do you think about this matter?

I think that globalization—as an economic and political process—is quite different from “global culture”. In some of my work I have dealt mostly with the very complex and duplicitous economic and political process of globalization rather than with global culture. This is probably most evident in ‘Game’, the work that I created for the 2^nd Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art in Albissola in 2002-2003. ‘Game’ is comparable to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in that it reaches back to myth, lore, and history for its imagery but deals nonetheless with global consequences in the present. Its iconography bridges the past and the present in order to reaffirm a point that I have made in several essays, which is that globalization is the culmination of a long tradition of global violation and conquest that in turn produce unforeseen, unanticipated consequences that can neither be preempted nor easily contained.

You are a curator, a musician, an artist, a poet and theorist.....which of the following figure do you consider as preeminent in your art-life?

It is the same life, though, and I am the same person no matter what I do or how many vocations I engage in. The word that comes to most people’s minds is the Renaissance man, yet I think that specialization, that is, the phenomenon of the individual who does one thing and one thing only, is a recent development in the history of human civilization and I do not know whether it’s a good thing or not. I just happen to have several seemingly disparate interests, and I try to devote the same energy and bring the same level of enthusiasm to all of them. I know also that there are numerous other areas of endeavor, creative and scientific, that I would like to explore and I hope that I have the opportunity to do so. Until that final silence, we must give the best that we have and do the most that we can to live life to the full.

You are taking part in the 52nd Biennale of Venice, can you tell me about this project? What will you exhibit and which are the reasons behind this art installation?

The project or piece is called ‘Keep It Real: Memorial to A Youth’, and it is an installation that I first produced in the mid-1990s as a curb-side (roadside) memorial to an unknown youth. This was shortly after I produced my other installation, ‘Buggy: Memorial to An Unknown Child’ and the found-objects piece, ‘Mementos’, and is one of several works that I made between 1995 and 1998.

The work began as notes for an essay on the contemporary American monument after I moved to New York in 1995 and observed that the modern American monument no longer took the form of a public sculpture in bronze or an elaborate gravestone but came instead as curbside memorials, large, overnight murals on shop fronts, and of course, now at the turn of the century, a virtual wake visitors’ notebook on MySpace. I set out to write about this, but the essay never came. In its place came a timeless memorial to every mother’s child and the mass murder at Virginia Tech University in the US last week reminds us once again why the piece has remained resonant.

What is interesting is that it is quite an inconspicuous work: just a bunch of flowers, a pair of shoes, and a hand-written note on a piece of cardboard, but it is a piece that has profound, universal resonance because it speaks to several poignant issues that are ever-present in our lives, our communities, and our experiences whoever we are and wherever we happen to be.

Most of those issues are more affirmative than tragic because all memorialization is an affirmation; of fortitude, resilience, and even defiance; the triumph of good memories over the pain and hopelessness of loss. And as I pointed out to Marina Abramovic several years ago when she exhibited the piece in her show on contemporary performance art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the work also speaks to the indispensable place of beauty in the aftermath of horror; how, as we poise to grapple with the crushing weight of tragedy, our first and immediate recourse is to art, to flowers and candlelight, to instant and beautiful memorials, to the poetry of the eulogy, to song and the soothing or even defiant strain of music, long before we succumb to bitterness or contemplate revenge. When we are at a complete loss as to why, we turn to art and faith.

There are classical aspects to the work, also; the use of the word “Youth” in the subtitle, for instance, which reminds us of modern titles for Greek sculptures, or the pair of shoes that somewhat hack back to Egypt and that ancient belief in a life after. It is as if, in same way that the ancients were surrounded by paintings of their favorite belongings as they were laid to rest in their tombs, someone added the mourned youth’s shoes because he needs them on the other side, so he could go on keeping it “real”. In other words, there is a leaning toward celebration, also, which is intrinsic to all memorials.

‘Keep It Real’ was acquired by the Hans Bogatske Collection in Brussels around 2002 or 2003 and it is my understanding that it was eventually passed on to the Dokolo Collection of Contemporary African Art. It has been fairly widely exhibited in Europe: at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastrich, BPS 22 in Chaleroi, Belgium, and at Migros Museum in Zurich, among others. That the curators chose to show it in Venice also, I guess is a reflection of their belief in its quiet significance.

You are an Igbo, how relevant is your heritage in your art life?

My cultural heritage and history as an Igbo are of critical relevance to my art, my sense of self, and my fate in the world. A great deal of my work is informed in a subtle yet firm way, by the history and experiences of the Igbo as a people, and by personal experiences that were determined or dictated by my origins. We are what has happened to us.

We are also what we bring to the world, and a significant part of that is influenced and shaped by our cultural heritage. I may be American, but like those other millions of Americans who were born and raised elsewhere, part of what I bring to the greater pool of American society and culture, and to the collective of world heritage, is what I inherited where I was born.

My work is deeply influenced by Igbo art as well as what I might call the Igbo sensibility especially prior to the tragic experience of postcolonial debasement. In almost every work that I have made throughout my career as an artist, be it an installation, a painting, a drawing, or a performance, there is an element that derives directly from pre-Independence Igbo art. The overarching aesthetic of that art and of the Igbo world was that no one perspective can capture or encapsulate the entirety of a subject, and so, in order to develop a comprehensive idea of any phenomenon or subject, you must be willing to approach it from several different perspectives without giving preeminence or priority to any one perspective. You cannot view a masquerade performance by standing in one spot. You must move around, go back and forth, shift positions and viewpoints; then you’d be in a position to claim to have seen the performance. Quite different from modern Western approach to theatre, isn’t it, where you sit in one spot to watch and then applaud at the end?

In most of my works you find that there is no one way of arranging elements or experiencing them. You can move things around, you can walk in from different directions, and you can move around things; you can sit down to interact with certain elements or simply watch from a distance, you can step in and out. Yet, in order to claim to have experienced the work, you have to try all of these approaches. Many installation artists leave instructions how their work must be presented, and often they are anal, that is to say, very strict and inflexible about this. I leave no such instructions because I find that my challenge as an artist is to create a work that retains its power and essence no matter how it is arranged or presented. If a work of art does not have that flexibility and cannot accommodate that multiplicity of perspectives, then it holds no viable truth.

The decorative element is very important and ubiquitous in my work, and that equally derives from Igbo art and culture. You will find it in Ike Ude’s work, also, and in Odili Donald Odita’s work, although each one of these artists comes from largely different backgrounds. You find that spectacle—what you might call the “beauty element”—is an important aspect of all these artists’ works. I think there’s a reason for it.

Igbo cosmology is another element that is very important in my work. For example this is clearly visible in one of my more recent major public artworks, the ‘Seat for the Gods and Saints’ which is on the side of Mt. Samsung in Korea. The work whose full title is “Okwu Muo: Seat for Ala, Anyanwu, and the Three Virtuous Monks’ in fact incorporates a crystal glass replica of an Igbo stool, and it is dedicated to the Igbo Earth Goddess, Ala and her consort, Anyanwu, as well as three Korean Buddhist monks from the 6^th century.

Finally, I mentioned the Igbo sensibility, and I should clarify that by this I mean a certain disposition that derives from a particular ethos and worldview that would be most evident in the period before Independence from colonialism but somehow still survives. Although this might be consigned to the category of inexact sciences, one attribute that is generally considered particularly Igbo is what I would refer to as emphatic presence. It should come as no surprise that of the four or five individuals who have left a markedly emphatic imprint on the discourse of African contemporary art today two are Igbo; Okwui Enwezor, and my humble self. For another example, in the initial phase of the so-called controversy surrounding Robert Storr’s decision to make an open call for projects for the African Pavilion at the 52^nd Venice Biennale, almost all the key players pro and against, were Igbo: Okwui Enwezor, Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Olu Oguibe... Talk about emphatic presence from a little, otherwise politically marginalized rainforest group!

This emphatic presence was first demonstrated on the global stage by a distant kinsman of ours, the great anti-slavery campaigner and Abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano whose best-selling 18^th century autobiography contributed more than any other work of literature to the abolition of the slave trade, and gave birth to a new genre in literature. Equiano’s book was one of the first international best-sellers in the history of modern literature, going into 11 editions in different European languages in the author’s lifetime. Little wonder, too, that Mr. Equiano’s first name was Olaudah: resonant metal, the one who speaks resoundingly. And we know also that there is one book that has done more than any other work of literature to bring a better informed understanding of Africa to millions of people around the world today, and that book is a classic by another Igbo, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

 Think of the resounding manner in which a new generation of writers of Nigerian origin have made their mark in world literature over the past fifteen or twenty years, and you find that the most prominent among them are all Igbo: Ben Okri, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Uzodinma Iweala… The first African artist to appear in Documenta Kassel in 1992 was Igbo; the first curator of African origin to direct Documenta Kassel in 2002 was equally Igbo. All this can be largely explained by our heritage both historical and cultural, and especially by that Igbo propensity to speak resoundingly, to take positions, and to register an emphatic presence wherever we are and in whatever we do. Whatever our nationality is; American, Nigerian, Belgian, German, or Canadian, that inclination is always evident in our work and our attitude to life, and it is important to our sense of who we are. You could say that all of us have followed in Equiano’s footsteps.