The unique homeland, stranger, is the world we inhabit.
One and the same chaos has produced all mortals.
Meleager of Gadara, epigram 417, 1st century BCE.
I have seen the mechanics. They are shells. It is the coiled expanse, and it moves. Now, you know that the expanse has no interior: it has nothing to lose. It cannot hurt itself like the silhouette but only unfold. Therefore, it has pushed back the silhouette, fearful, injuring itself, afraid of losing the interior it contains.
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambiguë, 1961.
Les graines de semence ne doivent pas être moulues
[Seed grains should not be ground]
Since Assoukrou Aké has placed his exhibition under the protective figure of Käthe Kollwitz as one relies on the protection of a ancestor as real as mythical, we could start there. The phrase that gives its title to the exhibition is a quote from the German engraver, who devoted her extraordinary work to representing those that are not shown: the common people, the powerless, crushed by domination, trampled by war, tortured by hunger, and their strength as well, the dignity of their revolt, the truth of their love.
This exhibition title is a gateway. The gateway through which Käthe Kollwitz exits the stage, as it is the title of her last lithograph. After witnessing the death of her son in the slaughter of the First World War, Kollwitz had to live through the death of her grandson in the horrors of the Second. Intimate deaths that fueled her relentless commitment against killings and killers. Seed grains should not be ground. One does not build a world on the corpses of its children. These cathedrals of bones, before building them in their own fields of wheat, Europe had scattered them to all the winds of the colonies.
This exhibition title is a gateway. The gateway through which Assoukrou Aké invites us into his theater of shadow and light. Like Kollwitz before him, it is by scratching, by scratching, by subtracting material that he brings out the vein of bodies and things. Removing is the first gesture of the engravers' guild. Removing to reveal. And everything that has not been removed remains in the shadows. Pure surface. Full expanse. Without depth.
The spiral faces of the anonymous figures that populate the work of Assoukrou Aké are made of circles, those of the trees of life, of the thickness that time gives. For four hundred years, Europe has worked to gradually destroy Africa before being able to colonize it on equal footing. For this, as Mamadou Diouf writes, it was necessary to expel Africa from its own history. Annihilate the thickness of its time. Destroy its depth. Make it a pure surface. A full expanse torn by wounds - Europe must indeed drill the earth, bodies, and minds. A full expanse coiled and become a shell, all the easier to break as it has been emptied.
Whether colonization was a long parenthesis or a slow hybridization, whether one prefers to play this chess game with the pieces of Ade Ajayi or with those of Valentin Mudimbe, it remains that in its wake, it shattered the vases. In the time after, a time that definitely does not end, it is necessary to patch up the tears in places and bodies, trace the rings of trees, find again the deep paths of that "African consciousness that mixes the sacred and the profane" that Assoukrou Aké speaks of. And repairing is not forgetting. And tracing is not submitting to the mausoleum of the past. And finding again is not stopping walking. It is inventing the present.
Regarding the history of the Caribbean, poet Derek Walcott wrote this: "Break a vase, and the love that gathers the fragments is stronger than the love that took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that brings the pieces together is the sealing of its original form. It is such love that gathers our African and Asian fragments, our precious cracked heritage whose restoration shows its white scars." Any resemblance to the work of Assoukrou Aké is by no means coincidental. Gathered fragments. White scars. The restoration of what has been broken. May the glued vase be able to fill up again with all its interiority.
In Walcott as in the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken ceramics are repaired with golden lacquer, it is the glue that gives shape and meaning to the whole. It is the glue that is contemplated. The scar that marks both the surface and the depth. The scar that holds together the fragments of time. The groove is a writing.
In the Jewish tradition, it is not history that breaks the vases. It is the very condition of existence. Fragmentation is a stage in the formation of the world that the Kabbalah calls the "breaking of the vessels." The light of creation is fragmented and enclosed in "shells" that obstruct knowledge. This shattering requires tikkun olam, the repair of the world. To repair the world is to capture the sparks in the debris that surround us and that we are. And according to the Kabbalah, it is this repair that gives birth to faces.
And we come back to the art of engraving. In the peels of matter, in the scratches of the image, in the broken substances, sparks will be seized. None is like another, but all participate in the same light. These sparks are letters, writing the text of the world. And Walter Benjamin teaches us that after capturing the sparks, the task of the artist is to restore them as "fragments of a single and greater language, debris of a single and same vase."
With patience, with meticulousness, like a goldsmith in the workshop, Assoukrou Aké repairs the breaks by showing them. And indeed, in this world we inhabit, this one and the same chaos, he takes on one of the most fundamental tasks: to let the faces be reborn.
Jean-Baptiste Naudy,
Paris, August 24, 2023.
