PIERTOPOLIS
A pier symbolizes arrivals and departures, through the age’s people have been on the move. Today even more than ever before, for numerous reasons, out of curiosity, to have a good time, for nostalgic reasons, looking for happiness, a better world, following our loved ones, looking for identity, DNA, our roots. Because we are forced by others or by the circumstances to explore the world, to settle down somewhere else, out of discontent, or to work, temporarily or to stay, to never turn back and to become one with the elements. All this also makes a pier an ideal place to dream or philosophize about leaving or to reflect on it. A pier is a place where people come together, from different countries and cultures, for various reasons, to say goodbye, or to welcome each others.
While the ‘State of L3’ was a project in which Antonio José Guzman searched for his own DNA (he is from Panama, has African roots and lives in The Netherlands), in ‘Piertopolis’ he expands his concept. Inspired by Bas Jan Ader and motivated by the philosophies of artists and architects like Fuller and Constant.
On his travels, Antonio José Guzman makes photos and films, alone or with others, depending on the situation at hand, the circumstances and the possibilities. Not to seduce the eye but to make his audience a witness, to inform, to stimulate, to inspire or to surprise. While presenting his search to the public, the pier is ever present as a constant and stabile way to express himself. His audience can come together on the pier, connect to one another. Apart from that, what they see in all the different expositions change every time.
After all, the visual diary created by Guzman is like a documentation of his journeys and travels, of his encounters with others, other artists, like-minded people or people who think differently. Diaries do not follow a pattern, they show the inconstancy of everyday life. The interesting thing about ‘Piertopolis’ is that Antonio José Guzman succeeds in taking his personal topics to a universal level. By doing that, he makes those topics urgent. It becomes something that everyone has to deal with; It urges you to get involved.
The fact that he dares to always make his results dependant on the circumstances, possibilities and the people he works with or has to work with until the last moment, results in the fact that they are always surprising and refreshing, even when they are framed within a certain concept. What he shows in Amsterdam’s Museum Dock Kromhout is different from what he shows in The Hague’s Gemak De Vrije Academie or in New York at Corridor Gallery. His ‘Piertopolis’ visual diary in Bergen, Norway it’s different from the one he made in Dakar. Antonio José Guzman gives meaning to the term ‘ongoing project’ on different levels.
Rob Perrée
Amsterdam, September 2011
Translation of manuscript in Dutch
Rob Perrée is Freelance writer and exhibition curator, specialized in contemporary American, African American, African and Surinam art and artist’s books. On the editorial board of Kunstbeeld Magazine, Co-founder of the Con Rumore Foundation, Lives and works in Amsterdam and New York.
Films against extreme right
It is already seventeen years ago when British sociologist Paul Gilroy’s influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness has been published. But the effect, at least in the visual arts, it still going on. This spring Tate Gallery in London organized a great overview of black art under the title Modern Afro Journey Through the Black Atlantic with a clear reference to Gilroy. In upcoming October the debate Black Atlantic (Revisited) will take place in Rotterdam Union.
Gilroy introduced the term ‘Black Atlantic’ to create a recognizable and unify name for several black cultures around the Atlantic Ocean. According to Gilroy there are no cultures that are typically African, Caribbean, American or European though exists a hybrid of “Transatlantic” Black culture.
The artists collective The State of L3, which now exhibits in Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, relegate to Gilroy’s ideas by calling their exhibition Modernity & Aesthetics of the New Black Atlantic.
The State of L3 was founded in 2006 by Antonio Jose Guzman, and artist from Panama who is been living since fifteen years in Amsterdam. Together with Abdoulaye Armin Kane and Felipe Peres Calheiros, Coordinators for L3 in Senegal and Brazil, they create art installations and films that deal with black identity and African roots. It’s because of this variety of heritage that the members of L3 call themselves Pan Africanists.
In Smart, the collective has arranged a multimedia presentation. There is an inverse boat that serves as a traveling cinema and streets sounds for far away places tingle the ears of the visitors. But by far the most impressive subject of this exhibition is L3 founder Guzman himself with his video work. The film The Day We Surrender To The Air is a gripping report about the search for his own genetic roots.
For the project The Day We Surrender To The Air, Guzman went to the United States to analyze his DNA. The results brought to light that his early family assembled European Sephardic Jew and Muslim peoples of the Sahel, but also Indians and people from Panamanian indigenous tribes belonged to his family tree.
The film became a road movie, which followed the tracks that his ancestors thousands of years ago previously have taken. Guzman walks through the snow in Siberia from where his ancestors once crossed the Bering Strait. He stands on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which his family traversed on their way to Mexico twenty thousand years. And he looked straight through the gate in Senegal, where the slaves were driven towards the ships, taking off to an unknown destination.
Who are we and where do we come from? These are the questions that Guzman’s movie again and again emerges. And what does nationality mean if your genetic material can be attributed to almost all parts of the world? Guzman actually say in this movie that the world is one big family. And this is an important statement, in a time where right wing ideas more and more prevail in a growing number of parts of our world.
Sandra Smallenburg
NRC Next / Translation of manuscript in Dutch
Sandra Smallenburg studied art history at Leiden University and works as an art editor and critic for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. She is also a contributor to ARTnews magazine.
In search of the african gene
‘L3′ is a gene that occurs in all Bantu people. Antonio Jose Guzman used it as code for his personal quest. Antonio Jose Guzman would prefer to go flying on a boat and sail across the sky. Over Africa, across the Atlantic; He created the Dogon Voyager for Interstellar Planetary Travelling, the spacecraft is the beating heart of his art project The State of L3, which is a growing web of artist and friends from Africa, Europe and Latin America. It’s a fantasy that Guzman gained by Jules Verne, the jazz of Sun Ra and the TV series Star Trek. Parts of the expanding work was on display in Amsterdam’s Gallery 23 and Smart Project Space, Sanaa Gallery, Utrecht and in the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp MHKA.
At Smart Project Space Guzman made a boat with a video mirror loop, where previous visitors took look inside. Guzman also made sculptures with winged forms from recycled material. Guzman: “The boat transports us to our friends and distant relatives, who we don’t know where they are”, Guzman did for the project workshops with selected young aspiring artists in Dakar, Recife and Amsterdam. The goal of L3 is to find a transatlantic black identity based on the colonial triangle. Guzman: “L3 is the gene that you will find in all the Bantu people across the world”. The “State of L3″ is imaginary, the vision of a state that encompasses all areas of the world where people with African roots live, the entire diaspora, the dream of Marcus Garvey, the negritude of Leopold Sedar Senghor. In the project the young artists of L3 rediscover these ideas not so much as a charge against the great injustices of the past, but as a source of inspiration, says Guzman. With The State of L3 Guzman invites the audience to look at themselves, and to question their relationship with identify and the post colonial world.
It started four years ago with Guzman’s fascination for DNA research. He made a documentary about it, previously screened at IDFA and the Thessaloniki Film Festival. A large percentage of Guzman’s ancestors was European, “Sephardic Jews, many slave traders themselves. A large part was native Panamanian. He also traced his roots to African Muslim peoples in the Sahel. Their descendants still live as Maroons, in the inaccessible border between Panama and Colombia.
The State of L3 started it’s tour of exhibitions during the Dakar biennial in Senegal. Guzman exhibit a boat and a car shape with fabric covered – “purposely not Dutch wax by Vlisco, but Nigerian printed wax”. The car drew a lot of attention on the suburbs of Dakar, “as if an expensive car is under the fabric”. Guzman video loops were projected during the biennial on residential buildings, images sometimes many meters high. “The people on the districts were moved, for the first time they saw a film in their streets and to their surprise they saw each other on it.”
Wim Bossema
De Volkskrant / Translation of manuscript in Dutch
Wim Bossema is a journalist at Volkskrant. A history graduate of the universities of Amsterdam and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he was previously in charge of Volkskrant’s Africa section.
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