Game
Olu Oguibe, Game
Olu Oguibe, Game
Olu Oguibe, Game (particular)
Olu Oguibe, Game (particular)
Olu Oguibe, Game (particular)
Game
My first visit to Liguria was pleasant and memorable. However, it also fell into a period of considerable anxiety and tension that ultimately ended in tragedy. While I and others celebrated the revival of the historic collaborations between contemporary artists and master ceramists in Albisola, a few miles away in the neighboring port city of Genoa an intense battle was being waged between Italian security forces guarding the annual convention of leaders of the eight leading industrial nations, or the Group of Eight, and thousands of social activists who had gathered to protest the agenda of the meeting and the rapacious propensities of globalization. The celebrations in Albisola, which marked the first Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art, were described as “the happy face of globalization” because they brought together international practitioners from all parts of the world who came to work with and acknowledge the expertise and significance of a local industry in what many would now refer to as a positive demonstration of glocalization. They were referred to as the happy face of globalization in recognition of the parallel gathering in Genoa where great powers debated and decided the fate of millions of the world’s citizens who had neither representation nor power to challenge their machinations. In effect while the biennial in Albisola and the collaborations that produced it represented the positive possibilities of global and local interaction, the gathering on the other side of town represented in large part the tragic and diabolical face of contemporary existence.
That tragic dimension acquired unforgettable poignancy when midway through the world leaders’ deliberations in Genoa, a young activist named Carlo Giuliani was cut down in cold blood by security force bullets, and left lying in the street. The contrast between that incident and our celebrations was inescapable and indelible. In Albisola friendship, warmth and enthusiasm framed narratives of professional respect and mutual discovery through creative exchange, while across the bridge eight powerful strangers came to town with their retinues of guards and armored cars, and in their wake left a town in ruins, and a young man lying in a pool of his own blood. That tragic paradox stayed with me for long, and in response I wrote a short verse called the Ballad of Carlo Giuliani. I also promised myself that if I should return to Liguria as an artist, I would create a work of art that deals with the elaborate and complex machine that brought Carlo and his fellow protesters to Genoa, a machine so complex and diabolical that very few of them understood it.
The invitation to return to Liguria as an artist came thanks to the artistic directors of the biennial, but the work that I created took longer to coalesce. Indeed, not till the last moment was I able to see how appropriately the metaphors had come together to address the theme that lodged in my mind more than a year earlier. The title itself came long after I finished the work and left Liguria.
Like its subject, Game is an elaborate installation piece composed of a large, ceramic mural, and a set for a board game with a table and two chairs. In all but one respect the game appears to be chess, with sixty-four alternating back and white ceramic squares and an unusual orange diagonal. Yet, rather than the customary number of game pieces, I have made 101 terracotta figurines instead: the figurines representing neither Kings nor Queens, but the masses of people who presently crisscross the planet; immigrants, refugees, travelers, citizens, every one of them a pawn in an indeterminate, global game in which the real players and referees are opaque or invisible presences beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. In this extraordinary game of power, money, territories and desires, unwitting masses are shoved around, used and abused, disemboweled, evacuated, cleansed, discounted as mere collateral, as necessary and unavoidable casualties. Cultures are uprooted and swept from ancestral land. Populations are displaced and offloaded in cities to roam unhinged and disoriented. Migrants battle ever-tightening borders, relentless and undeterred. And still the masses march, a multitude of pawns, like the crowds in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, undone not by death, but by civilization and progress.
On the ceramic mural there are eight figures, all men, representing the leaders of the group of eight industrialized nations. Each figure is dressed in colonial attire inspired in part by the wall panel art of the Nkanu people of the Congo and Angola (indeed the whole mural draws heavily on Nkanu panels in its general design.) In my research prior to producing the work, I looked for models of African representation of colonialism. Across the continent I found a consistent use of the motif of the colonial helmet, perhaps the most visible insignia of the District Officer who in colonial times represented all colonial authority. In the age of globalization, the received wisdom is that settler colonial presence being redundant it is replaced by remote control of information through global network systems in politics, the market, and the dispersal of humans and resources. However, very recent events in global politics provide strong evidence of the resurgence of settler colonialism. Standing guard over the rest of the world, the eight strong men of the new Empire oversee and manipulate the curious game of global usurpation and domination. Like Caesar or King Leopold, they move their forces wherever they may, occupy whatever land they choose, drive out disagreeable rulers and establish new colonial regimes and armies of occupation in their place. The helmet may be different, but the pattern has not changed. In other words, the motif and metaphor of the colonial District Officer are just as apt and palpable today as they were a century ago.
I produced the entire piece during two working sessions in the Ernan ceramic studio in Albisola, in August and October, 2002. The hundred and one terracotta figurines I made during two days of intense work in the studio in August, as well as began work on the mural. I finished the mural within a few days in October. In addition to realizing the wish to work again in clay, a medium that I have always relished and respected, and even more so to create a work that responds in some way to the experience and feelings generated during my first trip to Liguria, working in Albisola was very memorable in many other ways. I will always treasure the often tense but generous atmosphere working with Ernesto Canepa and his workshop, with Gianna, Annamaria, and Bouchaib, all master craftspeople who tolerated the encroachments on their space, gave advice freely, and worried themselves sick over the fact that I seemed to live solely on Coca Cola and work. Over summer and fall I had a wonderful experience working in Albisola and made new friends among artists I had hitherto only known by reputation. In the Studio Ernan I had a rare opportunity to work together with my friend Bili Bidjocka, an artist whom I greatly respect and whose work I have long deliberated on. On the other side of town I was welcomed into the family studio of Ceramiche San Giorgio where decades earlier Wifredo Lam had worked and there I painted a display ceramic plate while imagining myself in his place. A different generation, a different face, but thanks to the Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art, the spirit remains.
All in all, working in Liguria was an enriching adventure that I recommend for any artist who desires to experience art making in all its deepest facets beyond the packaging ploys of contemporary practice.
Olu Oguibe
Game by Olu Oguibe was made in Albisola in 2003 during the 2nd Biennial of Ceramics in Contemporary Art.
Olu Oguibe, Ceramics in Contemporay Art
Olu Oguibe, Africa at the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art
Conference proceedings Local ceramic traditions and the globalisation of contemporary art
