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| Photo by Max Dereta |
So much have been happening it is hard to know
where to start. Angolan artists in Venice or the lack of the Kenyans? The South
Africans in Basel or Alex da Silva in Rotterdam and his unveiling of his
beautiful work on slavery for Rotterdam Harbour at the Lloyd Pier. This is a
location of Media tycoons who like to inhabit trendy loft apartments in the
converted Wharf. The location is exculsive and the ideal spot to have a Slavery
Monument. Surprisingly, the house prices have risen since the opening, that must
be a first in Europe. The people from Surinam and Cape Verde have, for quite
some time, campaigned for a National Slave Day and July 1st is to become the
Dutch National Day for Slavery and a Nationwide holiday.
On July 1st 1863, exactly 150
years ago, all slaves in Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles were finally
granted their freedom, this was 30 years after the British abolished the trade
and the Netherlands eventually found their moral compass and followed suit;
today, over 80,000 descendents from the Colonial Dutch Caribbean live in the
city of Rotterdam, some are the direct descendants, others are related to the
contracted workers who replaced the slaves after abolition. Other ethnic groups
directly affected by slavery are those originally from the Cape Verdean
Islands, off the West Coast of Africa and Rotterdam houses around 23,000 Cape
Verdeans, one of which is the artist, Alex de Silva. Over the past year or so,
the artist has been in regular contact, feeding in various snippets of news
about the project; the on-going struggles of working to tight deadlines with
the constant pressure of time and finding the right artisans and craftsmen to
construct a monument on this scale and whether or not the different elements
would weld together perfectly. What became
obvious overtime was Alex’s overriding issue and concern of paying significant
homage to the slaves of the past. It has been an honour that Alex has been
generous enough to have kept me so up-to-date at all the different stages of
his project. With the introduction of his first child, his daughter and the new
role of fatherhood, these past two years have seen great personal change in the
artist. This new assignment for his adopted City of Rotterdam is the perfect
time to acknowledge his responsibility as an International Artist but also to
recognize the importance of the age of slavery and what it means to the black
communities around the world. There is a general feeling that the wind has been
taken from the sails of those slave-ships. The history stolen and almost
rewritten - the evidence must bare the test of time and the black communities
must be empowered to record the history correctly.
Initially, Alex had tried to explain his vision for
his commissioned civic statue but it is only now in the latter stages of the
project I begin to comprehend the sheer scale of the project and
start to understand the seriousness of his undertaking. Made out of a series of
welded bright polished steel hand beaten panels, the work stands at 9m high and
5m wide. The work depicts the coming of age for slavery. The beautiful
sculptured stainless steel figures look alien in the Rotterdam skyline and the
abstract minimal ship blends perfectly with the surrounding architecture. At
certain angles the structure becomes almost as abstract as Serra. The work is
entitle "Clave", which is a music note used in many Central and South
American music. The Clave is central to the Caribbean beat and features in the
Salsa, Rumba, Latin Jazz and is the cornerstone of Cuban music in Afro Cuban
rhythm. The work reads as much as a dance as it does a sculpture and hits all
the right notes, as the figures are so perfectly moulded together and shine
majestically in the Rotterdam skyline. Alex
de Silva is the ideal choice and certainly the only artist in Rotterdam that
could have produced such a majestic and thought provoking monument. The subject
matter is truly heartfelt. The effects of slavery are so evident in his country
of Cape Verde as it was an important place for the Portuguese to trade African
slaves with their European partners. Alex de Silva, himself is Creole, a derivative of the verb criar ("to
raise"), which was coined in the 15th century, in the trading and military
outposts of Cape Verde; it originally referred to descendants of the Portuguese
settlers who were born and "raised" locally. The word then spread to
other languages adopted from Portuguese slave traders who supplied most of the
slaves to South America throughout the 16th century, so he is the ideal artist
for this project.
Slavery is a word that can often be simply
thrown away or discarded in some way but in reality this barbaric trade in
human life is far more serious than the Jewish Holocaust. The western world
needs to snap out of its complacency and mark this horrific inhumanity to its
fellowmen and women. To create a monument is a good start but this repugnant
trade in human life warrants more magnitude in order to appease those that have
been directly or in-directly affected and reflect on those that have gained.
Personally, I believe that slavery is a subject that should always remain an
open-sore and the best the world can do is to ensure it rarely becomes
infected. Alex’s grand project is so spectacular and thankfully has been
erected in the perfect location, at the mouth of the estuary leading into
Rotterdam harbour. The work acts a beacon for all ships coming into Rotterdam,
which is the largest port in Europe being part of the Nieuwe Mass (New Meuse),
a channel in the delta formed by the Rhine and Meuse with flows out to the
North Sea on one side and into the rivers lead directly into the heart of
Europe on the other. These rivers include the industrial Ruhr region. Alex’s
work will stand alongside the great work of Russian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine -
De Verwoeste Stad “Destroyed City” a statue depicting the horror of the Nazi
bombing in 1940, created in 1953. Ossip Zadkine, lived in Paris and was a great
influence on the late Senegalese painter, Iba N’Daiye from St. Louis, Senegal
but he later moved to Paris with his wife Francine. There are many similarities
in Alex’s paintings that seem to note a hint of the African Master, Iba
N’Diaye, and their lives slighted echo each other having the duality of the
West African mix and European influence and training. Alex studied at the
Williem de Kooning Academy of Art
and Architecture in Rotterdam in 1999 and a then went to do a Post graduate in 2000 at Minerva Academy, Groningen in
the Netherlands. His new work now becomes as much a part of the cityscape as
other world famous artists such as Rodin, Willem de Kooning and the fantastic
architect, Rem Koolhaas and his iconic landmarks, which have shaped the modern
landscape of Rotterdam.
Of recent times there have been calls for Slavery
Museums to be designed and constructed in every major port around the world. In
August 2007 saw the doors open to the Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. Slavery Museum By
early 2010 Liverpool saw its 1 millionth visitor. The success of this Museum
has filtered over the Atlantic to America and considerations and plans are
being made of building more monuments to honour the Slaves and start to
document the rise of the African throughout the world. It is seen by many that
the African Slave built the Modern World. Today maybe a time for real payback
as each country involved with the Slave Trade should seriously consider
investing and readdressing the issues of slavery. What would be ideal is to
witness a real commitment within the private and public purses and funds
pouring into the construction of Slave Museums. This will have the positive
effect of engaging the black communities throughout the world to participate
and be a part of the mapping of a brand new World. This would not only
encourage engagement but lead to some genuine access to power, which before
now, has been internationally denied. It would also promote a sense of
ownership of a specific history but most importantly, it would go some way of
creating a fairer global society. Black History should not last for just one
month but be more of an annual event, lasting 365 days in the year. By building
these Museums they will essentially start to address and engage the young and
the restless. The Museums should be places where all the members of the world
would want to come as they are dedicated to the rise of the African. Government
and private enterprises should make it their civic duty to encourage their
students or employees to visit the Museums on a regular basis. Many European
countries are facing similar crisis of pockets of society feeling a sense of
isolation and detachment and the responsibility lies in thinking laterally and
starting to rebuild accordingly. For those interested in the rise of Africa,
books should be written and films produced. The subject of slavery could have
such a positive impact on those most ignored and become a booming industry and
a new inventive economy controlled by the disenfranchised.
A surge of Slave Museums have popped up over the
past 5 to 10 years. They seem extremely popular with the public, all of whom
want to enjoy an illusionary moment of freedom but who benefits? The purpose of
a Slave Museum surely is to empower the Black Communities, but instead they are
run by the Establishment. We all know there is money in Slavery but this is
perverse psychology. Slave Museums have opened in Cape Town, SA; Liverpool and
London, England; in the US there is Washington DC, Memphis, Atlanta,
Charleston, Maryland, Baltimore, New Orleans, Alexandria, VA and something here
is not adding up. Africans are yet again denied the power of their past as this
is all to do with ownership, which has always been denied to black people
worldwide, it is as Sir Isaiah Berlin noted, this is a form of what he called
“Orientalism”. Those that write the history own the minds of the people. This
is unacceptable in the 21st Century and needs to be
reconsidered with some join-up thinking. There needs to be links into the
Caribbean to Jamaica, Cuba and Trinidad, to South America to Brazil and Guyana
and to Africa to Senegal, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria to Morocco and Egypt. The
Abolition of Slavery in Mauritania came in 2007. It would be refreshing to see
the Dutch act differently to the US and UK models of Slave Museums.
“The fate of Africa is that after slavery,
colonialism, apartheid and neo-liberal globalization is that Africans are not
agents of their lives. Definitions, agendas paradigms, and perspectives are
still imposed by Europeans and others, who dominate all aspects of the African
reality. Thus the image of Africa, the concepts of Africa imposed on the world
are those created and controlled by non-African forces. Globalization is
therefore not only an imposition of products, but also of ideas and ideals — at
the expense of broader human diversity.”
Africa is the US and Europe’s best kept secret.
These Museums have kept unsurprisingly quiet so that those in the Caribbean and
the Continent of Africa are not aware of the honey-pot that they all have their
paws imbedded in. Who are the West trying to empower but those that are
already established, this is dirty politics at its worst and hopefully the
Netherlands will see the opportunities far clearer, than their international
counterparts.
Author: Joe Pollitt
Here is the video of the unveiling. Superb.
