Considered to be one of Africa’s top three investors, China also has unfettered access to Ethiopia’s natural resources and the negative impacts are already apparent, in terms of their involvement in widespread deforestation, poaching and other disruptions of the valley’s biodiversity.  Indeed, where there were once trees as far as the eye could see, the bulldozer’s claw had already left an indelible scar on the land and its people. The line had been crossed, leaving behind a great rift, with the freeze-frame irrevocably fractured. Of course there is a counter-narrative to this almost dystopian scenario. Some tribal communities, such as the Karo, have embraced the picture painted by the apologists of progress: the lure of electricity, schools, accessible health care, employment opportunities. But for many, the reality is at odds with the official propaganda. To clear the land, the Ethiopian government has embarked on a policy of forced removals to ‘model villages’, where the traditional communities will have to find alternative livelihoods. Most have been relegated to the status of cheap labour on the heavily guarded cash crop farms - the cotton and sugar plantations -that have started to dominate the landscape.  There exists the risk that over ½ million traditional livelihoods have been plunged into crisis and any resistance to resettlement or plantation labour is met with force - a situation that Slingsby likens to modern-day slavery or on the edge of the precipice. It is within this context that we should approach Slingsby’s In/dependence installation. It is a nuanced, meditative requiem encapsulating the devastating consequences wrought by the construction of the dams in the Omo Valley. The funereal references to this remote region also serve as eulogies to the loss of species worldwide and the desecration of nature’s once-inviolable rights. Yet the installation is also infused with preternatural symbols of hope, regeneration and renewal. It comprises multiple components, including a concrete sarcophagus-shaped chest of drawers - a reference to ancient Egyptian tombs - and the structural components of dam building. Strewn on the gallery floor are sprigs of over a thousand hand-blown, yellow glass flowers, reminiscent of those in Slingsby’s photographs of the Omo Valley. Except that the flowers have been made in China, a reference to the commercialisation and degradation of authenticity within the valley, not to mention  China’s growing influence in the region. Slingsby’s choice of materials and media are crucial to an understanding of the contradictory socio- cultural matrix framing his work. Glass evokes the fragility of the promise made by proponents of the dam to deliver prosperity to the now-ravaged landscape. The flowers peppering the region are actually an invasive species that originated in Mexico that has adapted to, and flourishes in, the arid conditions in which few other plants can survive. In bloom they form an exuberant carpet of yellow ; but their seeds are robust, oval and adorned with sharp, vicious-looking, vertical-facing thorns, hence the plant’s infamous name of ‘Devil Thorn’. Slingsby has cast a series of these thorns in bronze - a medium that imbues them with an imperial permanence; evoking the sense of a perilously ’thorny’ future for the remaining inhabitants of the Omo. ‘But one shouldn’t interpret the forms too literally’, Slingsby cautions. ‘They are primarily vehicles of thought, catalysts towards greater awareness of ourselves, the planet and our place within it.

For Slingsby In/dependence does not simply occupy a physical space. It constitutes another, multivalent place of consciousness that demands interaction, navigation and interrogation. The most astonishingly adept component of the installation would be just as appropriately displayed in the Smithsonian institute as an art gallery.  

Slingsby’s research has focussed on the Anthropocene era. This term denotes the geological period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment and the scale of the former’s impact on the latter. These can be gleaned from clues extracted and deconstructed from of the ancient layers of the earth. But his voice is not that of the interventionist; it is the more meditative expression of the artist. And his findings have been rendered in paintings, sculptures and in the case of In/dependence, installations that comprise intricate, monumental and meticulously detailed homages to indigenous societies and their environment. Firmly grounded in his empirical experience of this world, Slingsby’s art is the product of meticulous research into the ancient mark making of indigenous communities who have been marginalised through colonialism, apartheid and – in the case of Ethiopia – economic imperialism. As with his lifelong focus on ancient societies, in this work, Slingsby exposes the ways in which inequality is manipulated, legislated and institutionalised to suit an elite. He confronts the issues of ethnic identity and identity politics, as well as the attendant problems of patronage, and the distortion of good governance. He also acknowledges the inherent instability of fixing or freezing social categories and their susceptibility to the overlapping dynamics of culture, economics and politics. And through his work he expresses outrage at the uneven trade-off between history, identity, livelihood and the often bitter fruits of so-called civilisation which, for the poor and the marginalised, often bring servitude, displacement and the status of exiles even within their own lands. For example, In/Dependence includes rows of cabinets displaying scores of Mursi lip plates. Mursi women are one of the last groups in Africa to cut the lower lip in order to wear large pottery or wooden lip-plates. This occurs when a girl reaches puberty and serves as symbolic rite of passage from childhood to womanhood. It is therefore a signifier of a new identity’ After a year of stretching by inserting increasingly larger plugs, she receives her lip plate fashioned from river clay that seals her status as a mature woman, ready for marriage and child-bearing. But not only does the lip-plate signify womanhood; it also represents strength, self-esteem and unswerving allegiance to their cultural identity.

Slingsby believes that the lip plate binds the community, thereby according significant power in this circular piece of clay worn by the Mursi women. It can be considered the glue cementing the female role as bride and mother, as well as her relationship with cattle and the spirit world.

On the one level this component of the exhibition provides a scathing critique of the fate of the Omo Valley: the decimation of indigenous cultural identity in the wake of land grabs by multinationals and super-powers. All that remains of the once-resilient communities are their lip plates - reduced to the status of relics or artefacts in a museum display cabinet.

But Slingsby’s museological references are deliberately ambiguous. As sterile as these repositories of culture might have become, they nevertheless serve the function of protecting and preserving fragments of history and art that would otherwise be lost. The tragic irony is that the object accrues value and socio-cultural capital only after the annihilation of the societies who produced them. The lip plates vary in size and the intricacy of detail denoting the wearer’s marital status and lineage. Each piece functions as a unique personal and social narrative, much like the bodily scarification practised by both the Mursi and Kara.

‘To the Western eye, they represent disfigurement, but it is through this so-called disfigurement that we learn about their relationship with cattle, each other, their social cohesion and commitment to their community.’ He adds: ’As with all markings of the body, scars or anatomical modification delineate significant intervals in your life, whether they be rites of passage or specific achievements. Like contemporary tattoos each marking tells its own story inscribed onto the skin of its maker.’ Communities “living in different centuries simultaneously” once perceived themselves as existing in the moral and physical centre of their world are witnessing it being snatched from them, reducing them to small, disempowered minorities pushed further onto the edge of society.

Slingsby acknowledges the slippery ideological slopes one encounters when entering this terrain. But he is at pains to underscore his respect for communities who genuinely exist in communion with one another and their natural environment. This has always constituted the nexus of Slingsby’s art: the documentation and depiction of communities struggling to preserve centuries-old ways of life, in the eye of an unrelenting tsunami of industrialisation. Drifting effortlessly between diverse cultures and localities, he has waged an unflinching protest against the rupturing of ancient rites and the scarring of physical spaces while acknowledging the polarities of wounding and healing, desecration and restoration. And in so doing, he advocates for the construction of an alternative global narrative that transcends the power of social control and environmental exploitation, one that serves as a homecoming of sorts - a reunion of the self, the other and the natural world we all inhabit.  

N/DEPENDENCE Hazel Friedman