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To
the outsider, the slo-mo serenity of the Omo River Valley, in Southern
Ethiopia, is rendered all the more acute by its contrast to the
cacophony of a nation hurtling along the highway of modernisation.
Stretching to where the Sudanese and Kenyan borders are literally in
sight, from a distance the region appears pristinely untouched by any of
the accoutrements associated with Ethiopia's industrial revolution. One
of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions,
together with the national parks of neighbouring Lake Turkana into which
the river flows, the Lower Omo River Valley provides a biological and
paleoanthropic treasure-trove, earning it the status of UNESCO World
Heritage site. For centuries it has also served as a conjuncture for
communities traversing the region. About 200 000 indigenous people
belonging to at least 10 cultural groups, have lived and continue to
survive off the earth and river of the Omo basin, as nomadic
pastoralists or small-scale farmers. Yet now, the Omo Valley faces
inexorable changes to both its topography and inhabitants that are much
more than a collision of tradition and technology; they provide a
portent of calamity whose repercussions are as global as they are
regionally specific. It is this combustion of forces that forms the
fulcrum of Robert Slingsby’s In/Dependence installation - the latest
exhibition of this prodigious artist whose oeuvre spans almost half a
century. The ambivalent title is self-explanatory: the notion of freedom
intertwined with associations of control, even enslavement. It is a work
of immense complexity - both homage and epitaph, both a lament and an
impassioned call to action. It comprises multiple components hewn as
much from the intricacies of science, anthropology, ethnology and
history as from Slingsby’s personal cultural observations and
unfettered creativity.
And to even begin to access the layers of In/dependence, we must
traverse the landscape that has inspired it: the Omo River Valley in
Southern Ethiopia. Much has already been publicised about the
construction of Gibe I, II and III - three of Ethiopia’s most
ambitious and contentious hydroelectric projects that began in 2006.
Funded initially by Italy, followed by the Ethiopia government and now
China’s Exim Bank, the dams have already been completed in
Ethiopia’s south-western lowlands. These power stations have replaced
the Omo river’s natural flow cycle with regulated, man-made cycles
that depend on the electricity demands from the Ethiopian grid and its
international connections. But less has been documented about the
effects of this ambitious project to transform a land described by
historian Edward Gibbon as ‘the country that slept a thousand years
while the world ignored it. There is an inescapable symbolism associated
with dams particularly as shrines to development. They are perceived as
pivotal for food security and poverty alleviation, particularly in the
context of climate change and water scarcity. They continue to be
supported by the world's most elite and powerful, who are set to reap
the benefits from their construction. Yet they are equally challenged by
the scientific community, socio-environmental activists and advocacy
groups as a means of centralising the supply of another natural resource
- water - that is coveted and expropriated by governments and
corporations, worldwide.
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In
India, for example, the controversial Narmada dam project has
displaced up to a million people from rural communities who, instead of
benefitting from its liquid largesse have been alienated from their
traditional agrarian habitats and reduced to squatting on the fringes of
cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai.
In the 1950s, the USA-funded dams built along southern
Afghanistan’s Helmand River not only disrupted the delicate ecosystem
and eroded the traditional agrarian economy; they also laid the fertile
foundations for Afghanistan’s most lucrative export: narcotics from
the country’s prolific cash crop - poppy plantations cultivated along
the reconfigured river banks - from which opium and heroin are extracted
.
Defenders of the dams claim that effective hydroelectric
management - whereby the river’s annual floods are smoothed out and
the low flows are increased - will be beneficial to the entire Omo River
Basin. They point to the financial and technological advantages they
will bring to the region and country as a whole. But is this simply a
cynical spin on the currency of power and the power of currency? In in
their semi-nakedness, subsistence livelihoods, nomadic lifestyles and
cultural separateness the tribes inhabiting the Lower Omo Valley along
the margins of Southern Ethiopia - do not conform comfortably to the
narrative of progress. They are caught between conflicting values,
precariously straddling the schism between old and new. Their material
culture and group identities are predicated on and inextricably tied to
the Omo River basin ’s delicate ecology. In fact their very survival
revolves around the annual floods which are needed to cultivate the
riverbanks and herd their livestock, not only for the continuation of
their agro-pastoralist lifestyles, but for their physical survival and
cultural identities, as well. In order to establish and maintain
inter-group boundaries, as well as for aesthetic purposes, the groups
inhabiting the river banks, including the Karo, Hamar, Mursi and Suri,
have also developed distinct material cultures and rituals, derived from
their relationship with the Omo river. These include body modification,
scarification and other distinctive adornments. But these traditions are
now being decimated in a barren, eroded land, segregated by a concrete
stairway of water. And the groups that maintained their cultural
identities for centuries have become pawns in a ruthless geopolitical
game - collateral damage in the neo-colonial war of economic imperialism
waged in the name of progress, profits and power. In order to provide
irrigation for large-scale commercial farming, the dams cut a swathe
through the Omo communities’ grazing and agricultural pastures. The
Chinese have built a road through which to transport their own cargo;
the spoils of cash crop, sugar plantations and desiccated forests. Like
the rest of the continent, Ethiopia is rich in natural resources, which
China’s industrialised, fuel-hungry economy desperately needs.
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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.
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If
we had to allocate an appropriate natural emblem for Slingsby’s
50-year creative odyssey it would be a river, at times ebbing or
meandering, but mostly swelling in rapid, tumbling torrents that slice
through hills and mountains, its currents sweeping up silt, stone and
gravel and offloading them along the riverbeds. And there are two rivers
that form the principal tributaries of Slingsby's trajectory. The first
is the Orange or Gariep
- South Africa's major river that rises in the Drakensberg, among
the Lesotho mountains, where it is known as the Senqu, before snaking
westward into the Atlantic Ocean at Alexander Bay, adjoining Namibia.
The Gariep is Slingsby's River Jordan, his initial site of baptism and
spiritual crossing into the alternative cosmos of ancient societies. It
is a space where, for the artist, water, earth, sky and spirit align.
For several decades, the Gariep’s surrounding terrain - particularly
the Richtersveld, has served as Slingsby’s dictionary, the rocks as
his syntax, while the geometric signs and symbols engraved onto their
surfaces have become the personal alphabet of his visual dialect. The
second of Slingsby’s rivers is Ethiopia's Omo - which he first crossed
in 2013. To even begin to understand his navigation, one must embrace
these two river lands. They signify the junction from one state to
another (both physical and psychic) as well as the re-imagining and
intersection of the African diaspora. Both rivers are emblematic of
multiple territories and identities - personal and collective, past,
present and future. Each waterway represents a channel and a
spatial-temporal continuum. Yet simultaneously both are sites of
displacement, dispossession and calamity, representing stolen legacies.
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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
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