Bilongo

 

Bilongo: Sculpture created for Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz's "African Visual Arts in the Americas" class. In thinking about how a white American can use African visual forms without it being the same kind of purely visual appropriation that happened at the beginning of the modernist movement in Europe (Picasso, Matisse, etc.), I realized that the problem is not so much that the visual has been stolen but that we've failed to successfully borrow the spiritual. The western art market is saturated with retouched and faked nkisi, but that appetite is purely for a specific coded vision of the exotic, the other, not for the spiritual dimensions the figures would contain in their proper setting. 

The gesture of Bilongo (medicine), however, is not at all one of the exotic-- quite the contrary, it's a gesture I repeat four times a day, every day, in order to keep myself alive and healthy. In a true mpungu figure, a client would go to a priest (nganga) and ask for a specific kind of healing. The client would then have to gather medecines which would be applied to both the object and the body of the person. The nkisi and the human are conceptualized as the same design: the body and the statue are both containers, inside of which is a spirit. The exterior of the statue is pierced with a nail that has the medicine on the tip, and the medicine is applied to the person's body as well. The nail remains permanently in the figure as a note that the contract occurred (nkisi nkondi, nkondi means "notebook").

In my case, I've reversed the gesture. As a type 1 diabetic, I inject myself with insulin before every meal. The syringes which I've inserted into the statue have already been inside my body-- they delivered the medicine which keeps me healthy, and thus they contain on their tips particles of my skin and blood along with traces of that medicine. A mpungu, like a body, must be cared for and maintained or it can die, lose its spirit. I give my medicine and my blood to the statue in order to note and memorialize the fact that every day I make the choice to continue to care for my body and my spirit, a choice most people are never confronted with but which I feel lets me revel in my life and in the world in a way that people who never examine the failing of their bodies perhaps cannot.