On the lazy Sunday afternoon we walked into the main building in the beautifully ragged Kuona compound. The door was locked, so we walked around aimlessly for a bit. We didn’t mind- there were so many beautiful things to occupy ourselves with.
An artist found us, and eventually the door to the exhibition room was open. There were three installations.
“Just look around and then find us after, so you can speak to the artist.” he said.
The first installation was a queue of torsos in red coats, their insides dark and hollow. There were two wooden enclosure that were reminiscent of voting booths. Within them, stood television sets that looped a series of video clips and images. Red and Blue (the colour of a picture negative) scenes that seemed eerily familiar - campaign rallies, voting, queues, violence. You couldn’t put a figure on why the scenes looked amorphous - like they could be from anywhere. A chilling soundtrack accompanied the video.
A menacing black jacketed torso in the gas mask loomed in the corner, its presence even more dangerous after seeing the images flashing on the screen.
Turning back to the “red coats” you suddenly felt sorry for them, arranged like sardines and placed chest to back. We stood behind the “queue” for a moment and gazed into the space where their hooded faces should have been.
After the experience we had a conversation with the creator of the exhibition, Longinos Nagila.
“What made you do that.” We jumped right in.
He started by saying that democracy was a way of life and not something we should practice under the guise of politics alone. The more he spoke the more you would notice the clipped words, The micro-expressions on his face : a frown, a slight shake of his head.
“In Africa democracy is only seen on election day. There are three stages. The queue, where the voters lose their identity as people and become just numbers on a voter’s card. Then step two is the voting booth. Which is represented by the stations with the TV’s. I picked news clips from different parts of Africa: Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda. The countries have completely different identities but the mode of democracy is identical. You cannot distinguish one country from the next unless you have seen the news stories. The footage is in negative because that’s the stage we’re in: if you take photography processing as an analogy. The footage becomes red when the bloodshed starts, and that’s where we have step three. Upheaval and unrest. Represented by the black figure with a mask.” Nagila explained.
Africa has a history of faux democracies. Coups, stolen elections, a false sense of democracy, where it isn’t an ideal, but a tool to usurp power. Nagila’s message: this three stage cycle must end.
We loved his work, and although he won’t have any more shows within the country, we are highly anticipating his next installation.
