Ibrahim Mahama
Visual artist and author
Azra Akšamija
Artist, architectural historian, Director of the MIT Future Heritage Lab, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture
Vision for the Next 50
In the Next 50… Cultural institutions are built in to enable people in the global south to interact with each other and preserve their own heritage. They serve as places where people create and preserve art inherited from the past that will pass down to future generations.
In the Next 50… Heritage and art play a pivotal role in giving back a sense of identity and dignity to people who suffered from displacement and violence. Heritage sheds light on marginalized histories and gives those displaced people their voices.
Summary
Ibrahim Mahama and Azra Akšamija discussed the role of culture and heritage to highlight narratives of the under-represented regions. Both address questions of the ethics of preservation and how we deal with multilinear histories of people who have undergone harrowing experiences.
Ibrahim produces large installations to consolidate connection with traditions, heritage, everyday sites and people in Africa. He emphasized the importance of creating a space where artists from the global south can gather and create cultural legacies for the future. Azra shared her passion for building artworks that can give refugees healing, dignity and resilience, ultimately empowering them. Both as individuals and as a part of a global alliance, actors in the heritage sector must reconsider, she said, how to make those displaced people benefit from heritage preservation.
Dialogue
Looking at your work, I am delighted by the sensitivities and the questions within it. I believe as cultural practitioners we are constantly trying to ask questions, and also trying to find ways we can achieve a sense of justice in the way that materials, ideas and information are redistributed within the world.
I was looking at your book Design to Live and it was very interesting, to make a book that looks at refugees taking every-day or discarded objects and using them to design useful things and improve their lives. If someone is a refugee, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to live in a very inhuman way.
One thing I've been thinking about significantly is the relationship between people who are displaced, and also in relation to ecosystems or objects. My last piece in Ghana was in a site built by former Yugoslavian architects in the post-independent era in Ghana, which I had the chance to acquire. We had to exhume the building and we realized there was a huge colony of bats living within this space. The question was ‘Do we get rid of these bats?’ And we made the difficult choice of leaving these bats in the space. So we had find ways we could feed the bats or redesign the space to allow them to live more fruitfully within this space.
So, my question is, in trying to produce objects that can allow people to live within new spaces, how as architects and also as artists and practitioners, how do we extend that beyond the human, into the objects themselves – what is our relationship with these objects that we are making, in the context of this world that we are creating them in?
Well, I think we’re all embedded in deeper histories and a cultural context in which we live, so regardless of what we make, we’re always building on top of experiences and knowledge that were pre-existing in society. All that surrounding us, the culture, the exchanges, the handed-down knowledge, informs our making. And at times the informed knowledge has its own baggage, and so I think for us artists and architects, especially people who are trained or dedicate their time to reflecting more deeply on that production, it is a task to think about what exactly is being reproduced and to what end are we making these things. And what kinds of narratives are being perpetuated out of these artefacts? What are the power dynamics that come with them and what is our role in them? I always ask myself that because, as you know, as you're moving to different locations working on your own work but also studying other people’s cultural heritage and practices, this is really an important question.
What do you think about this? You work so often with found objects and transform them into large-scale installations. Could you talk about heritage and how that interaction with not just the material but the site also informs the contemporary expression and contributes to safeguarding that heritage you work on?
When it comes to heritage, I've always found different ways of interpreting it. So for instance, when we were in school, one of the big questions was how as artists, and not even just as artists, as cultural practitioners, because the artist label can have baggage, which allows you to think that you already understand art and its role and you try to produce art, whereas we are not trying so much to produce art, as we are trying to let art, the history of, lead us in many possible directions. So for instance, the building that I was talking about, the idea was to exhume, to take soil that was embedded within this building for years, and to realize that each and every single constellation within these spaces was of a significant cultural heritage, even the soil that was in the ground. And by exhuming the soil from this space, it somehow allowed us to come back to this concept of the void, in a more philosophical but also in a very material sense. And that could lead us into these forest spaces, sacred lands in and around Ghana. For instance, in the north where historically there were kings and tribal leaders buried in these spaces. You find certain types of trees that were planted within these spaces, and people there believe that maybe the spirits of their ancestors dwell in these plants. So these questions for me were very important, as to how they influence people living within those spaces from one generation to the other, and from a more ideological perspective such as regarding climate change, they are not cutting the trees within those areas because they believe that there's some kind of proximity to the spirit.
I thought it would be interesting to draw that to the issue of the contemporary, because in contemporary art, there's always this kind of disconnect to historical forms and also historical traditions, as to what we consider to be heritage.
For me, it’s very interesting for us to be able to create connections between different timelines and within these connections you can find everyday sites, forest areas and all kinds of other spaces that do speak to us within that.
I have an image of the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan called Azraq where you see a replica of the World Heritage site of Palmyra, replicated in a contemporary form through pieces of cement the person has found in different locations. I'm bringing this into this conversation because I think both your and my work touches on questions of the ethics of preservation – what exactly is being restored and how we deal with these multilinear histories, but also displacement and violence imposed on people and their heritage, and how that is brought up by contemporary forms. So here is such a powerful example of a contemporary form that for me sums up in a nutshell what the preservation of cultural heritage should be about. It’s a form of cultural shelter. You see the background with these standardized shelters of humanitarian aid that are functional, but they are meant to function in terms of efficiency to provide a roof above the head and safety from weather and from violence. But the other part of the shelter, the emotional and cultural dimensions are neglected in many cases in refugee camps, and in the humanitarian sector. And for people fleeing from war and violence, when they get stripped of their memory, identity, history, and they become a number in this vast place that is seeing them in terms of ‘I need to give you food and shelter and that is your life’, heritage provides a sense of dignity. You can see it in this image with this person. They have nothing to eat, their future is in peril, but they're building this thing in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert. Why? This image tells us what is really important for people is also this sense of identity and dignity. Heritage preservation can play an important role to address these people’s healing, for example, and also to inspire future generations to go back or connect.
The question of finance and economics is also at the very heart of all this. It's a question I’ve always asked myself when I was working, because most of the problems we have in the world come down to economics.
As architects and as artists, do you think that we have a much greater role to play? Do you think that we need more alliances between cultural practitioners?
There are many existing global alliances, but I guess it’s a question of what can you do as an individual and what can you do in alliance with other people? I think as individuals, experts in cultural production, artist, architect, heritage preservationist, there are many things one can do to elevate the voices of those who are not heard and to make things visible, to uncover certain histories that have been downplayed and marginalized. To be heard and to make others be heard is a skill we get trained in, as well as the power of image. It's not about aestheticizing the story, but it's really about bringing the voice out and making things visible, and then also making it intelligible for policymakers, for people to appreciate and understand. it’s important to talk about heritage, as they may ask who cares, or who benefits from its preservation. I think we need to be speaking to each other and checking each other also in terms of ethics of practice -- what biases and power dynamics are we bringing in as people engaged in the field.
Thinking about the future of heritage, especially for those of us creating artefacts at present, it’s about thinking what might become heritage in the next 50 years. What does that mean, thinking with the paradigm of environmental consciousness and global community consciousness and how my consumer behaviour impacts someone in a very remote part of the world. I think as individuals, this is where we can play. But of course, global alliances and forums like UNESCO are important. You founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art where Ghanaian artists can explore their mediums freely. Maybe you can also talk about that centre in relation to its global mission.
I started thinking of the concept of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art as a student, from a Marxist position, taking the idea of equality as a starting point and also the idea of redistribution through the work that we do. How do we, as artists, become cultural agents who constantly think about precarity, Globally, all of us are inherently in a precarious situation. People always think ‘we are a first world country, and these people are the ones who are suffering.’ No, the world has been in a lot of trouble for many centuries. We’ve had two world wars, a Cold War, famine and hunger, many different forms of crisis within that time. So as artists, if we have the chance to produce work we know can influence society, how do we do it? And for me, and for my generation coming from university, we thought that social infrastructure was one thing that was important. So building an artist’s studio that acts as a place where preservation and all kinds of things happen.
For instance, we've done retrospectives of older artists, and those retrospectives are almost seen as archaeological excavations, because you have artists who've spent their lives producing ideas and knowledge forms, but due to lack of state support in building cultural institutions, none of these things are ever understood or transmitted to other generations. To create this kind of cultural and heritage relevance, I thought it was important to create this space that would allow another generation to inherit something from the past, but at the same time, use that as a portal to create something for the future. Because we are from the global south, most of the work we do ends up in Western institutions. So you go to the museums in the west and you find that they have collections from all around the world, but on the continent, you can barely find contemporary art or modern art.
It’s important to start building our cultural legacies by building institutions that preserve the life's work of artists from the very beginning. So that in the next 5,000 years, when we are no longer there, at least by then, in the future, we will have created these cultural institutions.
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Five dialogue sessions covering five themes take place in 2022, each joined by thinkers in paired dialogue from diverse regions. The interdisciplinary dialogues inspire new visions for the next 50 years of World Heritage.
