It’s a post-plantation future

From the sidelines of the prosecco table at the Dutch Pavilion, I watch artist and worker co-op, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) perform a musically and visually stunning Congolese dance in front of a blur of beige burberry coats.

Bleary eyed, a familiar discomfort creeps over me. The persistent problem of trying to practice my anti-capitalist, anti-racist, de-colonial, abolitionist politics whilst being a living breathing person in the world. A life sentence of hypocrisy.  At the Venice Biennale Vernissage event I feel this with the sharpness of a razor blade on freshly set jelly. I’ve traveled 14,000 air miles, and I did not fork out the extra $75 to offset my carbon emissions. I can barely afford my airbnb but I’ve packed the most expensive items of clothing I own in an act of vanity, to blend in with the rich and famous Vernissage crowd (it doesn’t work). I’m overwhelmed by the spectacle of money, it smells like designer perfume and looks like freshly cut hair. The representative members of CATPC at Venice are acutely aware of the voyeurism enacted by the crowd and the mechanisms of othering at play. Dressed stylishly with popping bright colours and accessories crafted in Lusanga, they skillfully and confidently dance.

The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred is made by CATPC, brought to Venice by Commissioners Renzo Martens and Hicham Khalidi and exhibited at the Dutch Pavilion inside the exclusive pavilion gardens of the Biennale Giardini. It cuts to the bone of the power dynamics and inherent hypocrisies of blockbuster biennales, and their collusion with (unjust flows of global capital, material and symbolic) the current colonial capitalist regime. Inside the pavilion are large figurative sculptures in Cacau and Palm fat. Beautiful, gruesome and animated, these ornate sculptures present symbolic and mythical beings. I walk into the space by chance, without prior knowledge or context; there is a smell to the sculptures, not unpleasant or unfamiliar, but I can't place it. They are brown and glossy, the material has an alluring richness and an abject quality I think of as ‘sexy ugly’. I’m obsessed. I want to devour the sculptures, or maybe possess them. I learned later that the sculptures were made in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo from local river clay, translated into 3D printed molds, then remade in chocolate sourced from the tons of millions of which come through the major trade port of Amsterdam each year.^[1] The sculptures then traveled to Venice, another wealthy city which once hosted the largest trading port in the world.

The performance is over and CATPC are addressing the suede loafer crowd. They explain that the exhibition is part of a larger project to reclaim their culture, their land, and their self-determination. They tell us they have a white cube gallery in Lusanga (designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), founded by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) and they are leveraging their international art profile to buy back stolen land to create a ‘post-plantation’.^[2] Exhibiting at the Venice Biennale has given them the cultural capital required to get the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to return a precious and culturally significant power effigy Balot; a wooden sculpture of Belgian Colonial Officer, Maximilien Balot who was killed as retribution^[3]. Alongside the sculptures is a film titled The Judgment of the White Cube (2022) which theatrically depicts the white cube being trialed for extracting resources under colonial-capitalism^[4].  There is also a livestream between the white cube in Venice and the White Cube in Lusanga, showing the sculpture Balot in its rightful home and connecting the wider plantation community who lack the visa, time or means to travel to Venice.

My eyes narrow and lips curl when I realize The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the sacred is a collaboration with well known white Dutch artist Renzo Martens. The name sticks like mud. I’m time traveling back to 2014. I'm a student in one of Melbourne's major art schools. I'm using performance in my work to explore post structural theory (or so I thought). My art is a bit too earnest for the fashion at the time. My lecturers, all white, mostly men, try to steer my performance art in the direction of clever acts and socially engaged gestures. Several lecturers have high profile ‘decolonial’ practices and would not, or could not, examine their own positionality within their work. “Why don’t you look at Santiago Sierra's work?” they say. Of course it couldn’t be morally reprehensible, if my teachers, who were much smarter than me, were championing it. Have you watched ENJOY POVERTY 2010, they said? Brilliant, I thought, Renzo Martens is reflecting the West's fetishisation and consumption of images of poverty in Africa back unto itself. What a neat little parcel critiquing capitalism just like Santiago Sierra’s tidy capitalist critiques, I thought. Ten years later, the name Sierra is interchangeable with words like exploitative and unethical. ENJOY POVERTY was successful, controversial and great for Martens’ career. It did nothing for the malnourished children he exploited in order to make a clever capitalist critique. In this way, Martens’ practice tracks how discourse has shifted since my uni days, and thankfully, it is far less acceptable for white/settler artists (or anyone) to speak on behalf of communities that aren't their own – or to make extractive socially engaged work (I wish I could say it no longer happened).

While Martens exemplifies the tricky mess of white artists making decolonial work I actually don’t think he is a very important or interesting part of the conversation. CATPC has created a grass roots initiative from self determination that overshadows any academic appraisal of socially engaged practices. And it is CATPC who I want to hear from. They remind us that, “ for the most part, it’s us who are making this project happen. We take our destiny into our own hands.”^[5] Their sculptures too, speak in complex and dynamic ways of loss, grief and hope in the face of gross injustices from ongoing colonial processes. CATPC’s vision of an ecologically and financially sustainable post-plantation future hinges on the restoration of stolen land, getting to the heart of Indigenous sovereignty. CATPC’s post-plantation vision is part of a transnational, intersectional and transformative Land Back movement working towards the urgently needed decolonisation of our systems, structures and our thinking.^[6] This urgency has never felt more pointed as the world watches the genocide of Palestinian people and theft of their land as part of the Israeli colonial expansion project.

Here in so-called Australia, where the fundamental objective of the settler colonial project has always been, and continues to be, access to and ownership of land and resources, Native Title and Land Rights policies have failed our First Nations communities.  Like CATPC, Nēwara Aboriginal Corporation have taken destiny into their own hands bypassing the settler state to reclaim their traditional lands, with a successful crowdfunding initiative resulting in the purchase of 240 hectares of land. “Buying land outright means self-determination. We can do what we like with it.”^[7] Dave Widders, Anaiwan man.

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