SonAxis
Comissioned artistic intervention within the collections, exhititions, and history of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May > 6 June, 2021.
The public exhibition was the of a research on the collections, exhititions, and histories of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm 2019-2021. The project was produced by The Museum of World culture as part of the program AFRICA PÅGÅR.
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SonAxis was an artistic research, installation and intervention within the semi permanent, now defunct, so called “ Missionary exhibition” (Missionsutställningen), at the The Museum of Ethnography. It was also in some ways an intervention within some of the core narratives of the Museum of Ethnography in itself, and its intimate relation to the christian missionary movement. But most of all, an intervention within a decolonial there and now in Sweden, summer 2021. The art works within the exhibition are tracking, trapping, slippering, listening, calibrating and negotiating myriad nuances within the blur of desires driving colonizers, ethnographers, and missionaries alike, guided by christianity, commerce, science, in search of the Other, and in confrontation with a revolutionary unconscious.
The project has meant an attempt at tracing steps and records throughout Northern European modernisms, as a cultural heritage of constructions of whiteness. The protestant mission heard and envisioned as a revanchist colonial movement born out of trauma at home. A specific unheimliche/uncanny/hemsökelse complex hidden deep in the logics of inquisition, guilt, sin, and internalised violence. The trauma of a topographic amnesia enforced by a culture of campaigns hostile to anything understtod as un-christian votive musicalities. In particular those honouring rhythm as a means of assembly and emanicipation embodying narratives of tadition and a native common.
We listen our way into a missionary yarning, narrating, within a larger structure as involuntary victims of the dark side of the enlightenment, industrialisms, and the christian re-birth apropriating through bribery within conversion within. The born-agains spawning with fantasies of Africa and Congo as the biblical lost paradise, and at the same time the Scandinavians as the hyperboreean heroic Viking reborn as the civilizing engineer in the quest for universal civilisation. The congo mission conducted as the great sacrifice, in order to exterminate barbary of the sins at the root of poverty and slavery, identified as inferior cultural traits by means of heathenry, and with that allt the vices of infidels. The christian mission a journey between heaven and hell, within as out there.
The protestant missionary strife and struggle in order to shape a new form of christian engineering beared witness to a particular late modernism’s civilising canon. An ambigous movement of sacrifice, charity, under- and overcompensation, at times willfully naive, deaf and blind to the inherent racist structures at the core of christ as a lord of colonial whiteness.
As we came to conclusions listening to a sonorous axis - at the core of the missionary archive taking shape, we heard the christian subject formation as objective tending to, enforcing impossible notions of colonial whiteness. An operation functioning as a key movement at the absolute front line of racial friction, and fiction, and thus also as a practice of bearing first hand whitnesses to anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles.
But.. what is also heard as we navigate the murmurs of it all.. the protestant missionary momentum was, and is, for good and for bad, a movement often led by a deep and heartfelt consern for the fellow man. As such, there has been a lot of truly beneficial results coming out of the trenches, wether intentionally or not.
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Comissioned artistic intervention within the collections, exhititions, and history of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May > 6 June, 2021.
The public exhibition was the of a research on the collections, exhititions, and histories of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm 2019-2021. The project was produced by The Museum of World culture as part of the program AFRICA PÅGÅR.
..........................................................
SonAxis was an artistic research, installation and intervention within the semi permanent, now defunct, so called “ Missionary exhibition” (Missionsutställningen), at the The Museum of Ethnography. It was also in some ways an intervention within some of the core narratives of the Museum of Ethnography in itself, and its intimate relation to the christian missionary movement. But most of all, an intervention within a decolonial there and now in Sweden, summer 2021. The art works within the exhibition are tracking, trapping, slippering, listening, calibrating and negotiating myriad nuances within the blur of desires driving colonizers, ethnographers, and missionaries alike, guided by christianity, commerce, science, in search of the Other, and in confrontation with a revolutionary unconscious.
The project has meant an attempt at tracing steps and records throughout Northern European modernisms, as a cultural heritage of constructions of whiteness. The protestant mission heard and envisioned as a revanchist colonial movement born out of trauma at home. A specific unheimliche/uncanny/hemsökelse complex hidden deep in the logics of inquisition, guilt, sin, and internalised violence. The trauma of a topographic amnesia enforced by a culture of campaigns hostile to anything understtod as un-christian votive musicalities. In particular those honouring rhythm as a means of assembly and emanicipation embodying narratives of tadition and a native common.
We listen our way into a missionary yarning, narrating, within a larger structure as involuntary victims of the dark side of the enlightenment, industrialisms, and the christian re-birth apropriating through bribery within conversion within. The born-agains spawning with fantasies of Africa and Congo as the biblical lost paradise, and at the same time the Scandinavians as the hyperboreean heroic Viking reborn as the civilizing engineer in the quest for universal civilisation. The congo mission conducted as the great sacrifice, in order to exterminate barbary of the sins at the root of poverty and slavery, identified as inferior cultural traits by means of heathenry, and with that allt the vices of infidels. The christian mission a journey between heaven and hell, within as out there.
The protestant missionary strife and struggle in order to shape a new form of christian engineering beared witness to a particular late modernism’s civilising canon. An ambigous movement of sacrifice, charity, under- and overcompensation, at times willfully naive, deaf and blind to the inherent racist structures at the core of christ as a lord of colonial whiteness.
As we came to conclusions listening to a sonorous axis - at the core of the missionary archive taking shape, we heard the christian subject formation as objective tending to, enforcing impossible notions of colonial whiteness. An operation functioning as a key movement at the absolute front line of racial friction, and fiction, and thus also as a practice of bearing first hand whitnesses to anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles.
But.. what is also heard as we navigate the murmurs of it all.. the protestant missionary momentum was, and is, for good and for bad, a movement often led by a deep and heartfelt consern for the fellow man. As such, there has been a lot of truly beneficial results coming out of the trenches, wether intentionally or not.
SonAxis - A Sundi Mongo Stack, 2121, C-Print
..........................................................
>returns
> artworkings, etc
> info
> index
> news
> cv
> contact