The Re-Mediation of José Redinha's Paredes Pintadas Da Lunda

Accessing the Ancestors: the re-MediAtion of José redinhA’s PAREDES PINTADAS DA LUNDA Delinda Collier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Alguém varreu o fogo “virgin discs” was saving the Chokwe culture from a minha infância demise at the hands of the Chokwe themselves, e na fogueira arderam todos os ancestres. who, according to him, were discarding their heritage in favor of “newer” musical forms. They (Some fire swept through were denying the traditions of their ancestors, an my childhood ironic characterization of the upheavals that took 1 and the fire burned all of the ancestors.) place in the Lunda region during the rise of the —“Terra Autobiográfica” mining industry and colonial conflict—after all, by Francisco Fernando da Costa 80 percent of Diamang’s workforce was Chokwe, Andrade a large portion of whom were conscripted by the colonial government.3 Vilhena explains that the Dundo Museum was the first line of defense in saving tangible and intangible Chokwe culture. Júlio Vilhena, scholar and son of the then The company’s last resort, he says, was the use Delegate Administrator for the Companhia de of phonographic discs and other media objects Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), wrote an article to record analogical information that could pass for the Journal of the International Folk Music Council through and out of these tropical conditions in 1955, in which he presented a folklore project and into the ether—the non-place safety zone of the Dundo Museum in Lunda North, Angola. of storage media. He comments on the logistics of recording folk Diamang built the Dundo Museum in 1940s songs and oral culture among the ethnic Chokwe and it became the ultimate apparatus to store residents in the region, stating, information about what they called “life” in the Lunda provinces, and then to transmit that In the future a tape recorder will be used information to the Chokwe and around the for this work, which will give greater world in the form of “education.” Under the mobility, as it will avoid the transport directorship of José Redinha, from the 1940s of the voluminous and fragile stock of through the 1960s, the museum collected and virgin discs in the conditions of travel exhibited thousands of objects, choreographed 2 prevailing in the tropics. cultural events, exhibited photographs of chiefs and political leaders, and hosted scholars from The excursions Vilhena describes included around the world, who published an impressive tents, trucks, and generators that were all subject corpus of scholarship on the Chokwe and other to heat, bad roads, and humidity. However, for native Angolan populations.4 Most of the research Vilhena, this process of etching Chokwe voices into was published in Diamang’s Cultural Publications Critical Interventions 9, Spring 2012 ACCESSING THE ANCESTORS 11 series, of which there are 89 volumes.5 This essay in the Lunda provinces—what they termed will focus on one of those publications and its Scientific Colonialism—producing knowledge subsequent adaptations: José Redinha’s Paredes that encompassed studies of botany, biology, Pintadas da Lunda (Painted Walls of Lunda) (1953). zoology, and medicine, and stressing the re- Paredes is a compilation of Chokwe hut murals education of the native population.6 In the that Redinha collected between the years 1939 decades following its publication, a generation and 1943. Using photography and watercolor, he of anti-colonial artists began to look at Paredes copied the images from huts primarily around with the intent of re-mediating its images, mostly the Chitato district of the Lunda Sul province in paintings, to serve the growing independence of northeastern Angola, 10 km from the city movement and to repatriate Angola’s indigenous of Dundo. Bertrand Brothers, Inc. of Lisbon, visual heritage. In some cases, Redinha himself specialists in typography, printed Paredes with mentored these artists. its 102 color plates. Redinha replicated the The idea that native art operated by a murals as closely possible, even using the same disinterested autonomy was attractive to anti- pigments and binders as the Chokwe artists. As colonial Angolan writers and artists before and after he did with the maps and sketches he included Angola’s independence in 1975. The most famous in publications and company reports, Redinha poem by Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto, signed each watercolor as if it were an original “Havemos de Voltar (We Shall Return),” uses the work of art. This case study attempts to unravel trope of “return” to the land, the ancestors, the the march of mediation and its painful digestions minerals, and the culture as the ultimate act of using three moments of Paredes: Redinha’s initial activism.7 Scholar and visual artist Manuel Vitor intervention into the artistic practices of the Teixeira, or Viteix, researched Chokwe art as a Chokwe, the book’s publication and circulation, similar nationalist return to primordial Angola. and its re-mediation by two recent online heritage He was an activist-artist before independence and projects. Within this essay, Parades acts as an object a cultural administrator for the Marxist-Leninist of media theory and history, bridging the pre- Movimento Popular da Libertação de Angola colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in (MPLA) government after independence. For Angola. him, accessing and nationalizing the writings of Paredes is a colonialist object par excellence. Portuguese anthropologists was a revolutionary Its publication by Diamang occurred within a act, a return to the ancestors ghosted by the bounded situation, as Diamang was a hermetic Portuguese. In particular, Paredes was an important and hierarchical company, a geographically resource for artists who wanted to learn about isolated organization, and a total project of and use Chokwe images in their easel paintings. control. Often called a “state within a state,” By resuscitating native methods of mediation, Diamang maintained health services, agriculture, as Viteix’s reasoning went, contemporary artists a radio station, museum, and a hydroelectric dam, freed the colonial stranglehold on African and by the 1950s it was returning enormous communalist art and society, concurrent with a profits to a cadre of international investors, as Marxist restructuring of the state. In other words, well as the Portuguese and colonial Angolan re-mediation is remediation: an improvement of governments. In its many activities, Diamang a technological medium, as well as a societal measured and controlled every aspect of life correction.8 Interventions 12 Collier It is important, then, to be specific about how aesthetic and archival. Redinha’s signature was Redinha disallowed for innovation within Chokwe digitally removed from the images in order to art, and particularly his position concerning the “repair an injustice” done to the Chokwe artists, recursive logic of many Chokwe art practices, in that they were unnamed by Redinha. For their self-referentiality, and interactivity. For it both projects, visibility and participation were was his appraisal of Chokwe art as static and the guiding principles. The latter part of this obsolescent—which was demonstrably politically essay will argue that the democratic gesture of motivated—that Angolan artists desired to removing Redinha’s signature operates on the negate. In this essay, I will repeatedly, sometimes interface of a complex geopolitical system of allegorically, refer to a Chokwe practice that most media objects, flows of information and capital, clearly performs the tension between system and power plays that are obfuscated with each act and agency: sona. Sona is a drawing performance of digital mediation. that has a very clear and open logic, which is These projects give us pause to consider articulated by its practitioners, but is incrementally the colonialist structure of media themselves, complex and closed to non-practitioners. As such, particularly the myth that “native” media and it contains within it a theory and method of their logics are unconsciously self-organizing, pictorial representation and, in the larger scheme, analogical, and “real,” as opposed to colonialist it mediates assertions of power and conceptualizes media, which are artificial projects of rationalistic societal progression. For instance, sona instructs control and surveillance (digital).11 Rather, that boys as they are initiated into the mukanda rite at which passed through the signifier and into a puberty, where they are instructed for a period technological medium with colonization was of time on rituals, history, and the production of not any primordial real presence of the Chokwe objects, such as masks and figures, which mediate ancestors, but Chokwe media that likewise communication with the ancestral spirits.9 Sona is negotiated conceptions of the ancestors and a scalar, self-perpetuating system, like cybernetics, their protocols of access. It is clear that sona and like cybernetics, the reception-transmission went from a land-based medium to a more process is where meaning and its translation into mechanized medium that privileged information material authority is negotiated. This autonomous and opticality, its materials and logics much structure of sona, as well as its manipulation and more dispersed. However, even within Chokwe potential for usurpation, will be an important link media practices, materials and logics are used to to the discussion of the two recent digital projects obsolesce previous media of transmission and to

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