A Conversation with Deborah Stokes, Curator for Africa[dot] com.: Drums 2 Digital

Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins--Is this an exhibition that you developed at the University of Illinois, Chicago?

Deborah Stokes—I teach in the art history department at the University of Illinois, Chicago but the exhibition was actually for Columbia College in Chicago, where I was a guest curator.

LLC—Now, the show has been traveling. Is this the first venue for the exhibition?

DS—This is the first venue for the show.

LLC—Okay, And where else will we see this?

DS—Well, I’m working on other venue dates in the US right now, but I’m also hoping that I can have a satellite exhibition in Kenya. Mainly, I’m working with my friends and colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art RaMoMA, in Kenya. The idea is to have it [the satellite exhibition] run simultaneously; of course it would be a small exhibition, mainly photography. Then we could set up a conversation on the internet or some other technologically mediated way - between students, artists, and others during the run of the two simultaneous exhibits - breaking down the museum walls.

LLC—I was at MoAD for a meeting and when I walked into the gallery, I was immediately taken by the show because OD-CAP’s anniversary upload deals with race and/in digital space and when I saw all of the computers and cellphones I knew that I wanted to delve into how you came up with this idea. Please tell us how you came up with the idea?

DS--It’s an exhibition I had conceived of after returning to Africa in 2005. I hadn’t been there since 1981, when I did my research in Nigeria in south west Nigeria. I was documenting individual carvers among the Yoruba by carving compound and generation and going back again so many years I realized that the transformation of cellphone technology was really amazing. I was working about ten hours out by car near the Ugandan border in a town called Kimilili in the Western Province. Some colleagues of mine have a field school there.

Even in that very remote area cellphones were just ubiquitous, of course with computers the unreliability of electricity has made them very difficult.

There was one computer in town, it was often not up and running but it was there—they had just gotten it in 2004 and the idea of Africa being part of the modern world and Africans part of the of the global community - we are all suddenly closer, distance is dissolving. Being an art historian, I’m particularly interested in the arts of Africa both traditional and contemporary and how they are using technology as a form of communication but also as an artist's medium in video and as a digital code to create artwork among digital artists, etc.

LLC—Yes, I think a lot of people just don’t realize the technology use in African nations because of the type images that we usually see.

DS--One of the ideas behind this exhibition is to challenge people’s preconceptions about Africans—they have computers, they have high rises, they have skyscrapers, they have large cities, they are part of the modern world.

LLC--Yes, one thing that you mentioned is they may not have computers but they have cellphones—cellphone usage is very high. This reminds me of what some of my colleagues who teach in public schools in low-income areas in the US have told me about digital space and their students. They have said that the students may not have personal computers at home but they have cellphones and they are doing all sorts of things with those cellphones, subverting them [for their needs]—an they’ve said that you can’t say they aren’t wired because they are. It’s that they have taken this different instrument and they’re using that because they don’t have the other one at home and they are improvising with this one and making it their own. Yeah. I read where you actually worked with different colleagues to curate this exhibition--was that at the field school?

DS--Well that was just the base when I was there in 2005. I really used the Internet as a curatorial platform for this exhibition. Columbia College was originally expecting to have an exhibition from, I think, Brazil, but it was postponed for a year and they asked me to do an exhibition to fill the void. I could have done one of my usual exhibitions on African beadwork, one of my loves, but told them that I've also been thinking about this other idea on technology and how it’s really changing the social, cultural, and artistic life not just here [in the US] but in Africa and so the theme became communication between Africa and the US for their campus-wide Black history theme. This was relevant and timely for them but I was really slammed up against the deadline because I came back from Africa in July and this was due in February. I was teaching and so I depended on the Internet, list serves, emails, my cellphone.

LL--So you did this digitally on the Internet.

DS—On my cell phone and computer, exactly. And people that I would contact in Ghana would send someone an email in London to contact me in Chicago.

LLC--Isn’t that great?

DS--It was fabulous, and it really just underlines the whole theme and idea for this show.

LLC--You actually practiced what you preached in the show. Another point that I wanted to make is textiles and communication or textiles as communication.

DS--Textiles mostly printed in India, came into the marketplace would be named. For example the cellphone motifs on a type of cloth called kanga cloth in Kenya-- [communicates values, proverbs, etc.] that has eyes and lips relates to the proverb “Eye Sees, Mouth Does Not Speak”. [One example with images of cellphones also has Swahili text that reads: “Stop and criticize someone who is well known to like rumors and gossip!”] Popularized by women, some designs can be veiled comments—like comments about their husbands and something that would not be said out loud! Many of these textile designs are signs of modernization, or as one student viewing the dress said, it means, 'Call me!".

LLC--Is that the same for more traditional designs like drums?

DS—The drum design might mean that the woman’s husband is a drummer or that she comes from a drumming family. When the women in Niger were asked why they wore the cellphone and computers they said that they wanted to show that they were modern citizens—they knew what was going on—a status symbol.

LLC--Because they were moving forward.

DS—Because they were moving forward.

LLC—The telephone wire baskets that are created from South Africa, I saw them in South Africa many years ago but I imagine that they are all over Africa now. One thing that I found with the art of Africa, and certainly we saw this with the wood sculpture and so forth that once something becomes kind of popular then another ethnic group adopts it there [in their own area].

DS--These are distinctly in South African.

LLC--Also using this telephone wire--have you seen it in other baskets?

DS--No but there is in the exhibition a design—they call these spiral designs Zen Zulu and when I was in New York City last summer I saw a Senegalese businessman that was selling sweet grass baskets with the same type of Zen Zulu designs from South Africa. [When asked about them] he said "yes", he saw the designs on the Internet and asked his artisans to make the designs [in their sweet grass baskets]. So they’re going on the Internet the same way we are.

LLC--Many times it’s all about the market place.

DS—Yes the marketplace.

LLC--I’d like you to tell me about the casket with the Nokia cellphone.

DS--The artist who first started to create these coffins is Samuel Kane Kwei from Ghana and he was a woodworker and made cabinetry and furniture. He made the first ones for his immediate family one of his daughter’s husbands was a tuna fisherman so he made him a large tuna to be buried in. Another one fished for some other type of fish so he made another fish coffin for him. Then he started to be commissioned outside the family--the local Ashanti chief wanted to be buried in a Mercedes Benz.

LLC--I remember that one.

DS--It really started to catch on and he would take these commissions. The idea meant something about your success in life, which you could take with you to the after life--to the ancestral life. The idea was that you might even take one of these coffin forms and that it may even help you in the afterlife. For the cellphone coffin, I like to say, what better way to stay in touch with the ancestors - because these are meant to be ephemeral and because that when they are buried of course they degrade and become part of the earth again and so you kind of take that with you and be reborn in the ancestral land - with a cell phone to call home!

LLC--Now this coffin [by Samuel Nartey--he apprenticed for 11 years with Paa Joe (Joseph Tetteh Ashong)] here wasn’t made for a specific person.

DS--No, it was actually commissioned for this exhibition. It actually relates to the video in this exhibition by a performance/conceptual artist who teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, Daniel Peltz. He set up a [community-based] performance piece in the market place in the Cameroon with a sign that said “this is a direct number to God, beep him”, and then he waited for people see how they would respond and if they picked up the phone he had something worked out so that a bell would ring on the wall. He waited after the day was over and met with some of the people that he videoed and talked to them about their responses and their ideas--they talk about the cellphone as a tool in the same way that we use prayer and hymns, and why not the cellphone. They considered, critiqued, and evaluated this idea of drums used as a communicative medium and the cellphones where they beep each other. (In Nigeria and Ghana it’s called flashing). That’s why he titled this piece Beepez-le.

LLC--You know in the African American church there is this song, and I can only remember part of it now—“Jesus is on the main line tell him what you want”.

DS--Oh and I’ve seen cellphones on shrines, exactly, yes, yes, exactly, that is it

LLC--So this whole idea is of being able to communicate with God--tell him what you want and being comfortable with telling him what you want....

DS--Well traditional diviners are calling up clients now and giving them a prescription for something—they don’t have to travel long distances with poor road conditions—you now call them.

LLC--After curating the show and pulling up all of these examples, of what is happening, I ask you, is there a digital divide in Africa? I know there is probably a difference in rural verses urban but the cellphones are out in rural areas too.

DS--I think the idea that Africa is going to be the wireless continent is really where it’s at because computers are going to become wireless and the new cellphones are becoming important because they can access the Internet and that’s what we’ll see--they’ll leapfrog that entire decade of computers.

LLC--Yes, because just reading some of the tech news, in the future computers will become kind of passé and these hand-held devices will be what most every one will rely on.

DS--They already have online banking in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya where they are using the cellphones on a daily bases and kind of just co-op that whole Internet thing, they can just do it on their mobile.

LCC--I’d like to go into the gallery now.

In the Gallery

DS--The reason that I’d like to show this piece, Beepez-le is to bring in African voices, so the artist recreated this piece for the exhibition.

This photograph is by Will Okun, a teacher in the Chicago public schools who won a writing contest with Nick Kristof of the New York Times to travel with him to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda and he took this young man’s picture—but the young man disappeared and returned with his cellphone because he wanted to be photographed with his cellphone—that is so African, so typical that he would want to be seen with something that would be part of his own identity--his cellphone. This is the way he wanted to present himself in the photograph. He represents the digital generation [progress and status] in Africa--this is the iconic piece [of the exhibition].

LLC--Now we're seeing more contemporary African art from many countries but the mainstay is really the classical sculpture and that is what most of the museums have and what they want and what is sought by collectors. This has actually kept Africa in a time warp. I can imagine that doing these types of things [with electronic technology] is something to take themselves out of that, to say we are evolving, we are more complex, and we are moving forward with the rest of the world.

DS--And that’s one reason why I wanted to include contemporary artists and their names.