A tale of two artists

It is a Saturday morning in late February, at an artist’s studio – more mechanic’s workshop really – 10km from Marrakech. All is peaceful; the pack of wild dogs whose howls punctuated the previous night are sleeping; the only sound is birdsong. At least until the hammering begins.

That hammering, of mallets on copper plate, is the sound of Congolese artist Sammy Baloji’s latest project being constructed. It is a dome – a replica of a church in the Belgian city of Liège – which is being fashioned by a group of Moroccan craftsmen who work in the atelier of another artist, Eric van Hove, a friend of Baloji’s. Rarely have so many artistic tributaries converged, washing across this fertile Moroccan plain.

Baloji was born in Lubumbashi, the biggest city in the mining province of Katanga in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1978. He now lives in Brussels with his partner and boisterous young son, but his heart – and his artistic head – remain in the DRC. Congolese life, history and politics underpin all his work, and his dome – an exhibit he is preparing for the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale – has many complex meanings.

He established himself with a series of collages which juxtaposed photographs of labourers in Katanga at the turn of the 20th century, enchained (often literally) by their Belgian masters, with recent photographs of the province’s decayed industrial landscape. “I felt the story of the colonial period hadn’t been told,” he explained when we first met in Brussels in December 2014. “It was never taught in our schools. Even now you can find people in Katanga who will say the colonial period was better than the present. When I saw the archive pictures, with workers in chains, they shocked me.”

But his photomontages were as much about the present as the past. “Looking at the city in 2004 the country had been almost destroyed,” he said, “and I was asking myself why. We were independent, we were rich in minerals, what had happened? We could say it was the fault of Belgium, but they hadn’t been there since 1960. What had we been doing since then? I was trying to show the two systems side by side. Under the Belgians there were masters and slaves, but maybe it was still the same. There are politicians and the population, and the population are slaves. Nothing has changed. You have corruption and foreign corporations that make their own rules.”

At that first meeting, Baloji was already halfway through his mentorship with Olafur Eliasson, the celebrated Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist. The mentorship had come at a critical moment for Baloji: the series of collages which had established him was done; his son had been born a few years earlier, so he was more tied to Brussels (where he had first come on a residency at the Tervuren Museum in 2010)than he had previously been; he was facing the question “What next?”

He knew what subject he wanted to take on – colonial exploitation and its legacy, a continuation of his photographic series. He had ideas, too, of the materials with which he wanted to work – Congolese textiles seemed the most likely way forward – and of the connections he wanted to make between their geometric patterns and the way African cities, including Lubumbashi, had grown (organically, one cell producing another, unlike the regimentation of the districts the colonisers built for themselves in Africa). But nothing was settled; artistically, everything was in play.

What would Eliasson, who runs a large studio in Berlin with 80 staff, have to say to an African photographer who was just making his way in the art world and didn’t even have his own space in Brussels in which to work? How could he guide Baloji at this critical juncture in his career? Those were the questions uppermost in my mind when we first met at his private office in a suburb of Copenhagen – a white-walled shrine to art and contemplation that was so quiet it made my ears hurt.

“I chose Sammy because his idea of working was at a very early stage of gaining a formal language, but it taken directions that I thought were inspiring,” explained Eliasson. “He had chosen certain trajectories and was still working on giving those trajectories form, but I could see that it was interesting. It was not a traditional white cube trajectory; there was a non-careeristic element to it that was fascinating. His work did not in any way suggest that the market would carry him to success, but it had the potential to be really strong with or without the market.”

Eliasson was also attracted by the way Baloji had “taken upon himself the role of communicating art – organising exhibitions, making books, all the surrounding activities you have to engage in as a young artist”. Baloji had co-created an art biennale in Lubumbashi, and was, Eliasson said, thinking both artistically and pragmatically. “He was dealing with difficult questions of making such an event happen in a place where culture is very marginalised, and was very well balanced in his respect for both the art and the city. I thought that was very rare and important.”

Eliasson selected Baloji from a shortlist of five, but, as with many of the mentors, made it clear at the outset that this was to be a non-hierarchical relationship; he was seeking an exchange. “I was not only interested in being the one who gives,” he said. “I also wanted to be the one who takes. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.” Nor was he looking to change Baloji. “I’m not there to tell him what to do. I’m hopefully helping him to look more closely at why he is doing it. When making art we ask ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ Artists often forget the why and go directly to how, and then they become formalists. They have high skills in how, but eventually it becomes clear to everyone that the why is missing.”

He felt Baloji had a “strong instinctive or intuitive relationship with why”, but that their relationship might deepen it, not least by encouraging him to experiment. “Art is about being precise,” he said, “but how does one measure precision and how does one measure quality?” The science of art. Though Eliasson saw himself as partner rather than teacher, it was evident he would subject Baloji’s critical thinking to serious scrutiny.

Three months later in Marrakech, after mentor and protege had had a series of meetings in Berlin and Copenhagen, the seminars seemed to be having an effect. Baloji had winnowed down the range of possibilities he had been considering in late 2014, and embarked on the copper dome that he would show in Venice. The dome was his first installation, and it was very ambitious, constructed from more than 50 copper panels on each of which was superimposed the image of a scarified body taken from a book he had unearthed during his extensive research of Congo during the colonial period.

The way he was using scarification – the etching of a pattern on to the body, a practice common in Africa in the first half of the 20th century – was complicated. Baloji saw it as integral to an individual’s culture and sense of identity, a sort of map of the personality, and in turn linked to the patterns Africans imposed on the cities they built, which were more organic and geometric than the regimented districts built by the colonisers. The church in Liège, a memorial to the western dead of the first world war, had been built in the 1930s with copper brought from Katanga; by building a small-scale replica with copper panels decorated with images of scarified bodies, he was engaging in an act of reclamation, almost a reverse colonisation. “There are seven memorials to the western war dead in Liège,” he said. “This will be an eighth memorial – to the African war dead.”

How had Eliasson influenced him? “He didn’t tell me which direction I should go in,” Baloji explained. “Instead, he showed me how he worked and encouraged me to find my own way through. He said there was no rule: you had to try, to experiment. He told me I had to find ways of bringing my research material into the art field. I had to be both artist and archivist, but the research shouldn’t overwhelm the art. It’s not a historical document. I am using things that belong to the past, but it’s about now. I am looking for traces of power relationships in society. Olafur’s work makes a physical sensation on the audience; mine is more intellectual. But I have to be careful not to make it too boring [he laughs as he says this]. It’s art, not a history lesson. He is pushing me to be an artist rather than a documentarist, to explore and to work without self-imposed restrictions. Maybe the time I am spending with Olafur is my art school.”

Eliasson divides his time between Copenhagen and Berlin, where his main studio is housed in a former brewery in the trendy and rapidly gentrifying area of Prenzlauer Berg, a mecca for artists, designers and fashionistas. There in April 2015, a month before the opening of the Venice Biennale, Eliasson and Baloji met to pore over photographs of the completed dome, which was still in Morocco while Van Hove worked out how to transport it by land and sea to Venice (an odyssey which itself promised to be an artistic adventure), and to assess how far they had come together.

“Our encounters have been short but intense,” said Eliasson. “The more often you meet, the better you get to know each other and the better sense we get of each other’s language. It’s a little bit like a forced marriage.” He was anxious to downplay his contribution to Baloji’s evolution, and the latter’s willingness to leap from photography to installation. “Sammy has changed over the course of our time together, but not because of me,” he insisted. “He was already changing.” But Baloji was having none of it. “He showed me other approaches,” he said. “It was not just a case of listening.”

Baloji has a quiet determination and steeliness, but my guess is that the 48-year-old Eliasson – fond of extravagant theorising, used to creating grand artistic concepts such the Weather Project at London’s Tate Modern in 2003 and the New York City Waterfalls in 2008 – added a layer of ambition, confidence, almost abandon. You are an artist – create art! Even your ferreting out of facts in dusty archives is the work of an artist if you deem it to be so.

Eliasson has no doubts about the power of art. “Politicians they come and go,” he told the film crew that was also tracking his relationship with Baloji. “Who will be remembered at the end is always the artists.” Conceptual art is about rethinking and remaking the world. “Being an artist is a responsibility that stretches through everything one does,” he said emphatically.” By now, he was in aphorism overdrive. “Sammy’s work is not about something,” he said, “it is the something. Art is a reality machine, and making an exhibition introduces critical tools to the world.”

In reclaiming past lives and past identities, Eliasson argued, Baloji was not just creating provocative artworks but forcing the viewer to rethink history. Art was not just an aesthetic statement; it was a revolutionary act. If this was Baloji’s art school, it was a wonderfully bracing and challenging one. Dangerous, too, as once we had finished talking Eliasson picked up his longbow – he likes the concentration archery demands – and started firing arrows at a target on the other side of the studio, narrowly missing expensive artworks en route. “When I hit the bullseye,” he said as the arrows peppered the target, “I always put it on Instagram.” It was a pleasingly surreal end to an energising artistic journey.

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