IU: Dear Iris, you have been living in Luanda for more than a decade, and maybe it has occurred to you that more than once people may think that you are Angolan. This comes from your ex-
traordinary experience in Africa and your long-
time commitment to Angolan art. Can you tell us of how you came to have this symbiosis with the Angolan art and culture?
IBC: After university I was backpacking in South Africa and met by chance the Angolan artist Fernando Alvim who invited me shortly after to join
Camouflage Brussels with its 300m
2 exhi-
bition space,
Coartnews publications,
Autopsia archive and
Área residency program; it was one of the first art spaces across Europe promoting contemporary art from Africa. My plan was always to do a master’s in art, and as it turned out all these years in Brussels surrounded by African intellectuals and artists, running one of the biggest collections of contemporary African art at the time, was the best MA program I could have wished for.
I wrote my final thesis at the university on rooms of political willingness and what I found in Brussels was a group of Africans trying to make themselves heard in the international art scene, so I joined their cause. Remember that in the early 2000s, for many European curators contemporary African art did not exist. In the meantime, most of these artists and curators who were at the beginning of their careers when they exhibited with us, are well estab-
lished in the international art scene today, for example Otobong Nkanga or Elvira Dyangani Ose. Fortunately, no one doubts 20 years later that a thriving art scene exists in Africa and
its Diaspora.
It is not necessarily in the European educational system where you learn to be seen in the eyes
of the others, where you learn what imperialism did and still does to the concerned societies, which I realized full swing when I started work-
ing in Angola in 2003 as part of the team that set up the first Trienal de Luanda, which in re-
turn produced the first generation of interna-
tionally successful Angolan artists, such as Kiluanji Kia Henda, Nástio Mosquito or Edson Chagas. Now its already the turn of the youn-
gest generation with Helena Uambembe or Sandra Poulson. It feels good to have been
part of the process.
I guess somewhere along the way I became An-
golan too, arguing all these years for the same cause. This is the community I live in, I reflect on, I teach, I share their troubles and collaborate with. Angolan sponsors make my projects possi-
ble. The first collections I sold to are Angolan. Not only once I heard the compliment “You are one of us”, but of course I recognise that my gaze comes from the outside too. So it was right from the beginning a conscious choice to stick with my German surname in the middle as through my work I try to understand the culture that formed me, as well as the culture I live
in now.
IU: The last two years have been challenging for all, not only in terms of health and way of living, but also considering professional perspectives. How did you live this period and do you feel that it left a major impact on your art?
IBC: Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could wipe you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew. Here you very often react to situations that are not foreseeable. Angolan citizens are by default professionals in resilience as crises are omni-
present and manifold: aftermath of oppression and war, neglected infrastructure, health, edu-
cation and administrative services bump into one’s life in the form of traumas, anxiety, missing electricity or water, moon-like craters on the roads, frequent funerals, malaria or yellow fever outbreaks or Kafkaesque situations while doing paper work. Adding the inflation and devastating decisions of the IMF on the country’s economy – here the pandemic is just another addition to the numerous problems the society faces anyway. Only few have the luxury to work from home, so life continues – with restrictions of course – but pretty much the same. A hard lock down is not possible in a country were many live from what they earn in the day, luckily 65% of the population is under 25 that might be the advantage, even though I am pretty sure that mortality rates are much higher across the continent since the pandemic started, but what you don’t count doesn’t show up in any statistics either.
As the 17th International Architecture Exhibi-
tion – La Biennale di Venezia was postponed to 2021, we had luckily much more time in 2020
to prepare our participation
Unfolding urban ambiguities – Prédio do Livro. The challenge was to invent a huge volume with as few weight and transport volume as possible. After numer-
ous tests, I found a solution: for the upper part of the installation I developed a poetic installa-
tion “
Emotions raining inside people’s bodies, flowing down into dreams”, composed out of 8.665 ribbon markers that refer to the (hi)stories and memories of the
Prédio do Livro. It came into being by thinking about all the people who have lived, loved and maybe died in this mod-
ernist building in the shape of a book from colo-
nial time to today. As you mark a page in a book with a ribbon marker, each ribbon symbolizes
a momentum in life.
The only thing we can rely on is the fact that
“all things are momentary and pass away.” Scientists developed a profound understanding of the patterns of change and stability that con-
tinue the universe. From one day to the next,
the water molecules flowing along a river are entirely different, yet the river may stay recog-
nizably intact for millennia. Neo-Confucianism philosophers recognized that all the patterns of the universe ultimately affect each other, just like multiple ripples on a lake intersecting and creating new patterns. Likewise, the ribbons create ripples and patterns, they move and in-
teract like a living organism as the wind passes through them. Movements small or large invite the observer to meditate and dream.
In the end, due to lack of funding, only the
lower part of the project, a light table including a model, was exhibited in Venice, the missing upper part the installation was luckily exhibited during the
Bienal de Luanda: Fórum Pan-Afri-
cano para a Cultura de Paz, in November 2021. Which means, through time and space, in two Biennales, on two continents, the initial proposal came to life.