Lampoon, Matthieu with White Cube LR
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When art creates a new economy: the White Cube project in Lusanga, Congo

The post-plantation project by Renzo Martens and the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise – on restitution and new art from the Global South

A space designed by OMA, Rem Koohlaas

The White Cube is an art space designed by OMA (an architecture firm founded by Rem Koolhaas) and commissioned by Human Activities and the plantation workers’ art league Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). Dutch artist Renzo Martens, founder of Human Activities institute, established the art space in 2017 in a former Unilever palm oil plantation in Lusanga, D.R. Congo.  

Why placing a white cube in a former plantation

What is usually a container of art, the white cube, becomes the content itself and thus the object of critic and discourse. «With the establishment of the White Cube, the mechanisms through which plantations underwrite the art world are reversed. The white cube attracts the capital and visibility needed to invent a new ecological and economic model on site: the post-plantation.»

Art is showcased in the White Cube to attract capital and visibility in order to establish a new economy. This economy is one that makes advantage of the logic of the art market and Western museums to acquire capital for the ex-plantation workers for them to buy back their land from international corporations. Indeed, plantations have historically supported the establishment of museums in the Western world (both in Europe and North America), both through wealth, art and culture from the Global South.

Although many museums are now going through the process of decolonization, often claiming to be inclusive for minorities, while not turning their attention to the roots of colonizing behaviors: plantations, which today are still exploited and created to the detriment of rainforests. The cut down of rainforests not only leads to global warming, but also enhances inequalities and gentrification in cities where the money from these plantations are invested in museums. 

When art challenges inequality

Human Activities and CATPC care for reversing the inequality that underpins not only the global art world, but also society at large. Through the white cube in the Congolese plantation, they have been seeking for a new model of economy.

The question of the ethics of art galleries, museums and heritage sites is being posed. Through approaches to art practice and representation, the White Cube explores new ways for art and the art world to act towards real commonality and cooperation with whom some (mis)representations are about and whose culture and art got and still get appropriated by cultural institutions too.

The wealth accumulated din Congo finances Europe, so inequality does survive through European museums. «The repatriation of the white cube to a plantation owned by its workers means that they can decide what the white cube is, for whom it is, and what it delivers. Plantation workers use the capital, visibility and legitimacy generated by the white cube to buy back land and seize the means of production. Art contributes to creating inclusive, ecological, and worker-owned post-plantations.»

The White Cube mimics the apparent neutrality of global museum infrastructures, and being the content itself, it becomes an image signaling globalization. Almost becoming a piece of land art, the white cube both disrupts and regulates the plantation territory. As it aims to repair inequalities where their roots are, the White Cube goes beyond art and mingles with economy and politics. 

Speculation in art and economy

What art and economy have in common is speculation. Indeed, speculation can be a mode of production in art practices, and it refers to the open-ended process of production and conceptual thought behind it. To directly engage with capitalist market logic and economy is a choice Human Activities and CATPC made to test the white cube format and art outside the Western, institutional settings.

In speculative art the value of art and money becomes analogue: transactions generate value for the art produced around the plantation and exhibited in the White Cube and in the art market in general as for money in the financial market. 

Art thus mimics the neo-liberalist market in an attempt to explicit its logic and structure. As in the case of the White Cube, it does so through giving the power to CATPC’s workers to decide what to do with the white cube in their plantation and produce their own art to create a parallel market and capital. Through capital moved by art pieces value, the plantation workers then get the money to reinvest in their action to take their land back, giving life to a circular economy model.

Reparation from the plantation

The community-run white cube thus presents a peculiar example of reparation. The CATPC workers have been trained by artists to create their own pieces of art, mainly through cocoa. The post-plantation – in Renzo Marten’s terms – is a socially inclusive project that aims to revert the mechanism of power and process through using the plantation territory to empower Lusanga’s people both artistically and economically. Critical engagement and artistic experimentation serve as a way to experiment new ways to repurpose the white cube in reparation movements.

Repatriating the white cube in the Global South can thus serve to counteract gentrification and any colonialist behavior and thinking. Local agriculture benefits from this repatriation program as the resources acquired through art are reinvested in the development of an alternative monoculture to decolonize the narrative of the plantation.

The cause of art and earth mingle: the violence of the plantation system is the violence on the culture exploited and caused to repression. Art can thus be used to achieve that «rise in humanity» that Achille Mbembe talks about when addressing the restoration of humanity stolen by racism.

Balot NFT

On February 11th 2022 the first Balot NFT was minted. Using NFTs as tools for decolonization, CATPC ventured into the NFT world and now counts three hundred and six NFTs sold, and three hundred and six hectares of depleted plantation land bought back. Indeed, through digital ownership over their own art, the CATPC claims back their culture, their art, and last but not least, their land. Royalties from releases thus go into «replanting forests, reintroducing biodiversity, offsetting carbon emissions and providing local security.» 

The Balot NFT represents a sculpture carved in 1931 of beheaded Belgian officer Maximilien Balot. It was carved to control Balot’s spirit and make him work for the Pende people, an ethnic group in the south-west Democratic Republic of Congo. Indeed, the real sculpture was created during a Pende uprising against rape and other atrocities brought out by the Unilever plantation system and Belgian agents.

The sculpture is today located in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) and despite the loan requests made by CATPC to exhibit it in the White Cube, the VMFA never answered favorably. Thus, the NFT was made from a photographic reproduction of the sculpture consulted on the VMFA’s website. Buyers of the Balot NFT get a digital rendering of the sculpture and contribute to circulating capital into the community towards their re-empowerment and re-appropriation of goods.

CATPC & Martens’ next exhibitions

CATPC and Renzo Martens have been present together in several exhibitions around the world since 2012. From September 30th 2022 they are showcased in two new exhibitions: The Way We Are 4.0 at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art in Bremen (Germany), and Dream City Festival in Tunis (Tunisia). Martens has indeed developed collaborative works with the plantation workers/artists and brought to light a few films including White Cube and Plantations and Museums.

Narrating through moving images and travelling art pieces, Martens have been capable of circulating the discourse outside the plantation and integrating it in the wider post-colonial discourse. Through this circulation it has also been possible to change the life of the plantation workers through art and its power to attract visibility, capital and legitimacy for people. 

Re-meaning African art in global art circulations

In conclusion, the White Cube brings to the foreground possible new ways to re-signify African art in the contemporary panorama of art and society. A decolonial practice of care and commonality, this is what the White Cube and all the related programs draw. In a world where art and institutions from the Global South are changing their peripheral status into a central one, gravitating all art world towards them, the White Cube project does its part through Martens and the African neo-artists of the CATPC and their logic of creating a new, circular economy through the same capitalist global system that still exploits them.

To turn underpaid agricultural workers into landowners and cultural workers who produce their own art is to re-think cultural production at large as it unveils the contradictions intrinsic to art circulations. As restitution debates flourish in the West and African collections are demanded to be repatriated, the apparently anomalous presence of a white cube in the Congolese plantation says a lot about the West’s status. 

The repatriation of the White Cube

The repatriation of the White Cube, Human Activities and CATPC aim to bring back the privileges associated with the art world to one of the plantations that has historically funded the establishment of western museums, and prove that artistic critique on economic inequality can effectively reverse that inequality.

Ilaria Sponda

The writer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article.

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