Seminars

Restitution has become one of the art world's most celebrated, albeit controversial, narratives and few events made this as visible as the 60th Venice Biennale 2024. At the Dutch Pavilion CATPC (the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League) and the Dutch artist Renzo Martens caused a stir with a work realised with curator Hicham Khalidi. Since 2014, Martens — director of the controversial film Enjoy Poverty — has collaborated with CATPC on projects that address plantation labor as the obscured source of wealth underlying museum architecture and collection-building. In Venice The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred documented the return of the so-called Balot statue, which is associated with the 1931 Pende revolt against colonial exploitation. Through performative mimicry, the work staged a homecoming for its Western audience — of a sculpture that, in fact, did not come from Lusanga in the first place. The paper revisits the work's widely acclaimed reception to ask what made its narrative of return so persuasive — and for whom. It explores how the discourse and struggle for restitution travels globally and takes shape locally in postcolonial struggles for identity, authenticity and power.

This talk tracks the production and circulation of illustrated travelogues alongside the dense history of slave revolts in nineteenth-century Brazil—veritably nonexistent in visual accounts of the era, but which played a crucial role in the making and remaking of societal structures during this period. In particular, I examine two of the most popular nineteenth-century European illustrated travelogues crafted by Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848) and Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), whose respective representations became central references for contemporaneous and subsequent travelers to Brazil. By analyzing the fractures between these widely circulating visual accounts and written accounts of intense insurgency, upheaval, and revolt throughout Brazil, I demonstrate how modes of visual production, consumption, and circulation operated in tension with experienced political realities and practices of struggle enacted by enslaved, insurgent, and free black people leading up to the 1888 abolition of slavery and ultimate establishment of the Brazilian Republic in 1889. In so doing, I expose how dominant visual representations of blackness across Brazil have historically been forged by European and North American travelers visiting from abroad—each arriving with specific motives and sensitivities, all the while maintaining limited fields of vision.