FR: We’re interested in the idea and meaning of working contextually. How can that be thought of, and from which perspectives has it been thought of, and does it really make any sense to continue with the discourse of the need to be contextual?
In that sense, I was thinking of your very famous jute sack installations, especially the urban ones at Documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale and others. What I’m very interested in is the performativity of those pieces within the urban. Can you talk about if you also consider them as a performance gesture within the urban?
IM: Certainly, I do. I guess at Documenta, it was one of the first times that I started looking at the production aspect of the work in a performative sense because up until then I had mostly been producing the material/the work in public spaces, as well as railways and other spaces, because I was interested in how the labour done at these sites combined with the residues within these sites and how this was informing the aesthetic elements within the material and also the structural aspect of the material.
At Documenta, the idea was to use the Syntagma Square in Athens, which, when there’s a protest there, is normally occupied by numerous bodies. This time around I wanted to focus more on these sacks, which have been through a series of global transactions, have carried many different commodities, and somehow reflect upon the conditions of the postmodern working man. For me, it was highly performative that within this urban context it allowed people to have some kind of interaction with the material. I never wanted the material to be separated from people – just in the case of an art installation which covers a building and that’s it. But then also, when it goes on to cover a building, there a relationship is created between the material and the building itself: in a way, the composition that is created and how certain holes in the materials are left. So, when the wind blows, it somehow goes into the material and allows it to almost dance. Sometimes, the material extends into the pavements where pedestrians cross. For me, it’s performative in many different ways, from the production to the way that it’s put together in a site.
FR: Just out of curiosity, how come you started with these massive installations and this idea of covering buildings, entire buildings?
IM: When I was in art school in Kumasi, in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, I studied painting at the College of Arts. At the time, there was a new group of professors who had started teaching radical ways of making art, and they were encouraging students to go to town, to go into the market spaces, abandoned spaces, to find inspiration. The previous generations were somehow stuck to the old ways of making art with a modernist approach. If you had to make a painting, it had to be on canvas, it had to be in a certain material, the format, even the figure, had to have a certain form.
We were using Ground Zero as a starting point. So, the idea of going to town and thinking that everyone in the city is intelligent about how they interact with people on a daily basis, and they always use the arts in some form or another to be able to display whatever they have. In going to the African markets, you realise that a woman displays in many different forms: charcoal, fabrics, containers, even the way in which the market is organised. The idea was to go to the urban and rural, everywhere, just to find inspiration.
I started off by collecting materials from market spaces and working with the workers there. One early installation was covering a pile of food and charcoal in the market. Then I went on to covering some bridges, and then I started thinking what the possibilities would be if I somehow extended this to architecture, buildings. I wanted to be as ambitious as I could. Normally, artists are somehow afraid to try something big and fail. But in our curriculum, failure was the key, it was the starting point.
I started looking at these massive spaces trying to work things out. I didn’t teach the work how to grow. I think it was the other way around – the work taught me how to make, to continue working with it. I would set a precedent and once I began to see the revelations within the work – because the group of collaborators I was working with was really extensive, from construction workers to carpenters, and they would make decisions in the work which I had no control over. Those decisions were crucial. It created new forms of aesthetics that I couldn’t have had without this process. The city, with all its chaos and problems and conditions, was what gave me this courage to be able to at least work at this magnitude.
FR: I’m interested in your connection with time and material and your understanding of temporality when working both with the material and the city itself, I would say, thinking the urban as a material in itself.
IM: In the 20th century, most parts of Ghana featured the largest producers of cocoa in the world. Considerable capital was made from cocoa, which was used in the post-independence infrastructure, like buildings, factories, and other features attributed to Kwame Nkrumah, our first president. Before that, the cocoa had been mostly exploited by the British Empire. In the early ‘60s, the African Union was founded, and the first nuclear power plant in Ghana was built. The silos, a group of buildings, were built by Eastern European architects, factories were built – all these programs were completely abandoned in 1966 when Kwame Nkrumah – the head of the Pan-Africanist movement – was overthrown. Suddenly, we fell back into another time.
It’s almost as if we went back into the 12th century or something, both on an archaeological level and also on a material level. The jute sack was a material that had been employed and brought into Ghana by the Ghana Cocoa Board to buy cocoa from farmers, take the seeds to the ports, and offload these seeds into containers, which would leave the shore of Ghana to Switzerland or wherever. The cocoa that Ghana generates translates into a revenue of over 50 billion dollars every year globally, but Ghana only gets one billion of that money. During the time of Nkrumah, the idea was to industrialise so that we could process these commodities and create more value for the system.
Now, when the bag leaves, the silo is abandoned. The sacks take the beans, and then the beans leave, the bag stays behind, it goes through a series of different commodities, processes – it comes to a point where it no longer has a value. So, the silo in Tamale, which I bought and converted into a museum, is just the beginning of many silos I am planning to acquire from the states and convert into institutions all over the country.
FR: It is interesting how by covering buildings, a whole infrastructure, you also create an understanding of the materiality of the building itself and how it is historically charged. It is exciting to see them as an urban gesture, especially in Western cities where you don’t normally see these comments been played out on such a big scale – as an urban-scale gesture. I’m interested in these different scales of the work, the temporality of the jute sacks, but that temporality is also connected with the temporality of the mortar, and the colonial history behind these buildings themselves.
IM: I think that we’re somehow at a point in human history where people do not take time to be able to draw or make connections between spaces, between materials; when people are drinking their coffee or hot chocolate or buying whatever commodities from the shop or supermarket, they don’t really think about the labour that is connected to them. Also, when they end up having a debate about immigrants or people coming in to work—it almost seems to them as if these people are invading their space or something like that.
For me, it was very important to open up these conversations between the imperial factors versus the idea of the common – the common history that we all share as humanity. I guess the fragility of the material is very important. It breaks and decays when it’s installed. Each time that it’s installed in one space, it doesn’t leave it in the same way. It leaves either faded or torn or broken, part of it gets lost. I guess I’m interested in how this reflects upon the temporality of things, because we tend to hold on to things almost as if they were our core values.
FR: I’m also curious about your work in connection to the development of the Savannah Centre of Contemporary Art (SCCA) and RedClay in Tamale. For example, the parade of aircrafts going around the city, which would then accommodate artistic work. I was looking at some videos and for me, it’s a completely performative gesture, this act of creating a space on an urban or even global scale, because this act can be read from a very aerial perspective. How do you view this space in Tamale? What is your relation to the city itself and this space as a comment or as a generator around the city, and not just contained in one space?
IM: Tamale is an interesting place. I was born there but I didn’t grow up there. I’ve lived in Accra for most of my life. When I was a child, every once in a while, during a vacation we would come to Tamale to visit the family. When I was at university, I would come more often. In 2014, I made a conscious decision to go back to Tamale to create the studio because at the time, I was just finishing my MFA, and we had read all these books on capital like the ones by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Walter Benjamin, and I was beginning to think about the artist as a producer, how the artists need to be within their own space. So, I thought, okay… In Ghana everyone wants to do something in Accra. I said to myself, why not just go to Tamale. If you have a studio in a village somewhere, at least it will influence a generation of people there.
So, I went to Tamale, started building a studio and having conversations with the older generation of artists. I said to myself, why not convert this studio into an institution where we can focus on retrospectives and resurrect the practices of older artists. That’s how SCCA was born. I also then decided, why not present the institution or the studio as a gift to the city?
I started expanding the spaces, building, collecting archives, building archival spaces, resident spaces, exhibition spaces, bringing the airplanes… There’s no reason why we should occupy only four-sided spaces. You can occupy any space. You can occupy the silo, you can occupy old court buildings, cemeteries. So, I started buying these old airplanes in Accra and then transporting them on the ground by road. Bringing them was very performative because I was very interested in how the same collaborators for my installations – truck drivers and material transporters – were the same kind of people that I was working with to transport these airplanes.
The main idea of getting the airplanes was to convert them into classrooms for kids to learn about drone technologies, biochemistry, and many other things. We had to exhume the airplane, take out all the seats from the fuselage and make it into a void. For me, all of this is performative, but it’s also geared towards a long-term effect of creating change. I remember Okwui Enwezor always used to talk about change in his work. I was able to get a silo as part of the institution now, and I’ve been looking at this old cemetery, we could convert it into some kind of an archive or library space. There’s also an old Olympic-site swimming pool, which is located about 200 kilometres north of Tamale. I’m also in conversation to complete the pool so that we can use it to teach children how to swim on a professional level.
I guess I’ve gotten to a point in art where I have realised that art could be anything – even teaching children how to swim on a level that allows them to expand their world view or imagination, or to penetrate other spaces. It’s going towards a way of changing perception. When you travel to these communities around the city, you’ll find all these old warehouses that were used for storing food but have been abandoned. The idea I’ve been negotiating with the chiefs and community members is to convert these old storage spaces into parts of institutional spaces where we will use them as pedagogical spaces, classrooms – we would have a projector in those spaces, so it would revive cinema culture within that area.
By this time you realise that, in the next 20-30 years, you will have created this very cultural, vibrant city. But it will not happen if you do not start from somewhere. Also, you don’t want it to be elitist. You want it to be something that grows organically, that actually belongs to the people. So, you have to do it in such a way that people will grow, or their kids will grow into it. By the time they are my age, it will become part of their thinking and vocabulary. But for now, it’s still very difficult for people to ?? because they don’t believe, because no one believes that someone would invest such an amount of money into creating institutions like that in a place like Tamale.