“I call for the Stedelijk, the Ludwig Museum, the Van Abbemuseum, and Tate Modern to state clearly and simply: Plantation workers in Indonesia, Ghana, Congo, and the Caribbean largely paid for these museums. Local workers largely built them. These are your, their, our museums too.
Curators have expended tremendous brainpower and cultural capital to justify to large audiences that conceptual artworks, social practice, and institutional critique can be considered legitimate art displayed in these museums. If all this can be art, I would find it hard to believe, then, that the work of the plantation workers that involuntarily financed these museums cannot also be considered art.
This acknowledgment should not happen merely with a plaque, or a thematic exhibition, but by inviting these worker communities, on their terms, to take part together in the future of the museums.
It is time for these museums to finally elevate all of these communities and show that the museums themselves can indeed be pedestals, for all of us, places to show ourselves, to gather.”
Ced’art Tamasala / CATPC, Balot, 2022. © and courtesy of the artists and KOW Berlin.
In his drawings, Tamsala repeatedly uses symbols central to the country's and the collective's history. The figurines on the carpet are Balot sculptures that circulate globally. The Balot sculpture—also called Funji—was carved in 1931 during a Pende uprising against rape and other atrocities under the Unilever plantation system and Belgian colonial agents. It depicts the angry spirit of the beheaded Belgian officer Maximilien Balot, carved to control his spirit and make him work for the Pende people. Today, the sculpture is held in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, USA. Loan requests and a personal visit by CATPC to the VMFA between 2020 and 2022 led to no results, though the sculpture was eventually temporarily exhibited in Lusanga in 2024, as part of the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale. The same figure appears as dart-like munition, the Balot NFT (2022), created when CATPC explored alternative ways of reclaiming its power. The flashes originate from an imaginary satellite symbolizing Luyalu, described by CATPC as a life force animating life, nature, and Earth, expressed through art.
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