Blaise Mandefu Ayawo (1968–2024)
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 17, at the opening of the Dutch pavilion of the sixtieth edition of La Biennale di Venezia, it is pouring rain. I arrive fashionably late. There is a huge throng of people from all over the world—journalists, writers, curators, artists—the usual crowd at a Venice opening. But this time, it feels different. Especially for the Dutch pavilion.
Center stage is not the white male artist but a collective of Congolese artists chosen for the 2024 Dutch pavilion, CATPC, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, among them their elder statesman, Blaise Mandefu Ayawo. Dressed smartly in a suit and a traditional Lusanga woven hat, he greets me with enthusiasm. The mood is surreal and energetic, charged with a feeling that something immutable will follow this event. Blaise Mandefu Ayawo will pass on less than two weeks later, to fortify the forcefields of our ancestors.
I first met Blaise in Lusanga in 2017, as a guest of the artist Renzo Martens during “The Repatriation of the White Cube,” an event organized in the context of the inauguration of the White Cube museum on a former Unilever plantation in Lusanga. In this action, the CATPC sought to recontextualize the modernist white cube in one of the plantations that have historically underwritten its development. Profits extracted from plantations have historically funded museums and universities, while the ongoing violence of the plantation system continues to haunt the civility, taste, and aesthetics championed by these institutions. By literally returning an OMA-designed white cube to a Unilever palm oil plantation (as part of a group show alongside artworks by Sammy Baloji, Kader Attia, Marlene Dumas, and CATPC, among others) these two opposite poles of the global value chain collided with each other, with the ultimate intent of putting the white cube in the service of Lusanga’s people. After a long flight from Lagos to Kinshasa and then a journey by car of more than four hundred miles to the former Unilever plantation in Lusanga, I arrived just in time to hear Blaise’s now famous speech. “We children of the plantation embrace this project, this international center of research on art and the economic inequalities of Lusanga, like a dream, but with a lot of doubts. Because of the fate suffered by our parents, the White Cube brings ancient history back to the surface: the repatriation of the White Cube is in fact a coffin to bury the looted statues of our ancestors. In the village, we bury our dead without coffins. We, CATPC, would like to use this occasion to construct a sacred home for those who have passed before us.” A healthy distrust of interventionist Western projects is the beginning of wisdom for African and indeed Congolese communities. A museum on the plantation rendered infecund by monocultural practices by Unilever goes against every logic of gentrification. Blaise advocated for a living, breathing museum that would regenerate the decay of Congolese communities. The Lusanga community screamed in chorus, “Luyalu! Luyalu! Luyalu!” (Power! Power! Power!) as Blaise delivered his speech. The entire episode was theatrical and at the same time very moving.
The desolate landscapes I traversed on my journey to Lusanga reflected the desperate conditions of impoverished rural DRC. There are museums in Africa and Europe that purport to represent Africa but are really just modulations of colonial projects. Blaise was determined not to be co-opted into another such project. For Blaise, it was simple. While Western economies and museums were thriving, his community was left desolate and exploited. Among legacies of art and Indigenous communities being destroyed, displaced, and marginalized by exploitative extractive economies funding major art-world museums, Congolese communities have a deep history of Land art, sculpture, and poetic speech. In Lusanga, at the site of the White Cube, the artists and plantation workers are reconnecting with that essence of their heritage through ancestral wisdom and their artistic practices. They have led and advocated for the restitution of their art sequestered in Western museums.
Congo, along with the Amazon, is known as the lung of the planet, with a rich landmass larger than the entirety of Western Europe. The land of Congo is rich with vast natural resources that have been exploited for centuries. For Blaise, it was always about the land. Back when we met, one of the artists in the collective, Matthieu Kasiama, performed a séance that engaged with various objects arranged as an installation on the land. We were all transfixed and moved by this. The arrangement resembled a constellation of items a bird might gather to build a nest. Blaise’s sculpture, Mvuyu Libérateur (2023), is the centerpiece of the Dutch pavilion in Venice. Mvuyu Libérateur means “a liberating bird.” The Liberating Bird is sensitive to the pain of its fellow creatures: When it finds another bird or an animal trapped by hunters, it intervenes to help the creature free itself. For the Venice Biennale, it cracks open white cubes and allows the energy they have amassed to return to the communities on the plantations that funded so many museums. The sculpture speaks to Lusanga’s ongoing social, cultural, and economic injustices. The original clay sculpture stands on CATPC’s reclaimed land and growing forest in Lusanga, while the Venice version is a clone made using cocoa and palm oil by-products, symbolizing the exploitation that is the leitmotif of Congolese history. Mvuyu Libérateur speaks to Blaise’s ambition to liberate Lusanga, Congo, and Africa through art.
Blaise was a spiritual healer who safeguarded the wisdom of the Indigenous customs—and one of the elders of CATPC. When he first joined CATPC, he brought a collection of wooden sculptures he had been working on for years. Throughout the subsequent years spent working with the collective, he held a sincere desire to reconnect to the ancestral knowledge of traditional sculpture. He dedicated himself completely, driven by the wish to surpass and challenge the conditions he and his communities inhabited. Working with the clay of the plantation in Lusanga, he knew how to manipulate reality on a micro scale in order for it to have a greater influence over larger constellations.
In the vast landscape of artistic expression, few have touched the core of their community as profoundly as Blaise Mandefu Ayawo. Blaise stood as a monumental figure within the CATPC, dedicating the last ten years of his life to reclaiming and restoring the ancestral lands around Lusanga in his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is deeply sorrowful that while the celebrations were taking place in Lusanga and Venice, Blaise fell ill and passed on.
Blaise’s body was repatriated to Lusanga, and his life was celebrated amongst his family, friends, and colleagues. CATPC honored his memory by planting three trees in the sacred forest, symbolizing his enduring presence and the continuation of his work.
The enduring image for me with Blaise will remain a double-exposed memory. A Venetian silhouette etched against the background of our first meeting in Lusanga, standing outside the Dutch pavilion in the rain, with tears of loss, joy, faith, hope, recalling memories of the journey. The rain washing down the salty tears from the faces of the joyous CATPC collective into the soil of the earth and, as we later discovered, the commencement of a glorious transitioning of Blaise to the heavens whence the rains came.
