Spotlight on Leonardo Benzant: Afrosupernatural
Considering the possibilities of genetic imprints, cultural identification, innate and intuitive beliefs, and a conscious seeking of links that reveal continuities that are hidden or largely unsuspected by the mainstream, Benzant imagines himself as an Urban Shaman. His sculptures from the series "Paraphernalia of the Urban Shaman M:5", are inspired by African power-objects, such as the minkisi and makutos of the Bakongo tribe, while also visually referencing the banding patterns of chromosomes, thus fusing the spiritual with the scientific. Here Benzant discusses the ideas that inspired the work featured in his first solo exhibition at Aljira organized by Visiting Curator Dexter Wimberly.
Photo Credit: Tyrus Ortega Gaines ALJIRA: What inspired you to create the series, “Paraphernalia of the Urban Shaman” and what was your process?
BENZANT: I started that beadwork series in 2012. I think something was calling me beyond the canvas. My inspiration is about pulling more from an African paradigm rather than a Western paradigm. It seemed more organic to leave out the canvas. I was thinking, what is the paraphernalia of the urban shaman? I started making notes, trying to see the connections behind different concepts. I was thinking about ritual and what would be the more popular reference. A lot of people don’t know what a tata nkisi or nganga is. An nganga is a ritual expert or specialist. A tata nkisi is a father of nksisi, referring to medicine, nature or spirits. I was thinking, I can transcend traditions even though I’m referencing tradition. I’m an Urban Shaman.
I string much of the beads by myself. Sometimes my mother helps, my wife, nephew, niece and my daughter. I select the colors and give them a direction but I leave it open for them to improvise. I use about twelve strands per piece. It takes anywhere between four and seven days per strand, just stringing the beads. For me it’s parallel to a lot of processes you find in the African diaspora as a communal way of working. It’s a sacred thing. There are numerous examples, for example think of the women of Gee’s Bend who work on quilts together. They pray together while they work and they sing. There was something ritualistic about the process for me that echoes through the diaspora. There’s also a repetitive and improvisational aspect connected to something labor intensive, like making an El Anatsui piece. That’s a modality that you find a lot in the African diaspora. It’s hard to gauge exactly how long it takes to create them because I work on multiple pieces at the same time. The more complex ones take at least five or six months.
I buy the beads from a store in Manhattan. They’re imported from Czech Republic. That’s part of the meaning of what I’m saying, too. We use a whole bunch of shit that doesn’t come from Africa. We transform it, and Africanize it by what we do to it. Connected to that, part of what I’m saying is: okay, we speak European vocabularies but we’re not European. We come up with all sorts of variations. There’s a syntax that’s there. Even the bead work that’s done now on the continent is imported. It’s an extension that we’re using Western culture…beads that come from Czech Republic.
Paraphernalia Of The Urban Shaman M:5, 2012-2016, Clothes/textiles, cardboard tubes, leather, caucasian baby doll, chicken bone, brown barbie doll, horse hair, glitter, coins, powered charcoal, earth, cigar-ash, coffee grinds, vija/ashiote, powered egg shell, string, wire, monofilament, various plant bundles, matte medium, acrylic ink, rabbit skin glue, rice glue, glass seed beads, rum and miscellaneous sculptures. (Installation Photos Courtesy: Chuka Chukuma)
The sculpture itself, is a process of creating the form from scratch which, is a process in itself. A lot of people assume that the sculptures or forms are sticks. Using sticks implies something you just found. People think the beads took a long time but making the shapes took a long time, too. Some of the them look like tubes. Some are made from fabric. I roll them up in the same way you make a cigar. I put different things inside of them. It’s rolled up fabric bound up in a certain way to alter the form of the fabric. It’s a different way of playing with shape, making the shape more nuanced. I also use different painting and collage techniques. Sometimes I use powdered charcoal or a little bit of glitter. There are also raised surfaces on some of them which I made by putting paint in a cake decorator bag. One of the paintings has one of the beaded forms sewn onto the canvas.
The sculptures or forms are so distinct and unique in my opinion, it’s more to them than just being beautiful. The surface reflects the interior. The surface is like a mirror. It’s like even with a human body, when somebody is healthy they have a glow, a lot of the time what’s going on on the inside is reflected in some kind of way. I’m drawn to shapes that feel organic, pod-like, or root-like. The forms are oblong and sort of narrow. Some people think it’s a phallic thing but it’s not necessarily that, or just that.
I use different materials. I involve collage, string, and bead embroidery. On the surface of the paintings and some of the sculptures in areas that don’t have beads, I use coffee grinds and what Dominicans call vija, a cooking powder that gives food a reddish color. I also use egg shell powder and cigar ash on the surface the paintings and the sculptures. I use them for the color but also for the cultural association. When I’m using coffee I’m thinking about rituals and ancestors. I’m also thinking about how coffee was a slave crop which made the slave colony rich in Haiti.
Memoria Kongo: Bambula, 2013, Mixed-media, assemblage-painting on canvas, 96 x 72 in. (Photo Credit: Chuka Chukuma) ALJIRA: How are you playing with and communicating your ideas about different cultural understandings through your work?
BENZANT: I remember going to my first bembé and feeling that I was just at the outer layer of the celebration and there was something going on in the inner circle that was reserved only for initiated people. I appreciate not telling people everything. I realize no matter what you say, if people don’t have the curiosity, if they are closed to it, then they aren’t even going to be interested. I like to seduce people to want to know more. I guess I like the seduction game. On one level you think it’s one thing and behind it there is something else. Those who have been initiated recognize the imagery immediately in a fresh way. Robert Farris Thompson is someone I respect because of the way he deals with these topics. He was initiated in Palo, Yoruba and Abakua.
I’m playing with different cultural understandings of knowledge and transmission of knowledge. In Western society you go to a university that you must pay for. It’s taken for granted that knowledge is free. In most African systems initiation and oral history is their way of transmitting the knowledge and the culture and so it’s concealed. I’m playing with how things are revealed and concealed. So many things about African culture and ritual is hidden in view. Because the mainstream has the privilege of not having to know about other cultures it doesn’t even bother to check. And we’re supposed to know their paradigm but they don’t need to know ours. So we take it for granted that there’s one art narrative, the Western art historical narrative, but there are actually many historical narratives going on. It’s required to get your degree but what kind of message does that send that my own history or culture is like an elective? My own culture and history isn’t required to get that degree and everything that’s Western is at the center of the story? Why must we be so successfully colonized, especially those of us who go to school?
The Strong Hand That Turns The World, 2010, Acrylic, ink, embroidery on hand-pieced fabric and unstretched canvas, 108 x 72 in. (Photo Credit: Chuka Chukuma)
ALJIRA: Tell us more about the Afro-Caribbean religious references the work contains.
BENZANT: It’s just there. Some people practice and some people shun it. It has a stigma to it. But it’s there. Some people feel threatened by the iconography of African saints, rituals and African magic. That comes from European ideas that say it’s evil, or we are heathens. For people who practice, the relationship to nature, to themselves and how to organize themselves, is very sophisticated to me. It’s a way of moving through life and the world. The different archetypes that come out of the culture are complex and profound. It’s bewildering to me to think of African philosophy and African world view as backwards.
We take for granted that we don’t have to explain these things. People blame the artists when they don’t get it. For me, it’s important. When the Modernists like Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse were taking and using African forms, they didn’t care about the history or the culture or the meaning. That’s a Eurocentric conqueror’s attitude to take something and not care about what it means. They don’t do that with their own history or artifacts. They value them. We should value our own history and connections to it.
Subterrestrial African Magik, 2016, Oil on unstretched canvas, 75 x 96 in. (Photo Credit: Chuka Chukuma)
ALJIRA: What inspired the painting, “Afrosupernatural Combat”?
BENZANT: On the one hand it’s me being playful, understanding the context, the Eurocentric gaze, the anthropologist gaze of putting other cultures under a microscope. It’s me understanding that we’re under a microscope and there are many assumptions about culture, anything that’s not European, any indigenous cultures and African cultures. And there are many. You can see how they are connected, even though they are different. Most indigenous cultures have an ancestor practice or reference to how their ancestors are connected to the land and how that impacts them in the present. They all have a cosmology that speaks to them about the past in the relation to the present and that impacts the future. Many of them have masquerading traditions and oral histories. Each culture is distinct yet has things in common. I’m referencing those connections through my work.
The other aspect I’m referencing is the rituals that I’m immersed in. Palo Mayombe is the religion I got initiated into which was founded by the Cimarrones in Cuba. Cimarrones means Maroon and the maroons were runaway slaves. The founder of Palo Mayombe would often burn plantations down and free slaves. So in my mind, African magic is tied in with resistance. It’s not a people that want to be oppressed. It’s a people that are resisting. There’s this image that we passively accepted the slavery system. Hell no, there was always resistance. Many people think spirituality and they want to think zen. People don’t want to get into those aspects of resistance but it’s part of the history.
Afrosupernatural Combat, 2011, Oilstick and mixed-media on paper, 72 x 60 in. (Photo Credit: Chuka Chukuma)
ALJIRA: How are you merging the spiritual and the scientific?
BENZANT: Some of my shapes and the way that the colors are stacked in the sculptures are similar to that of a chromosome - if you were to look at it under a microscope. Chromosomes contain the genetic information that make us who we are, which comes from our ancestors. Our DNA is connected to our ancestors. In Kikongo, the word bambula, which means memory or ancestral memory, can be loosely translated to mean DNA.
In Yoruba you have a deity referred to as ‘Olokun’ and in science according to Western notions the bottom of the sea preserves many things. Archaeologists often find things intact at the bottom of the sea. Olokun is associated with the mysteries at the bottom of the sea. Different cultures refer to things in different ways. The Yoruba people were very aware of the qualities at the bottom of the sea. They distinguished the bottom of the sea as Olokun and the top of the sea as Yemaya. This is classification, this is science, spoke of in another way. A different way of articulating things.
I’m talking about religion but if you take it as a metaphor to apply it to something else just to get a sense that there are different paradigms that people come from which are viable. We don’t have to be ashamed of it because we went to Howard and have a PhD. There’s a lot of pressure to assimilate. That’s what I’m resisting, by embracing another paradigm and being inspired by things that are coming from another direction. I hope that people will be inspired to slow down and be inspired to being present in a way that inspires them to reflect. I’m not against Western cultural and influences. I know Western art and I’ve studied it a lot. My heart is pulling on my African roots.
Leonardo Benzant attended Pratt Institute from 2007 – 2010. In addition to being in several important private collections, his work was recently acquired by The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina for their permanent art collection. He was also one of the artists included in the Gantt Center's February 2015 exhibition, Venturing Out of the Heart of Darkness. His work was recently exhibited at the N'Namdi Center in Detroit, Michigan and will be included in an upcoming exhibition, Koi No Yokan, at 101/EXHIBIT gallery in Los Angeles, California opening in July 2016. Leonardo Benzant: Afrosupernatural is on view at Aljira through May 21, 2016.
