For Mozambican artist Euridice Zaituna Kala, history is not something you lock away in a book or a museum. It is a fragile, living discipline that needs interaction with humans so it can be nurtured and passed down through the generations. The discovery of a slave ship that sank off the coast of South Africa in the 18th century is the point of departure for her latest immersive project.
Kala’s most recent solo exhibition “Sea(E)scapes DNA: Don’t (N)ever Ask”, showing in Paris at the Salon H gallery, brings together photography, sculpture and sound installations that reflect on seven years of research.
It all began with the discovery of a wreck of the Portugese slave ship Sao José Paquete-d’Africa in 2015, which piqued Kala’s imagination.
Loaded with 400 slaves, the ship left Ilha de Moçambique, a small island from where the Portugese administered their east African colonies, for Sao Luis do Maranho in Brazil. This was in 1794.
When it sank off the coast of Cape Town, 210 people perished. The others were picked up and delivered to their destination.
Kala was intrigued by the circumstances and began to look for information, but she could only find records from the Portuguese side, and nothing from Mozambique’s records.
“It was a project that chose me,” she told RFI, adding it was a chance for her to “reappropriate history”, so often written by those in powerful positions.
Embodying history
Born in Maputo in 1978, Kala trained as a photographer at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has lived abroad for some 15 years, the last six of those based in Paris, but her heart is still in Africa.
Although it is impossible to know exactly what happened on board the Sao José Paquete-d’Africa, what is known is that she set out on a journey to retrace the steps of the ship’s trajectory. She visited Lisbon, the Ila de Moçambique and Cape Town.
She explains how the shackles and other remains of the wreck were sent to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, opened by former US president Barack Obama in 2016.
Kala was surprised that “all this information was leaving African shores without having passed through Mozambican institutions, historical sites … without having done the tour.”
What about the lives lost in the journey? What did those people think, feel, hear?
“Through this journey I was to become the archive,” the artist told RFI, focusing on the conditions these people found themselves in, but taking it a step further by incorporating her own memories and souvenirs.
The sea is a canvas, a membrane
The sea, as a character itself, provides a canvas for Kala to explore the gaps in history, and present the ‘unofficial soundtrack’ for those who travelled across it long ago.
The second part of the project’s title, “DNA: Don’t (N)ever Ask”, reflects the constantly evolving nature of her work as an artist, always weaving threads of the past together with the present, asking questions, challenging history.
“It’s about memory, it’s about viewing the sea as a living membrane, a space for reference but also identifying that the human body has 70 percent of water, so we are the sea, we are part of this element,” she says.
Just as she does with all her projects, Kala dives deep into the archives first to draw out bits of information, then creates what she calls “a space for sharing” where the personal and the public can meet.
“Even though I come from this country (Mozambique) that does not have a highly developed history of slavery, we still feel it, it’s still entrenched in our DNA; these memories are still there, and how do we deal with them, what kind of symptoms arise in daily life? We’re still dealing with this history.”
To draw the audience into the conversation with this dark chapter of history, Kala has concocted a soundscape with the help of Romain Mascagni, taking liberal inspiration from the sounds of the sea, the noises of the ship, of what she imagines to be the experience of these bodies transported across the waves.
Forgotten sounds, vibrations
The sounds evoke fear, longing, hunger, waiting – the unknown.
“I really want the public to be immersed, submerged within the narrative. Within this composition, we are travelling around different textures of sound; the sea, the vessel, the body, and how we perceive certain vibrations and certain frequencies.”
The walls and the floor of the gallery are covered with objects – transparent glass domes, engraved metal plates, glass sheets with black and white photos. We could easily imagine they are remnants of a wreck washed up upon some distant shore.
Many of the items have small speakers attached, a “voice” to emit sound. The loops of sound start and stop intermittently, while overhead, the main speakers pulse out different sound sequences, taking the visitor into what feels very much like the hull of a ship, or the belly of a whale.
“History is a fragile discipline and my personal history is a fragile discipline, so I’m interested in moulding this and constructing narratives around these two spaces, the macro and the micro. This is my kind of methodology that I’m working around.”
“Sea(E)scapes DNA: Don’t (N)ever Ask” is at the Le Salon H gallery in Paris until 26 March 2022.
Euridice Zaituna Kala is to exhibit work as part of a group show during the first Fata Morgana festival at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris from 22 March – 29 May.