Homeless

...in so far as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person for him, or else I may become his master and, in my turn, look at him. But this mastery is self-defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized through the others desire, he is no longer the person by whom I wished to be recognized, but a being fascinated, deprived of his freedom, and who therefore no longer counts in my eyes.i Merleau-Ponty was touching the core of performance art with this statement, even though in this case he was writing about the relationship between the gaze and sexuality. But performance is also an act that evolves around languish and desire, a space where nothing is unconditional and all possibilities are open. It is to stale and easy to bring Hegel's master-slave dialectic to the stage in this context. Performance art evolves around an ambiguous space of discomfort in which the gaze plays the main role, incorporating the subject and the public in a dance that switches between master and slave, from subject to observer. It is a power-play that starts with the body making an effort to become, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, a whole or a thing in the world, in a constant struggle with the ever-present world frame on the one hand, and on the other hand the observer that relates to that moment in time as a participant, an accomplice, wether active or passive. It is important to know that Ato Malinda initially wanted to become an actress. Regarding her body of works on the whole, it becomes clear that even though she left that idea behind her, she still encounters the world as a stage. Performing is innate to me Malinda says when I ask her about it, it is almost like this ancient African shamanistic notion that someone has been chosen to do something. I feel this urge and have this talent to perform, there is nothing I can do about it. She is engaging herself to her environment, continuously striving to find a platform on which her divided self, just like Merleau-Ponty puts it, can become a whole and she can connect, maybe even completely blend-in, with the world. Like a chameleon she paints her skin with the patterns and colours of an indigenous cloth, worn by Kenyan women as a 'leso', as she did in her performance 'Prison Sex II' (2008-2009). In an intense process of transformation she does not only embody the imprisoned women in the Portugese Fort of Mombasa in a poetic and symbolic way; she becomes all women in similar situations, trying to gain autonomy in the world. Even though her body is a tool, a vessel, her mind is attaching itself to her surroundings. It trickle's through that body, inviting the gaze of the observer to reflect on the hundreds of questions that occupy her mind as a woman, as an African, as a western educated African woman... Hybridity exists on many levels. Malinda, while facing her own inner challenge to come to terms with her decent, sex, colour, social status, context, etc. transforms what is projected upon her into projections of her own. In each context she enters, the image changes as her position changes. Looking at 'Prison Sex I', 'Prison Sex II' and her advocacy against Female Genital Mutilation, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto concerning the social transformation of women in our current time comes to mind: The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. Although this was of course written from the western point of view, an awareness deriving from the second feminist wave during the late '60, I ask Malinda if she can relate to Haraway's words. Absolutely, especially when I see myself in the context of my performances. But I also, in a way, feel torn apart by matters of

locality, the way ancient traditions are being misinterpreted and my western upbringing. For me Haraway's cyborg woman, is exactly who I have become, but on the African continent I am confronted with things I know, are familiar, but that only represent a part of me. Against some of these facts I have to oppose because it is in conflict with my current view on the world, or at least I have to reflect on them in the way I am used to. By performing. As Fanon called out to the African to 'decide to embody history in his own person' there where the 'colonial world is cut up in two', in many ways Malinda embodies these both worlds which are impossible to dissect. She is cut up, in many pieces. Again, Haraway gives an answer, creating a whole out of these partitions: The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Ato responds:It is exactly what I am dealing with. I fact, I realize now that all these parts have become a whole. Only the fact that I am always switching context and in every situation can relate to that context, confused me to thinking that I was homeless. The home of course is my body itself. Growing up Malinda lived in Europe and the US. Coming back to Kenya, her motherland, in 2004 was an unavoidable but also difficult process. Initially I was looking for this sort of authenticity as to what it is to be African. I did a number of performances that where a sort of reflection of the complexity I found myself in. Coming back to Kenya was also very isolating for me personally. It has taken me years to find this space to be who I am, because who I am is also partly who I was in the US. Also, when I came back, Kenya wasn't ready for the kind of person that I was at that time, and I wasn't ready for what Kenya was either. But I came to terms with things and things also changed. The world looks different upon Africa now, and Africa also has a broader outlook on the world. Things like Al Jazeera really had a great contribution to that. The process of creating a whole out of her divided self asks for a different approach whenever the backdrop changes. By carefully researching her subjects or points of focus her background as a scholar comes in. But for creating a complete image of the complexity of the world frame that is projected on her, the condensed space of her performances is the only logical outcome. On the subject of research, I feel it may be the one thing that grounds the abstraction of my practice in some kind of reality. Research and epistemologies help me deal with the uncertain existential. Applied socially, it helps me create the 'complex metaphors' that are not easily put to words. Invited by the Karen Blixen Museum in Denmark, recently, for the project 'NotAboutKarenBlixen', she was mostly struck by the way non-western immigrants were looked upon. In the context of this museum, devoted to the Danish novelist who's stay in Kenya around the beginning of the 20th century was reflected in her famous novel 'Out of Africa', Malinda decided to create a home for thoughts in the form of a blues shack entitled 'Rebuilding, Remembering, Renewing'. It was the first time for me to work together with another artist. But as I had just visited the Caribbean and was completely captured by that context, I was very excited to work with Surinamese artist Gillian Grantsaan. The work they both created, became a metaphor for the stepping stone she felt the Caribbean region was to her. The blues-shack known in the southern US as a space where one could withdraw himself from the constant invasion of the body and give way to the mind, the words, the spirit of life as an African American. The blues shack symbolizes the in-between space of both body and mind, the life as an immigrant, the feeling of displacement

and the limitations of the word. I wanted to create a space that framed the thoughts as well as the body, a place where others apart from their decent could step into the struggle of the immigrant, living his daily life, giving meaning to his place in the world. Malinda's stages are condensed, poetic reflections of her point of focus. In 'Looking at Art, Looking at Africa, Looking at Art' for instance, she reflected on her studies on ancient rock art and the African rural life vs. the big urban cities, while reading Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. On the one hand it brings back to mind the Ugandan scholar and poet Okot p'Bitek. Whilst trying to answer the central question of his essay 'What is Culture?'ii, he states: Western tradition which regards culture as something that can be bought and sold, where the artist is some very special fellow who is paid with money for his works is entirely alien to African thought. Putting Deleuze next to this in this context, seems like a tour de force, but is the outcome of her own development. When I ask her about her view on p'Bitek she goes back in time: Okot p'Bitek was of the generation of my parents. His writings were very important to me for a while, trying to understand what it was to be African. At the same time I tried hard to understand why I felt so divided. Now I feel I have grown beyond that. In this globalizing world I am faced with different challenges than p'Bitek's or my parents' generation. So I guess we are back at why I used Deleuze in that context. It is a part of me as well. When I ask Malinda why she choose Kenya, and not Uganda her fathers homeland to return to, she approaches it in a practical manner. I was born here, I have my citizenship here and at that time I might have felt closer to my mother than to my father. Since my relationship with my father is changing at the moment, it could very well be that I will move closer to Uganda in the future. I don't know. In our conversation many possibilities pass by: going to Europe, Cameroon, the US, and she still wants to go back to the Caribbean. It felt like a stepping stone, like I said before. Finally visiting the Caribbean, which I wanted to do for a long time and which I did in 2010 for a residency at the Instituto Buena Bista on Curacao, was an enormous eye-opener for me when it comes to feelings of displacement. I want to research that context, come closer to their constant struggles on identity and appropriation. Of course I am not sure yet of what outcome this will have in my work. I guess I feel that I will find answers there to a sort of missing link. Coming to Europe every now and then, Malinda becomes an African. Maybe even more African then when she is 'at home'. There, she feels the need to raise questions and give answers to the ideas and perceptions that are projected on her. Under the current political and social conditions, xenophobia and issues on identity are creating borders in a globalized world that brought forth people that cannot be pinned-down within that setting. Malinda is clearly a product of what the world has become, while a lot of people were looking the other way. She has to respond to the opposing forces, show the image from the other side of the mirror. Returning to Africa, a different mechanism takes root. There she feels the need to engage herself to the past and the present, comment on what she knows now of what is projected on Africa. At the same time relating to tradition, religion and social and political circumstances that are keeping the future hostage. It is a process of divide and conquer of the self. And of the other. Her 2009 installation 'Africa Untitled' consists of dark chunks of styrofoam, cut up pieces that form the African continent. In a way this seems to be a key-piece. With this work she created a stage for a performance in which she herself is absent, but she invites others to take place on it to play with the abused body that it represents. The pieces are as divided as she is herself. Homeless, and adjusting its body to every situation it has to come to terms with. The question is if home is truly where the heart is. Maybe in the case of Ato Malinda, home can be the place where the body finds a stage, finds itself captured by the gaze, and the heart is an every drifting entity that has a place in the world as a whole.

Nancy Hoffmann July 2011

i ii

Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p.167 Okot p'Bitek, Artist the Ruler,