‘We Reappropriated What Belongs to Us:’ Congolese Artists Minted NFTs of a Colonial Era Sculpture—The Museum That Owns it is Not Pleased

Mem­bers of the Con­golese Plan­ta­tion Work­ers Art League sat out­side on lawn chairs at dusk in Lusan­ga, wait­ing for their NFTs to mint. While the dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cates were being made on the blockchain, the art col­lec­tive was on a video call with the Berlin art deal­er Alexan­der Koch.

Koch and the gallery he co-owns, KOW, were host­ing the Berlin chap­ter of the group’s NFT release, so he was show­ing its mem­bers around with his lap­top and point­ing out the NFT dis­play of a rotat­ing wood­en stat­ue on a screen. For the Con­golese group of artists, known by the acronym CATPC, it was a cer­e­mo­ni­ous event. The mint­ing of this par­tic­u­lar sculp­ture is a turn­ing point in a fraught jour­ney they embarked on in 2016 when they began seek­ing the loca­tion of an impor­tant Pende sculp­ture that had been carved in the 1930s in the like­ness of an abu­sive col­o­niz­er. The man it depicts, Max­im­i­lien Balot, had been mur­dered in an upris­ing on the plan­ta­tion and the sculp­ture was lat­er cre­at­ed to con­tain and con­trol the Belgian’s spirit.

It could be that the wood­en object is an emp­ty ves­sel, spir­i­tu­al­ly-speak­ing, where it sits at the Vir­ginia Muse­um of Fine Arts. Back in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go, one could say that the dark spir­it of colo­nial­ism is still present in the nation, through a lega­cy of pover­ty fol­low­ing decades of vio­lent extrac­tive cap­i­tal­ism from Europe at the hands of Bel­gium and pri­vate com­pa­nies like Unilever. This is what CATPC hopes to redress with its edi­tion of 300 NFTs: any prof­its from the sales next month will flow to the post-plan­ta­tion artis­tic com­mu­ni­ty, where male work­ers make $18 a month and where women make just half of that.

Balot NFT. Courtesy CAPTC and Renzo Martens." width="1000" height="562" srcset="https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/image-1.jpeg 1000w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/image-1-300x169.jpeg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/image-1-50x28.jpeg 50w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px">

CATPC dur­ing the mint­ing of the Balot NFT. Cour­tesy Ced’art Tamasala/CAPTC.

The sale of the NFT is an exam­ple of pow­er­ful mag­i­cal think­ing: the group felt that the chances that the sculp­ture will return on loan to Con­go were always slim and now the muse­um that owns the work is not pleased about the NFT, which was made with­out their consent.

It also brings up cru­cial ques­tions about the pri­va­ti­za­tion of objects with con­tro­ver­sial his­to­ries on the blockchain. Ced’art Tamasala, one of the artists in CATPC, is con­cerned about the fate of loot­ed art in the cryp­to-sphere: “Pow­er­ful art insti­tu­tions could appro­pri­ate loot­ed objects in a new way and reap even more finan­cial income with this dig­i­tal space,” he wrote over email.

Inside the White Cube

Con­go, a Bel­gian colony between 1885 and 1960, was one of Europe’s many pri­vate taps for resources dur­ing the colo­nial era. With prof­its gen­er­at­ed from their art, the CAPTC has been buy­ing back plan­ta­tion land in Lusan­ga in an area that was for­mer­ly run by the com­pa­ny Unilever (the town was then called Lever Ville), and reviv­ing it by plant­i­ng diverse crops in its tired earth. Thou­sands of hectares of land once con­trolled by Unilever is now owned by multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies who bought it—CATPC has bought back around 100 hectares so far.

To finance this, the CATPC has been work­ing togeth­er with the Dutch artist Ren­zo Martens for sev­er­al years, using the art world as a plat­form to get their project front row with pow­er­ful peo­ple in the West. Martens has been retool­ing his priv­i­lege and using his net­works in Europe to help, in par­tic­u­lar through the White Cube, an art insti­tu­tion that opened in 2017. The insti­tu­tion, designed pro bono by star archi­tect Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, includes artist stu­dios, a con­fer­ence room, and the muse­um. The Lusan­ga build­ing will host an exhi­bi­tion by Ghan­ian art star Ibrahim Mahama this month.

White Cube, Renzo Martens, 2020. Courtesy the artist and KOW Berlin." width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/02_RM_White_Cube_Press_II-1024x576.png 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/02_RM_White_Cube_Press_II-300x169.png 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/02_RM_White_Cube_Press_II-50x28.png 50w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px">

White Cube, Ren­zo Martens, 2020. Cour­tesy the artist and KOW Berlin.

The Dutch artist has described him­self as an “agent” of sorts. His white­ness has caused some misunderstandings—a few crit­ics don’t like the optics. “I try to bla­tant­ly admit that I am an expo­nent of a sys­tem that fucks over peo­ple con­tin­u­ous­ly, whether I like that or not,” Martens told me over the phone. “I am a part of it because of birth, because of my mid­dle class sta­tus, because of skin col­or, because I con­sume cof­fee and choco­late on a dai­ly basis.”

A major focus on Martens’s work is get­ting the art world to come to terms with its com­plic­i­ty in glob­al issues, like the post-plan­ta­tion econ­o­my in the Con­go. “The art world is a part of the prob­lem,” said Martens, who not­ed how Unilever, which owned a lot of land dur­ing the colo­nial era and extract­ed labor using cru­el meth­ods, was a major spon­sor for the Tate Modern’s Unilever Series over 12 years, financ­ing Ola­fur Eliasson’s show “The Weath­er Project” in 2003, among others.

His most recent col­lab­o­ra­tion with the group has a series of short doc­u­men­tary films (on view at KOW until April 9) that fol­lows CATPC trac­ing the sto­ry of what hap­pened to the sculp­ture of Balot. They fol­low the his­to­ry of the object, made by an unknown artist to depict the Bel­gian who was accused of rape and mur­dered dur­ing the 1931 upris­ing; it was bought by a col­lec­tor in the ear­ly 1970s from an impov­er­ished local man. The col­lec­tor lat­er sold it to the Vir­ginia Muse­um of Fine Arts for an undis­closed sum.

The Plantation and The Museum, CATPC and Renzo Martens, (2021). Courtesy the artists and KOW Berlin." width="956" height="535" srcset="https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-18-at-15.48.05.png 956w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-18-at-15.48.05-300x168.png 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-18-at-15.48.05-50x28.png 50w" sizes="(max-width: 956px) 100vw, 956px">

The Plan­ta­tion and The Muse­um, CATPC and Ren­zo Martens, (2021). Cour­tesy the artists and KOW Berlin.

Crypto Co-optation

Dur­ing the mint­ing of the NFT in Lusan­ga, users were watch­ing from Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, accord­ing to Vimeo’s sta­tis­tics. Alexan­der Nyerges, direc­tor of the Vir­ginia Muse­um of Fine Arts, told me that he is aware of the NFTs being made, and said the muse­um now no longer intends to loan the work to CATPC for an exhi­bi­tion at White Cube. 

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the NFT has bro­ken all trust between VMFA and the exhi­bi­tion orga­niz­ers,” he told me. He called the cre­ation of the NFT, which he said is based on images nabbed from the museum’s web­site with­out explic­it per­mis­sion “unac­cept­able” and “unpro­fes­sion­al.”

But one might ask what the chances were that the muse­um was ever plan­ning to loan the work out. The CATPC told me that it has been ask­ing to loan the work for two years, and that they were told to check back lat­er. Mean­while, the sculp­ture was loaned to West­ern muse­ums in the U.S. and Switzer­land. “We under­stood that this was a silent way of say­ing no to us,” said Tamasala. CATPC’s NFT is a punk ges­ture from a group that is tired of play­ing by the rules while being ignored.

The soft refusal from the Vir­ginia muse­um could be seen as part of a greater grid­lock of mis­un­der­stand­ing between steely West­ern insti­tu­tions, who have high­ly spec­i­fied ways of oper­at­ing, and the avant-garde think­ing that has emerged in for­mer colo­nial regions, who also have a more inti­mate and informed way of relat­ing to the works their com­mu­ni­ties cre­at­ed. Tamasala said their blockchain appro­pri­a­tion of the object has allowed them to “bypass the prob­lem and final­ly have the sculp­ture and cre­ate our world.”

The Plan­ta­tion and The Muse­um, CATPC and Ren­zo Martens, (2021). Cour­tesy the artists and KOW Berlin.

Who Gets to Own the Crypto Art World?

CATPC is not the first to use the blockchain for a trans­gres­sive coop­tion: in a talk last fall, Ger­man artist Hito Stey­erl con­demned the pow­er struc­tures that are already cement­ed in the blockchain and announced that she had mint­ed the Hum­boldt Forum and oth­er Ger­man muse­ums on the blockchain.

West­ern col­lec­tions have not yet cre­at­ed NFTs based on works in their stor­ages with con­tro­ver­sial his­to­ries, but the CATPC is wor­ried that it could become a real­i­ty. It is imag­in­able, espe­cial­ly giv­en that the Uffizi was quick to mint NFTs of some of its most famous works, Martens point­ed out.

Since they have flood­ed the art mar­ket, the NFT space, while offer­ing new cre­ative pow­er and direct prof­it flow to cre­ators, has rapid­ly become a head­line-grab­bing scene of exor­bi­tant­ly priced sales. Recent data graphs detailed how the major­i­ty of NFT-based art is owned by a small clus­ter of col­lec­tors; the researchers not­ed that “diver­si­fi­ca­tion does not appear to have hap­pened in the world of NFT-based art.” Mean­while, com­pa­nies are rush­ing to file NFT trade­marks to pro­tect their assets from dupli­ca­tion and fakes. Appli­ca­tions for NFT trade­marks in the U.S. alone have increased 400 fold between 2021 and 2022.

But Martens and CATPC still see an oppor­tu­ni­ty, at least for now. “Let these com­mu­ni­ties also take hold of this tech­nol­o­gy, not just the muse­ums that build on inequal­i­ties and risk rein­forc­ing them,” said Tamasala. “This space could also be used to achieve our goal of cre­at­ing our world; it is very impor­tant to make com­mu­nal what has been privatized.”

At the mint­ing of the NFT, there was anoth­er rit­u­al tak­ing place right on the ground, between the hums com­put­ers and White Cube in the back­ground, a cer­e­mo­ni­ous pour­ing of palm wine onto the plan­ta­tion soil. Though the sale of CATPC’s NFT of Balot in no way sup­ple­ments a loan (or resti­tu­tion), the group hopes to gen­er­ate some form of repair and repa­ra­tion for their com­mu­ni­ty. “We have reap­pro­pri­at­ed oth­er­wise what belongs to us intel­lec­tu­al­ly, artis­ti­cal­ly, moral­ly,” said Tamasala. “We feel clos­er to the sculp­ture and proud to have what was already ours before.”

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