Memories, identities, gazes, interpretations… These are some of the words and notions the group of artists, historians, anthropologists, art historians… engaged with during the AAP Benin Workshops 2023 in the city of Porto-Novo (Rep of Benin). Following the week of artistic experimentations in Johannesburg in August 2022, the visual archives (autochromes, black and white silent movies) created by Father Francis Aupiais served as a basis, as a source of inspiration to further work and perform with. For a week, they all searched for ways to revive the past captured in the still images. How to bridge over a century of physical and “spiritual” distance, how to redefine the lenses used to look at the autochromes, how to inform and (re)shape the gaze laid on those populations.
Setting foot on the places where the autochromes and movies were made, as well as meeting with some descendants of the people captured in the visual archives, triggered and nourished new conversations with that material. This time however, the new dialogues occurred with eyes and minds impregnated with revivified memories of the past. Embarking on that path is essential to challenge what one assumes they know and understand about what they see. Deconstructing the pre-conceived elements, the inherited filters through which one looks at the content of the archival material leads to question not only the context(s) within which the autochromes and movies were made, their goal, as well as how to look at them, but also how to deal with them from now on.
Throughout the week, the group addressed some concerns raised around that corpus. The autochromes and movies were collected during colonization, and even though the Catholic priest’s motivation was to portray a Dahomeyan population as an organized and structured one, with a political, social and religious frameworks, the general context cannot be overlooked. Resorting to artistic means may suggest alternative channels to approach such archival material. The repatriation of African collections which are in European museums has unveiled several questions and debates pertaining to their provenance or to whom they should be returned to. Regarding Father Aupiais’s corpus, the concerns revolve around ethical issues namely how to make them available to the descendants, how to treat them, whether they should even be used at all, or how, from now on, to change the rapport established between social scientists and the populations they study.
The artistic experimentation suggests more avenues of answers and alternatives. While a project attempted to reconnect and link with musicians captured in an autochrome and bring back sound and movement to the still and silent archive, and then use it as a jumping-off point to improvise and create; another one, using the sound of whispers and of human heartbeats, was dwelling on the time that goes by and how it influences our understanding of what we see and who we are in relation to others. The versatility of our gaze, the partiality of the interpretation of what we see were challenged in another project. It tried to emphasize the mere fact that each individual perceives an image differently as their eyes are already conditioned by their environment.
