MALIBISONTRAX

Aero. Diving into Marocco, crossing the blood-red Atlas mountains. Some Dutch artists suspended in mid-air francy. We are going to bisonate, migrations through the frozen sky, the bison artworks are flying with us, exodus, Zion, it’s all on our agenda. The smells of Africa already dormant in the plane, until all of Africa hits you, going down the stairs of the aircraft, at three, in your nose, A-fri-ca! Within seconds you understand, Africa is a place of the senses. Our packages with bisons chaotically through Malinese customs, another image of modern, paleo pop migration, we’re sticking together, herd and all. The atmosphere is both utterly relaxed and sporadically radically manic, and after twenty minutes in the airport it’s great to have left Europe, although some of us have come with Western eyes. Our leader sur place, Hama Goro from the Centre du Soleil d’Afrique, and our experienced guide, Judith van der Kooij, pave the way. On the way from the airport we meet a stone buffalo, or the Malinese equivalent, and other, animal statues in the wilderness of the traffic. Tender is the night, a black tenderness, with all smells coming though our noses, fires, meats, shits, herbs, gasses, benzins. We are being asked for money on arrival, pay off our consciences, drive on into the Mali dark. Our herd of bisons on the back of the bus, Babylon by Bison, we’re missing bisons by George Clinton, Salif Keita, Nina Hagen. But we’re managing. Berend Strik, Rob Birza, Remy Jungerman, Dick van Arkel, Gillion Grantsaan, Valentijn van der Heijden, Mike Tedja, Robin van Erven Dorens, Eva Klee, Barbara Hin, all managing the night away especially when we arrive at the Hotel Djenne, where lizards shoot behind paintings and golden buffel heads. African lizards with orange faces and blue coats being funkstars in the semi dark. We are here for an exchange, and I wouldn´t mind changing outfits with these reptile guys, imagine. But our exchange goes deeper, we are here to work together with Malinese artists, to create a show, BC Bison Caravan, edition 4. It´s the show where BC dies or lives, survives the weight of its rather complex start. Bison Caravan challenges the inhumanity of the art world, and seeks to replace the clinical game of gallery and museum with a more open, human approach. Its strategy carries ´the risk of incompetence´ as Patrick Healy calls it, a conscious blurring of the standard of contemporary, professional art. In its 4 presentations BC has done two musea and two more experimental spaces, the one in Marseille being the old Gitane factory, where rainwater leaked on the opening night on our bisons, like in a wet cave. In our domes, we don´t make rain articificially. So far, we have upset most of our contributors. When the floodwaters came, all bisons were washed ashore on the beaches of our reason and the sun reduced them to skeletons, the remains of once happy bisons. BC is also referring to Before Christ, and with it comes the ambition to paint, draw or assemble one large fresco, mosaic or drawing, with strong references to prehistoric art. Africasiaustralialaskamerica… we want to be navigated worldwide, and from every single corner of the world we can receive further additions to our prehistoric wall, ‘before the fall when they wrote it on the wall, before there wasn’t even any Hollywood’. The rooms in Hotel Djenne are hot and airconditionings not always working, but all in all is it an artful place, run by the ex-minister of culture in Mali, bricolé a l‘Africaine, she says. Migrations northward, dangerous and desperate journeys undertaken by West-Africans of different nationalities washed ashore on the beaches of Spain wearing Barcelona shirts on the day of Barcelona’s Champions League win. Globallabillity that is. Bisons, those paleolithic automobiles driving on our highways of pop, because creating prehistoric works today implicate the last convulsions of popular culture, it’s a visible in Bison Caravan, prehistorics versus popadelics, bison being a popular symbol, a Hardrock Café icon, McEnroe’s racket, Eddie van Halen’s guitar, a buffalo head. On our second day, we, Dick van Arkel, Valentijn van der Heiden and me start hanging the show in a rather undemocratic way, for which I’m heavily criticised later. We have developed a specific way of hanging, rhythmic patters which create groups of bisons, herding together, like magnets. Berend Strik has suggested to create cadavres exquises with the Malinese artists, and use the technique of the bogolan, to work on cloth. The outpour of works is quite incredible, and this seems to be working, a real exchange! From the beginning of the project the issue of the bison has been problematic, because contributors do it their own way, and submit works varying from beach scenes to selfportraits and abstract pictures which in our experience dilude the potential strength of our walls. This big bubble which is prehistory that lives within all art, must become visible in Bison Caravan, a balancing act between paleo and pop. This is the migration within the work, from the prehistoric bison to the pop buffalo. Hama Goro is ill and we move around in yellow cabs, taxi a Bamako, from the hotel to the museum and the Centre du Soleil, trying to get two exhibitions in place. Making culture in the fifth poorest country in the world is a question of rigidity of mind, you have to fulfill your mission without asking too many questions, and of finding an attitude with helps you deal with the poverty and sickness, which is in your face. In the Western media we learn to think of Africa is an object of charity. Cultural exchange is important, and in particular in Mali, which has such great culture, in music, in architecture, in fine arts. In the evening we relax in a restaurant with the same name, Le Relaxed, next to another restaurant with a similar name, Le Relais. Mike Tedja, Robin van Erven Dorens, Barbara Hin, Eva Klee, Gillion Grantsaan, they all have fish, steaks or bison’ testicles. The latter being a creamy dessert, an exploded heart, into the shape of red couilles de bison. Some hit the nightlife, whilst others sleep the Mali night away. Others hit the market and it’s only on friday, the day of the opening, that I make it to a market, the marché fétiche, where in a daze I buy two monkey heads, most likely destined to put a evil spell on somebody with. The heat on the market is like a turbo-engine, and with two stinking monkey heads in a small plastic bag I become dizzy, flee the market place, grab a cab with Robin who tries to scare me with his sincere belief in voodoo, ‘Io credo in tutto’ has always been my motto, ‘I believe in everything’ like Fellini said, I want to dump the heads but I feel I can’t because I might be implicated in a metaphysical crime, and therefore ask in the hotel for a piece of white chalk, draw two bisons in the floor and put the monkey heads in them, I make photographs of them, bisons fétiches, after the Jutland bird-bison, and take a cab to the river Niger into which I throw the heads of those decapitated apes of Folly, neutralising the spell, riverringsome on the aquagrave. At the opening, in the Centre de Soleil, the ex-minister of culture is there, national tv, a drumband with eloquent dancers and an excellent word of welcome by Hama Goro. I look at the show, and I miss bisons by Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Zinedine Zidane, Jan Wolkers and more. But I manage. There’s severe drumming and dancing, hideous Holland playing Ivory Coast on a small tv-screen in the corner of the yard, next to a horned sculpture by Jakuda. We all move to assist at the second, much larger opening. I hear the sounds of another drumband, but it is a little girl on her own, playing a small drum wityh a stick. Dick van Arkel gives the opening speech, and when the doors open, quite a number of people pour in, and respond to the show. Approximately 50 Malinese artists have contributed, plus artists from Senegal and Burkina Fasso. Another dimension is added to the herd, and a number of young, Malinese artists from the academy are content. Remy Jungerman plays his ‘bizon prik’ with children, a beautiful work and a variation on the Dutch game ‘ezeltje prikje’, where a blindfolded spectator is invited to ‘prikken’ the bison’s tail on the right spot in the bison painting. A writer is angry at me and rightly so, the writings he has done with children are not in the show. I apologize and tell him I don’t know about any writings, but this is the problem with Bison Caravan throughout, contributors hold you responsible for errors and losses, and you end up making more enemies than friends. But navigating in and out the art world does make sense, it requires of contributors a different, deepened tolerance towards the status of the works. There’s at least 150 people, and bisons are staring us in the face. We have come a long way since that sweaty first room in Aarhus Denmark, where a dead American buffalo guarded over a rather incoherent group of works. A band is playing wonderful, Malinese music, of which you hear too little in everyday life, and it’s not that people are listening to their iPods. Mike Tedja and I perform with the band reading from our writings and the night falls quickly, a quick, sudden death. The next day we travel to Djenné, and stop off in Segou, at the river Niger, fishermen in long, paleo-gondola’s travel on the water, in flow motion. It’s great to have left Bamako behind, and drive through the savannah, trees are getting thicker, like doors of a cathedral, everybody on our bus has her or his favourite baobab. Somehow, in the country, Mali seems more human, one is conquered by the illusion that people suffer less. We arrive in Djenné, West-Africa’s oldest muslim city and entirely built of clay, at night, exhausted. Most of the group sleep on the roof of the hotel, and do some reading lit by the stars. We visit the old ruins, and learn of large pots to burry the dead, pots with a hole in them for the soul to break free, in which the dead person is folded like an embryo. Bones bones, everywhere bones. We visit the house of the chief, to whom we pay tribute, and in his courtyard where three of his wives move about, there is a prison with no hole for the soul but Dick van Arkel finds a lead bucket which says ‘made in poland’, next imagined stop of Bison Caravan. Some of us, among whom Eva Klee, visit the marabou, a fortune teller and magician, who predicts a good future for our project, and further editions in Africa. He tells us to do well around whenever we are here. There’s cattle all over and even a little calf is born, the family guarding it happy and proud. Berend Strik reads from his travel guide live on Dutch radio, and just about when he finds his own voice the line is cut off. At night trying to buy a football for children is quite the adventure, and we fail finding the pump for it. The mosque in Djenné is among the wonders of the world, this city is wrapped in a cloud of spiritual severity. Most of us return happy from the market, which I since my adventure with the monkey heads avoid. We visit the house of Toni van der Lee, a Dutch moviemaker and producer of Rocknroll Junkie and Naardekloten!, who has built himself a home in Mali, drawn by the spiritual powers of its people. Being the tourists we are we buy Peul hats, and continue our way. Our stop on our return in Segou is for me the apotheosis of our journey. We stand on the bank of the river Niger, with a bleak sun, pale fire, dissolving. Fishermen, still, move as in suspension, and the night falls quickly, a silvery, end of the worldlike night. A cripple poet sells me his poetry, and he writes a poem about a bison, of which he never heard before. I draw him one and he says ‘it’s a bird!’, then a camel, then something like a camel. Under my very eyes, I see the man signing this edition of Bison Caravan, nr. 4, in Mali.

HH, Mormoiron 2006-07-10