Presentation text 2005
My Possession - Ingrid Mwangi
Neither here nor there, but in the space in-between, Ingrid Mwangi (Nairobi, 1975) has moved within estrangement since she left her native Kenya at the age of 15 to live in her mother’s native Germany.
Too dark-skinned for Europe, too fair for Africa, she became a receiver of perceptions and influences from both sides, the Western present and her ancestral roots. Her work makes use of the body and voice to express the singular personality that this experience has moulded. As in “Song of the Devastation”, a high-voltage emotional sound libel against gagging, stigma, stereotypes and prejudice. The artist enters a circle formed by the audience, and, lying down, lets her body show that struggle and resistance alternatives arise from destruction. “I deal with black identity,with living surrounded by violence, but I also explore how to create something positive out of it”, explains Mwangi. “My Possession”, the performance she created for the Festival, derivesfrom “Devastation”.
The two worlds that nourish her generate the issues proposed in the course of her artistic itinerary – and the body is the only place where they finally meet. “Using my body as my main tool of expression was not an option, but a necessity. This is what I had at hand. The beginning was very difficult, a painful process in which I had to know myself, discover my interface with society, discover how it saw me and what my projections were. My body is the only thing that really belongs to me. I can cut myself, I can appropriate this material as I see fit.”
Feet, hands, back, face and voice are the scenic elements that her oeuvre highlights, besides the ever-present hair: dreadlocks that, tied to the ceiling, convert into cages, hanging tresses, threads weaving into a shawl. Mwangi plays both coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, she tackles the notions of fairness and darkness with irony, she paints the maps of Germany (which she defines as the “burnt country”) and of Africa (“the brilliant dark continent”) on her belly; she replaces figures of women in a Nazi advertisement with her own face,multiplied beside Hitler.Her body is medium,message, laboratory, point of entry, window, sensor of the world.
“My prime material is circumstance, the direct and indirect experiences that spark a sense of urgency, that alert people to the need of dealing with problems. Living abroad gave me a hard sense of my private space, of differences, of conflicts that can be transformed creatively.With the passing of the years, the use of personal references in my work became more diffuse. I avoid being specific, I try to be more abstract and universal. I use art to create consciousnesses. I want to open a forum for discussion.”
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival - 'Performance.'": 6th to 25th September 2005, pp. 140 and 141, São Paulo, Brazil, 2005.