GROUP PROJECT RESEARCH BOOK (ADI+HANJU+THEO)
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SELECTION we started with having a selection of 9 objects and choosing one that looked the most interesting and complex. something, that immediately presented broken power dynamic, submission/dominance and is problematic on its own. it is a wooden statue of 2 african men, carrying an european in a hammock with his dog. right away we had questions popping out like who mostly owns indigenous art, how race is portrayed in museums, does art portray bias on people from different areas etc. we hoped to find answers for it.

OBJECT  


the object (twee afrikaanse mannen dragen een europese man in hangmat) belonging to the wereld museum has been ‘donated’ there in 1939. it has been made before the belgian congo and belgian congo society. we speculate it was around the time of the international association of the congo, while leopold ii was in power. it is a painted wooden statue presenting two african men holding a stick/trunk with attached hammock on which a white man is resting on. the wereld museum states it comes from bembe people (most probably in current south kivu, drc).



UNDERSTANDING OF THE HAMMOCKmost of our sources point to several places of origin of the hammock, most of them focus themselves within the pre-colonial caribbean/latin america, current day haiti, guatemala and yucatan peninsula. it has been used as a place of sleep for people around tree trunks but also as a method of moving the dead to a burial side. our sources point out that they have been made using fish nets but also wood bark. when the spanish arrived, they have adapted it to their own needs and introduced the hammock to europe, which later has been used as a transportation method in rural places of newly colonised land (such as central africa). 


REPLICATION OF ARTWORKduring the research, we have found an almost identical statue on display in poland as a part of henryk sienkiewicz’s ‘african imaginary’ exhibited at the national museum in kielce in 2023 belonging to one of the ethnographic or national museums in poland. however, we were unable to find out who does it belong to, since polish museums have either very limited online archive or none of. the structure of the object (at least from the picture) looks incredibly similar so we can assume, there could be many more and that they might have been made for newcomers/colonisers as a gift/act of submission. find a picture here


POWER DYNAMICS IN HAMMOCK TRANSPORTATIONthrough reading and skimming multiple articles and papers, we have stumbled upon more and more pictures of the usage of hammock. all of them had similarities: they all required at least two people carrying the european coloniser. the european is always well presenting, wearing a suit or shirt, shoes, hat and other accessories, the people carrying the hammock, often have a piece of cloth covering their intimate area, with no shoes or head coverage. the idea of carrying someone who wears shoes by someone who doesn’t portrays incredible distortion between them. the european often has some sort of weapon, like a gun to protect himself and physically show the dominance. see pictures of europeans sitting on hammocks carried by africans (might be disturbing). not only does it humiliate the people carrying the european but also portrays the contrast between having power and none of it. european is untouchable, like a moving embassy of a nation. any discomfort or placing him in a dangerous position would mean punishment for the carrier. an example of such punishments would be king leopolds ii of belgium who has ordered to cut off hands of people who have not been working hard and fast enough on rubber plantations (pictures, very disturbing).

 HAMMOCKS ELSEWHEREhammock was not only used in latin america, europe and its colonies but also in different areas in asia. some sources indicate that it was used in the territory of south korea in shila era. drawings of hammock (가마) appeared on the wall which were dated before colonisation of the americas. they used gama as a transportation for royals and signature of wealth. the bigger the gama, with more people holding it, the more prosperous the monarchs and their kingdom presents themselves. what it means is that humans have created multiple versions of hammock. similar case appers in japan with kago (駕籠) and india with palaki (पालकी). pictures of gama, kago and palaki


AI BIASwhile doing tryouts, we stumbled upon a true example of ai bias in its database. we have selected a picture and tried to reverse the roles of a resting european with working carriers. doing so, however, led us to an interesting discovery. using generative fill on a original picture (left) in photoshop, by selecting a european and prompting ‘black man’, it successfully changed his skin colour, but it also removed his clothing and placed him outside of the hammock, that a european rested his leg previously (central). to confirm our speculation, we tried to do another trial by prompting 3 people on the right with ‘white people’. it changed them into one individual, gave him clothes, a hat and even made him sit, while others worked. this hostile balance is caused by biased dataset which we’ll later talk about.

DECONSTRUCTIONto move further, we have decided to try and find out different meanings of the object itself and the history around it. we have dissected the object into three separate pieces: the european, the hammock and the carriers. we have decided to look at them separately under the context of history and the present and came out three different design outcomes. 



THE EUROPEANeuropean is the one in charge, is the one that everything is made for. he is the one, whose comfort matters the most and people’s lives depend on it. he is the man in power. he could symbolise multiple things, what we found interesting was to translate him into a modern day situation. who is the white man in power today? what ideology did he create and how it influences people around. we believe the most accurate reflection of him are powerful companies that work with governments and in the end become one. we have created a statement animation of a skyscraper (referring to companies maximalism), people being the pillars/carries (representing our enormous dependency on those corporations), hammock representing the territory companies are fighting for (made in dollar material, since the money is the what gives them power and influence) and in the place of an european, there’s logos of foreign-owned companies who currently exploit materials like copper, cobalt and crude oil in the congo. the power still is outside of the congo and still lays in the hands of (mostly) europeans.



THE HAMMOCKhammock in the object has been used as a clever way of showcasing who can and cannot use it. we believe it could be a new representation of a territory, who can access it and who ons it. before colonial explorations, hammock had a very simple use, rest and moving the dead. everyone who could make it, could have it, colonialists used it as a method of transport and only the wealthy could use it. currently because of the capitalistic sector, everyone who has enough financial funds has a possibility of purchasing one. we’d like to showcase this conditionality in 3 maps representing 3 eras: precolonial (left), colonial (centre), postcolonial (right). the precolonial map, represents a rough shape foof sound america. the land is the fishnet, representing the material used for making a hammock and trees on which the hammock would hang. the second map, represents the hammock from colonial times. the hands pointed inside resemble the inaccessibility of the land but also they also link to leopolds ii violent acts towards congolese people, and pain they went through. the right map represents current world with hammocks being its land. nets connect the land together, showing easy access and consumptionist way of living. 

THE CARRIERSthe object portrays multiple power dynamics but it focuses on relation between the european and the carriers. in this piece, we’d like to give representation to the carriers showcasing pain through ceramics. our idea was to create three pieces representing body parts that have been mainly hurt during the carriage of the hammock with an european inside of it. a hand and a shoulder pad being physically hurt during holding the wooden bamboo-like stick and a foot which was exposed to sharp and dangerous objects while moving through dense forests. the glaze of these artefacts represents bronze which symbolises wealth and strength. we used this colouring on purpose to give honour and acknowledge the suffering of the enslaved people whose voices were not heard. museums collect artefacts of the past, but past has always been biased. pictures of the european being taken for the european, other people around the european were not important for the european, were not meant to be given representation. we’d like to challenge this implicit view. we understand our positionally, as people from ‘the western’, present world, and we want to use this positionally as a statement, that there’s still not enough visibility given to this topic in museums. every institution has a direction, they want to focus their exhibition and showcase one of multiple truths, whether it’s by adding or removing objects from a display. some museums remove certain pieces because ‘they’re too violent’ for the public, but then, a museum limits the story to an ‘appropriate’ and digestible one, which we can understand as a partial erasure of history.  we want to stress that these artefacts are not meant to offend or objectify anyone. focusing on body parts, removes a singular person from it. because it was not a singular person who got mistreated, tortured and killed by the colonial powers in the congo, it was at least 6 million. 


DIVISION OF WORKresearch - adi, hanju, theo
object the european:
    hanju - material/mesh
    adi - video
    theo - skybox/terrain
object the hammock - hanju
object the carriers - adi
website - adi 
keynote - adi

sources:
hammock origins 
https://www.abhaengen.com/en/history-of-hammocks https://sparkfiles.net/hammocks-deep-history/ https://www.abhaengen.com/en/history-of-hammocks https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/focus/colonial2.html https://kr.starsinsider.com/lifestyle/495713 https://rutopia.com/en/blog/the-hammocks-mayan-handcrafts-for-your-home https://www.hamacama.com/en/hammock/history/ https://kr.starsinsider.com/lifestyle/495713 https://www.abhaengen.com/en/history-of-hammocks# 
belgian impact in the congo
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/honorstheses/article/1660/&path_info=The_impact_of_the_Belgian_colonization_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_Congo.pdf
https://wewastetime.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/on-a-tour-of-inspection/ https://antislavery.ac.uk/items/show/2065 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-b0bd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/gabinetpostal/lestat-lliure-del-congo-un-genocidi-a-lombra/?lang=en#:~:text=Leopold%20II%20ruled%20the%20Congo,resources%2C%20especially%20ivory%20and%20rubber.
replicated art 
https://mnki.pl/pl/aktualnosci/pokaz/1737,imaginarium_afrykanskie,1
modern day exploitation of congo
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/drc-cobalt-and-copper-mining-for-batteries-leading-to-human-rights-abuses/ https://www.globalwitness.org/en/archive/global-witness-uncovers-foreign-companies-links-congo-violence/

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