Michele Magema: Garden Paths
Irene Laub Gallery
Brussels | BelgiumThe collective memory is considered here to be a vast garden in which some paths have already been laid out, while others have yet to be imagined. To do so, it will be necessary to clear the way, mark out and materialize these new trails. Il will also be possible – although not required – to give them a particular destination. Since the early 2000s, the work of Michèle Magema (born in 1977 in Kinshasa) consists in revisiting History by processing invisible materials, dialoguing with the unsaid and creating healing trajectories.
Considering herself to be a being of genealogy, the artist started immersing herself, from a young age, into her parents’ personal history. Born in the 1950s, they lived through the Colonization and Independence, and later, because they had to move to another country, had to go through the process of getting acclimatized to a new environment. Their history became a research platform upon which the artist lays her own body and her own history, as a link, as a boundary and as a pathway between generations. Using images, fragments of narratives and above all, silences, she gradually reconstructs a family history which connects two continents over the course of a long timeline. Her work contains a constant sense of motion, between the Democratic Republic of Congo and France, between Africa and Europe. Layer by layer, she probes a family history that inevitably extends to a collective one. Building on intimate and personal territory, she ends up connecting it to a far larger territory: a political, economic, social, cultural, agricultural, ecological and scientific one. In response to being made invisible and being silenced, Michèle Magema brings those who are not spoken of into the light, the smaller stories that make up History.
Belgium has an obvious role to play in this colonial, living and memorial geography. Michèle Magema explores the flow of living organisms between Belgian and Congolese colonial gardens. After researching maritime trade between Antwerp and Matadi, the artist is now interested in the Eala Garden (created in 1900) in Mbandaka (Democratic Republic of Congo), the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken (created in 1873) in Brussels and the Botanical Garden of Meise (created in 1797, current form in 1958). She carefully examines the gardens’ layout and architecture; the botanical choices and how certain plants are relocated from one continent to the other. Colonial gardens are multifaceted, as they have both scientific, agricultural and economic aspects. Through these, Garden Paths reveals a dialogue, a link (past and present) between the gardens, and by extension, speaks of what also connects the two countries.
The collective memory is considered here to be a vast garden in which some paths have already been laid out, while others have yet to be imagined. To do so, it will be necessary to clear the way, mark out and materialize these new trails. Il will also be possible – although not required – to give them a particular destination. Since the early 2000s, the work of Michèle Magema (born in 1977 in Kinshasa) consists in revisiting History by processing invisible materials, dialoguing with the unsaid and creating healing trajectories.
Considering herself to be a being of genealogy, the artist started immersing herself, from a young age, into her parents’ personal history. Born in the 1950s, they lived through the Colonization and Independence, and later, because they had to move to another country, had to go through the process of getting acclimatized to a new environment. Their history became a research platform upon which the artist lays her own body and her own history, as a link, as a boundary and as a pathway between generations. Using images, fragments of narratives and above all, silences, she gradually reconstructs a family history which connects two continents over the course of a long timeline. Her work contains a constant sense of motion, between the Democratic Republic of Congo and France, between Africa and Europe. Layer by layer, she probes a family history that inevitably extends to a collective one. Building on intimate and personal territory, she ends up connecting it to a far larger territory: a political, economic, social, cultural, agricultural, ecological and scientific one. In response to being made invisible and being silenced, Michèle Magema brings those who are not spoken of into the light, the smaller stories that make up History.
Belgium has an obvious role to play in this colonial, living and memorial geography. Michèle Magema explores the flow of living organisms between Belgian and Congolese colonial gardens. After researching maritime trade between Antwerp and Matadi, the artist is now interested in the Eala Garden (created in 1900) in Mbandaka (Democratic Republic of Congo), the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken (created in 1873) in Brussels and the Botanical Garden of Meise (created in 1797, current form in 1958). She carefully examines the gardens’ layout and architecture; the botanical choices and how certain plants are relocated from one continent to the other. Colonial gardens are multifaceted, as they have both scientific, agricultural and economic aspects. Through these, Garden Paths reveals a dialogue, a link (past and present) between the gardens, and by extension, speaks of what also connects the two countries.
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