Saint Corona: Christiaan Diedericks

Christiaan Diedericks
Saint Corona (Dark - a single diagnosis of health)
Monotype on 300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper
TLC Extension Collection (2020, South Africa)

Overview: A bearded African man in three quarters profile is depicted in the manner of a Renaissance representation of a Saint, his eyes lifted heavenwards, with a halo or crown in the shape of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. A background wash is primarily composed of orange, reds, and browns echoing the hues of the crown itself with a vertical swath of blue to the right.

Artist's Statement: Saint Corona actually existed and is especially venerated in Austria and Bavaria as the Patron Saint against plagues and epidemics. In Anzù, Northern Italy, the hotbed of the Coronavirus in Europe, is a basilica where the relics of Saint Victor and Saint Corona are being preserved since the 9th century. Saint Corona was only fifteen when she professed her Christian Faith during the persecution of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius around 165 AD.

Currently the whole world is in the middle of the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic with many scientists struggling to develop a vaccine against it. The virus outbreak has also disrupted the daily life of millions of people all over the world and most countries are under strict lockdowns globally.

Saint Corona in my work is depicted as a black man with a crown or halo resembling the novel Coronavirus or Covid-19. The depiction of the saint as a black man specifically refers to geography or place, to Africa and more specifically South Africa where we are still anticipating a major spike in infections. However, the reference to a specific race is a deliberate strategy employed to highlight the vast class divide existing in South Africa. While most privileged white people are able to wait out the imposed lockdown in the comfort of their homes, millions of black people are literally starving to death. This “plaque or epidemic” exposed the terrible reality of scores of hungry black people anticipating food parcels in queues of up to two kilometres in South Africa right now.

A second narrative exists in my Saint Corona and investigates the parallels between the dreaded HIV virus in the eighties and the Coronavirus pandemic today. For me personally, a grim irony presents itself in the fact that the whole world is now in a complete state of panic and researchers are frantically searching for a vaccine (not that I am inferring that we should not take the outbreak very seriously). During the early 1980's during the outbreak of the HIV virus, the entire world turned a blind eye and labelled the pandemic "the gay plague".   Money for research was only made available many years later after an unfathomable amount of gay men died and only when heterosexual people started dying as well. Nearly four decades later the HIV virus killed vast amounts of people and is still affecting millions living with HIV/AIDS globally. There is still no vaccine or cure. To add fuel to this fire many HIV positive people are stigmatised.

Mark Auslander:  The artist's double title for this work "Saint Corona (Dark - a single diagnosis of health)" alludes to a paradoxical feature of the global pandemic, with reference to race and class: although  a single virus type, SARS-CoV-2 threatens all of humanity, the dangers of Covid-19 are disproportionately experienced by communities of color in Africa and the Americas, due to co-morbidities shaped by a range of factors, including preexisting medical conditions, emerging out of poverty and unequal access to health care. As painfully depicted in TLC artists Themba Khumala's Waiting for Food Parcels and Kim Berman's State of Disaster, the economic, housing, and food security impacts of the Lockdown have been exponentially magnified in poor black communities. There may be a single biomedical diagnosis for this disease condition, but from a social medicine perspective, we need multiple diagnoses of the forms of structural violence that plague low income communities of color in South Africa and many societies around the world.  The protein spikes of the novel coronavirus that  Christiaan Diedericks has placed around the head of the Saint can also, in this light,  be read as a latter-day crown of thorns, the piercing ravages of social inequality and oppressive policies that unspeakably extend the devastating impact of the virus for many people of color.

As the artist notes, this history of unequal risk posed by a virus has a particularly painful proximate history in South Africa. Low-income communities were particularly impacted by HIV/AIDS, in large measure due to the Mbeki administration's long reluctance to make anti retroviral therapies affordable and available to poor patients, and crises of public health delivery compounded by rural and urban poverty, anchored in the long history of Apartheid social engineering. During the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, some South African aritists envisioned persons with AIDS in the figure of a Black Christ, martyred by ill-conceived policy and legacies of structural racism: Diedericks' new image continues this iconographic tradition.  As in earlier eras, in the face of the Saint we see reflected our own collective shortcomings as well as our aspirations for a better world.

Saint Corona in the Era of #GeorgeFloyd

The artist has shared that this monotype was inspired by Jericho Brown's remarkable poem, The Virus,

https://poets.org/poem/virus

which prophetically conflates a biological pathogen with the virus of racial hatred, an insatiable impulse to kill and eradicate all those of darker hues. At our remarkable current moment, Diedericks' print seens equally prophetic. 

Seen through American eyes in June 2020, this portrait of a lightly bearded martyred black man takes on new, urgent associations that were largely unanticipated when the artist created the work many weeks ago. As the US and the world experience mass protests denouncing the murder of George Floyd and many other black and brown people at the hands of the police,  "Saint Corona" inevitably comes to stand for, and perhaps to intercede for,  these lost souls as well.  The same complex history of systemic racism that has conditioned the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on black communities has also occasioned pervasive police violence against black bodies, emerging directly out of the plantation slavery system and post-Civil War efforts to re-imposed "slavery by a different name," through the mass criminalization of black life.

Mural of George Floyd, at the site of his murder in Minneapolis, MN

The origins of the present crisis of police violence against low income people of color in South Africa have different, if related, origin stories, anchored in elite struggles to contain labor and political unrest in urban centers; in violent fantasies of black peril that were, tragically, internalized in many low income communities; and in the restructuring of cities as urban "battle spaces" under Apartheid.  Post-1994 liberal reform in the political sphere in South Africa did not provide, for millions of people, economic justice or an equitable experience of law enforcement, and the resulting loss of police legitimacy has left many urban and periurban communities in a continuing state of low level civil war. (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009, 2016).

The militarization of policing in the US and in South Africa is an enormously complex phenomenon, but at heart it reflects a long-running ideological refusal, in Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) vigorous phrase, to allow black people, "the right to own their own bodies."  May the noble visage of Saint Corona, long a guardian against pestilence, now serve as a defense against the modern plague of racial violence in its many forms, and remind us all of the dignity and self-sovereignty of bodies and persons of color during this time of deep peril.

References

Ta-Nehisi Coates. 2015.  Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff.  2009. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff.  2016. The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

For more information:

www.artistproofstudio.co.za
 https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/extension-collection

#TLCExtensionCollection #ArtForGood #TheLockdownCollection