Covid-19 Olympics: Tusevo Landu

Tusevo Landu
Covid-19 Olympics
Charcoal mixed media on fabriano
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: The five multi-colored  rings of the International Olympic Movement are arrayed over a grayish background filled with images of the novel coronavirus. Each ring contains figures or images evocative of the pandemic and lockdown, including a pointed hand ""Stay Home") a monstrous snarling beast being injected, huddled figures reading various pronouncements, and a figure clad in running shoes perhaps being wrapped in a body bag, The top center ring show Kongo power figurine or nkisi nkondi, into which nails have been ritually pounded. surrounded by statistics on worldwide cases and deaths from the pandemic. The figurine asks, "Where is your mask, fool?"

Artist's Statement: In this work, I express the impact of the Corona Virus in our lives, across the world, how the outbreak has become a global competition where nations are in search of the cure
or vaccine. I have used the Olympics symbol to globalise these concepts, to be more satirical about the year 2020. This year was supposed to be the year where the Olympics would take place, but we are witnessing the opposite. To me this seems so hilarious and pathetic because there are
people going through tremendous breakdowns during this lockdown; retrenchments are happening, mental illness playing a role as well, people have lost their loved ones and families are torn apart. What will happen post-pandemic?

Mark Auslander:  As John Macaloon (1984) notes in his study of the invention of the modern Olympic moment,  Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, sought to distinguish between "patriotism", love of one's country, and "nationalism,"  that is to say adversarial opposition, including viole ce, aimed at other nations and peoples. The Olympics would celebrate the former, through flags and anthems and uniforms, and defuse and defang the latter. The past century has hardly demonstrated the triumph of love over hatred in the international arena,  but de Coubertin's dream still exercises a powerful shared vision for those who believe in the possibility of a common human and humane world, as powerfully imaged in the famous logo of the interlocking rings of humanity.

The Covid-19 crisis has united humanity in the sense of facing a common danger, although it has hardly led to the levels of international cooperation and humanitarian solidarity De Coubertin and his fellow Durkheimians might have hoped for. In many societies, the pandemic has elicited xenophobic responses; this week, the current US administration, seeking to detract for its staggering public health failures, has taken the previously unthinkable step towards withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization. Landus's image of the delayed 2020 Olympics calls into sharp relief both the promise and the failures of the long-cherished dream of global solidarity, as we all wonder if there will be a coordinated response in the search for a vaccine, or if we are facing a biomedical war of all against all.

Allen Roberts suggests that the snarling beast in the lower right circle is a hyena, a widely apprehended witchcraft familiar in the region. Allen further notes that HIV/AIDS in East Africa was at times referred to as "hyena," Perhaps Landu similarly uses this feared creature as a stand in for Covid-19, which at the moment seems entirely untamable. Hence, the hand that advances with syringe towards the animal, holding one presumes the long wished-for vaccine, which would guarantee victory in this global competition.

I am especially intrigued by the nail-studded Kongo nkisi nkondi that presides over the work in the top center ring. Landu moved to South Africa in 2006 from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the nkisi presumably references his own national cultural heritage. Nails pounded into nkisi famously help to enforce oaths and underlying social values, so it is entirely appropriate that the figurine hear admonishes viewers to wear their masks and keep others safe. It is worth noting that nkisi are activated by medicinal substances, including grave soil, and in that sense may be conceived of as powerful mobile graves through which the powers of the Dead watch over and safeguard the living (MacGaffey. 1993). At this time of mass death and loss, we might read the nkisi as speaking on behalf of the Dead, to all of living humanity, exhorting us through the intertwined rings of the  International Olympic movement to heed, at long last, our better angels.

In a recent essay, Allen Roberts (2019) introduces the neologism "interformance" to characterize the performative labor established by and through the nailed nkisi nkondi figurines, which render "extravagantly visible" the vast matrix of invisible spiritual and social relations that converge within and radiate from these power objects,  binding all associated with this form to honor a common pledge. The irresistible spectacle of the nail power figure (an exemplary "technology of enchantment" in Alfred Gell's terms)  takes us into the "inter-", the very heart of things, even as they intensify the "-formance,"the coming into being of a network of previously diffuse intersubjective intentionalities. These objects and their ritual deployment are extreme examples of what Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) long ago termed "symbolic action," the externalization of interior emotional states that take on objective, binding reality in the external world.  Such would such seem to be the case with Landu's forceful nkisi, presiding over the Olympic banner, projecting out the plea to wear our masks to all of humanity, lest we lose all we hold dear.

References

Godfrey Lienhardt. 1961. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action. Chapter 7 in Divinity and Experience : The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford University Press.

John J. MacAloon,  1984. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wyatt MacGaffey. 1993  "The Eyes of Understanding," in Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi and The Art of Renee Stout. (Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris Smithsonian. 

Roberts, Allen F. 2019. Interformances of a Kongo Nail Figure, in Striking Iron; The Art of African  Blacksmiths. University of Washington Press.