Members of the Congolese League of Plantation Workers sat outside on lawn chairs at dusk in Lusanga, waiting for their NFTs to be struck. While the digital certificates were created on the blockchain, the art collective was in videoconference with the Berlin art dealer Alexander Koch.

Koch and the gallery he co-owns, KOW, hosted the Berlin chapter of the group’s NFT release. So he was showing off his limbs with his laptop and pointing out the NFT display of a rotating wooden statue on a screen. For the group of Congolese artists, known by the acronym CATPC, it was a solemn event. The striking of this particular sculpture is a turning point in a difficult journey they embarked on in 2016 when they began searching for the location of an important hanged sculpture that had been carved in the 1930s in the likeness of an abusive colonizer. The man it depicts, Maximilien Balot, had been murdered during an uprising on the plantation and the sculpture was later created to contain and control the Belgian’s spirit.

It could be that the wooden object is an empty vessel, spiritually speaking, where it is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Back in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one could say that the dark spirit of colonialism is still present in the nation, through a legacy of poverty after decades of violent extractive capitalism from Europe. in the hands of Belgium and private companies like Unilever. That’s what CATPC hopes to fix with its edition of 300 NFTs: all proceeds from next month’s sales will go to the post-plantation arts community, and be used to buy back more land and pay workers fairly.

The sale of the NFT is an example of powerful wishful thinking: the group felt that the chances of the sculpture returning on loan to Congo were still slim and now the museum that owns the work is unhappy with the NFT, which has been made without their consent.

It also raises crucial questions about the privatization of objects with controversial histories on the blockchain. Ced’art Tamasala, one of the CATPC artists, worries about the fate of looted art in the crypto-sphere: “Powerful art institutions could appropriate looted objects in a new way and reap even more of financial income with this digital space. he wrote via email.

Inside the white cube

The Congo, a Belgian colony between 1885 and 1960, was one of many private taps in Europe during the colonial era. Using the profits generated from their art, CAPTC buys up plantation land in Lusanga in an area once run by the Unilever corporation (the town was then called Lever Ville), and brings it back to life by planting various crops in its tired land. Thousands of hectares of land once controlled by Unilever are now owned by multinational corporations which have bought it – CATPC has bought back around 100 hectares so far.

To fund this, CATPC has been working with Dutch artist Renzo Martens for several years, using the art world as a platform to bring their project to the fore with powerful people in the West. Martens is revamping its privilege and using its networks in Europe to help, including through the White Cube, an arts institution that opened in 2017. The institution, designed pro bono by star architect Rem Koolhaas’s OMA practice, includes art studios. ‘artists, a conference room and the museum. The Lusanga building will this month host an exhibition by Ghanaian art star Ibrahim Mahama.

white cubeRenzo Martens, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and KOW Berlin.

The Dutch artist described himself as a kind of “agent”. Its whiteness has caused some misunderstandings – some critics don’t like the optics. “I’m trying to blatantly admit that I’m a representative of a system that fucks people all the time, whether I like it or not,” Martens told me over the phone. “I am part of it because of my birth, because of my middle class status, because of the color of my skin, because I consume coffee and chocolate on a daily basis.”

One of the main aims of Martens’ work is to bring the art world to accept his complicity in global issues, such as the post-plantation economy in the Congo. “The art world is part of the problem,” said Martens, who noted how Unilever, which owned a lot of land in colonial times and had a cruel workforce, was one of the main sponsors. from Tate Modern’s Unilever series for 12 years. , financing, among other things, the show “The Weather Project” by Olafur Eliasson in 2003.

His most recent collaboration with the group includes a series of short documentaries (on view at KOW until April 9) that follows CATPC tracing the story of what happened to Balot’s sculpture. They trace the history of the object, made by an unknown artist to represent the Belgian accused of rape and murdered during the 1931 insurrection; it was purchased by a collector in the early 1970s from an impoverished local man. The collector then sold it to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for an undisclosed sum.

The Plantation and the Museum, CATPC and Renzo Martens, (2021). Courtesy of the artists and KOW Berlin.

Crypto Cooperation

When the NFT hit in Lusanga, users were watching from Richmond, Virginia, according to Vimeo statistics. Alexander Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, told me he was aware of the making of the NFTs and said the museum no longer intended to loan the work to CATPC for exhibition at the WhiteCube.

“Unfortunately, the NFT has severed all trust between VMFA and the expo organizers,” he told me. He called the creation of the NFT, which he said was based on images retrieved from the museum’s website without explicit permission, “unacceptable” and “unprofessional.”

But one wonders what the chances were that the museum would one day consider lending the work. The CATPC told me that he had been requesting the loan of the work for two years and that he had been told to come back later. In the meantime, the sculpture has been loaned to Western museums in the United States and Switzerland. “We understood that it was a silent way of telling us no,” Tamasala said. CATPC’s NFT is a punk move from a band who are tired of playing by the rules while being ignored.

The Virginia museum’s soft refusal could be seen as part of a greater deadlock of misunderstanding between inflexible Western institutions, which have very specific ways of operating, and the avant-garde thinking that emerged in the former colonial regions, which also have an intimate and informed way of relating to the works created by their communities. Tamasala said their blockchain appropriation of the object allowed them to “work around the problem and finally have the sculpture and create our world.”

The Plantation and the Museum, CATPC and Renzo Martens, (2021). Courtesy of the artists and KOW Berlin.

Who owns the world of cryptographic art?

The CATPC is not the first to use the blockchain for transgressive cooptation: in a conference last fall, German artist Hito Steyerl denounced the power structures already cemented in the blockchain and announced that she had hit the Forum Humboldt and other German museums on the blockchain.

Western collections have yet to create NFTs based on works in their reserves with controversial stories, but the CATPC fears this may become a reality. It’s imaginable, especially since the Uffizi was quick to hit the NFTs of some of his most famous works, Martens pointed out.

Since flooding the art market, the NFT space, while offering new creative power and a direct profit stream to creators, has quickly become a headline-grabbing scene with sales at exorbitant prices. Recent data graphics detailed how the majority of NFT-based art is held by a small group of collectors; the researchers noted that “diversification does not appear to have occurred in the NFT-based art world”. Meanwhile, companies are rushing to file NFT marks to protect their assets from duplication and counterfeiting. NFT trademark applications in the United States only increased 400 times between 2021 and 2022.

But Martens and CATPC still see an opportunity, at least for now. “Let these communities also take hold of this technology, not just museums that build on inequalities and risk reinforcing them,” Tamasala said. “This space could also be used to achieve our goal of creating our world; it is very important to make communal what has been privatized.

When the NFT struck, another ritual was taking place in the field between the computers and White Cube, a ceremonial pouring of palm wine onto the plantation floor. While the sale of CATPC’s Balot NFT in no way complements a loan (or restitution), the group hopes to generate some form of redress and reparation for their community. “We have otherwise reclaimed what is intellectually, artistically, morally ours,” Tamasala said. “We feel closer to the sculpture and proud to have what was already ours before.”

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