We could be heroes,

by Humberto Moro

​

​

​

The art of Raphaël Barontini (b. 1984; Saint-Denis, France) applies formal aspects of image construction such as color, shape, line quality, textures and so on, to create his own visual language—one that addresses the legacies and consequences of slavery, colonialism, as he traces the ways in which colonial historical processes have erased histories and cultures. 

 

In Barontini’s compositions, one can find a myriad of references: faces of historical characters who have played key roles in abolitionists movements, African artifacts, Greco-Roman sculpture, Egyptian symbols, European military vestures, fabric patterns, equestrian portraits, Baroque painting and so on. These elements appear as fragments that are juxtaposed and arranged into nascent figures which arise amidst backgrounds of different colors, gradients, or textures. 

 

At first glance, one could say that Barontini’s graphic technique works like a collage does, but the research process in which the artist selects every fragment in the composition, as well as the material gesture of creating the figures, points at a different direction. What Barontini is creating is a new form of imagining the present, a reconstitution of history. A reconstitution of narratives and bodies, with the potential to imagine what different history could be, one that is told from the “periphery” and not from the “center,” one that is closer to the non-linear epistemologies of indigenous peoples and in their origin stories. 

 

This idea of reconstituted historical bodies, mirrors the conceptual foundations for the notion of a “right to opacity” [le droit à l’opacité] by Édouard Glissant (a persistent source of inspiration for Barontini). The Martinican wrtier understands the way in which the project of “Westernization” in the advent of globalization, imposes a monolithic understanding of cultures, in what he calls almost a chaotic, permanent, and obscure process—outside the linear and extractive structures of colonial logics— and how the cultural hybridity of, in this case the Caribbean, has the right to exists within its own internal, opaque dynamics.

 

Beyond the visual dimension of Barontini’s historical reconstitutions, the work of the artist operates in yet, one more dimension. This proposition is indivisible from the visual counterpart and, establishes an embodied, active dialogue between image, object, and action, and that is, the tradition of the carnival. In this case, the artist understands the heritage of the carnival tradition—of the West Indies more specifically—not only as a celebratory event, but as a practice which has the capacity to carry all sorts of meaning; a form of political resistance, a contestation, a form of collective memory, and a receptacle for living culture. In the words of the artist as a “space preserved from globalization” Through music, costumes, dance, and the occupation of public space the carnival allows peoples for a space of mourning, affirmation, and celebration, in an experience which deploys hybridity as its foundational principle. 

 

Such is the case of the work that Barontini created in 2019, in honor of renowned American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, titled The Golden March, in Savannah, Georgia, US, at the SCAD Museum of Art. In a parade made in collaboration with a local high school’s marching band, the artist designed a series of banners for the event, as well as capes worn by the band that celebrated the life and legacy of Douglass. The environment in which this celebration took place was the street where the main brick façade of the museum sits — a brick structure from completed in 1853 and built by enslaved laborers, which was originally conceived as the depot for the Central of Georgia Railway and the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the United States. It is important to mention this work, as it became a milestone in Barontini’s production, establishes interesting connections with the present exhibition. 

 

In the façade of the Pantheon, the phrase ‘Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie Reconnaissante’, meaning “To the great men, the grateful homeland” announces not only the mission of the building, but its capacity: a mausoleum of greatness, to honor the great ones, to keep their myths alive, but also, to transform persons into figures, and figures into monuments. In this building, Barontini was invited by The Centre des Monuments Nationaux to present an exhibition as part of the program about Histoire & mémoires des combats contre l’esclavage [history and remembrances of anti-slavery struggles]. 

 

Barontini has created a constellation of textile and pictorial installations dispersed through the building. A series of banners depicting the Haitian Revolution leader Dutty Boukman; the Haitian vudou priestess Cécile Fatiman; Louis Delgrès, a resistance leader in Guadeloupe; Sanité Bélair, a Haitian revolutionary and lieutenant, just to name a few. In these portraits, and in Barontini’s signature style, these abolitionist figures are recomposed from many elements like political documents, ethnographic images, reliques, and sculptural objects of diverse nature—as they generate—historical layers with the characters they represent. 

 

Two large-scale commissions are installed in the south and north transepts of the building. The North Transept is inhabited by a hanging composition of textiles that memorialize the oceanic Slave Trade. The central piece of this composition is the figure of a Black man falling. Taken from Théodore Chasssériau’s Study for Negro (1838) the work evokes the idea of a fall, of dehumanization, suffered by people in conditions of slavery. 

 

On the South Transept, a textile represent Solitude, a national hero of Guadeloupe who actively fought the reimposition of slavery on the islands, and while little is known about her, it’s said that she was pregnant when she fought for the abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe. She was not executed until after she had given birth, so that even her newborn child could be enslaved. In the manner of an equestrian portrait, a second textile work pays homage to Toussaint Louverture, a military leader who prominently leaded the Haitian Revolution, and lastly, a third work reimagines the Battle of Vertières, the decisive episode in the Haitian Revolution, between the forces led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Naopoleon’s army. 

 

As the artist notes, two elements are pervasive throughout the banners and the installations: on one hand, his use of ethnographic photographs from different museum collections as a means to represent the faces of the enslaved, as in most cases, there are no historical images who represent this group of people. “Using photographs from ethnographic collections is a way of inverting the almost scientific and exoticizing vision held by the Western eye of the time when portraying people from the colonies. For instance, several of the faces used to represent the characters come from the photographic collection of the Musée de l'Homme at the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.” The second element is the use of camouflage, which is an allegorical motif that refers to marronnage, a term that addresses the peoples who after escaping conditions of slavery formed different settlements and often found themselves in the necessity to hide, often in the mountains. 

 

To further extend the spirit of resistance the artist has designed a robust performance which includes activating the banners in the exhibition, as well as he has partnered with students from L’École d’Art Appliqué Duperré in Paris to design the attire for performers. As the participants move through the different spaces of the Pantheon in a path designed by the artist, the sound of roaring drums will completely bathe all spaces of the building, contaminating the space with a different kind of history, and a different kind of national heroes. 

  

Overall, the holistic experience that Barontini offers with the exhibition We Could be Heroes, is the possibility to question the ways in which historical “truths” and architectural spaces can be actively dismantled through artistic practice. And moreover, how this process of envisioning the ways in which erased histories could exist in the present—to mourn, celebrate and embody those histories—is a way to exercise the collective imagination to allow for a different future. ◆

​

​

Text commissioned by the CMN (National Monument Center) for the exhibition "We could be heroes", 

(2023)