Sicomoro centenario
Description:
This installation represents a temporary formalization of on- going research that Bianca Baldi (Johannesburg, 1985; lives and works in Brussels) began in the fall of 2022 on a study grant from the Taking Care – Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care project co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. The point of departure was a private collection of photographs taken by the artist’s paternal grandfather, a soldier in Addis Ababa during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, featuring the recurrent presence of a tree (ficus sycomorus) the artist still found intact in 2019 on one of her visits to the city.
Examining the materials conserved at the former Museum of Civilizations, Baldi focused on collections of merchandise, particularly the specimens of local woods that exemplified the plundering of natural resources serving the expansion of Italian industry.
The wallpaper in the background holds a photograph of the plants displayed in the “Permanent Exhibition of Colonial Products,” held in the 1930s at the Cyrenaica Chamber of Commerce in Benghazi in which the artist has lengthened the shelves portrayed to display some of the original specimens once again. This intervention is meant to establish dialogue with a lithographic print in which words of a poem emerge from the branches of the sycamore tree, which is empowered to speak by another natural element, namely, the stone used to make the print, also on display. The sycamore in her grandfather’s photos becomes a one-hundred year old witness to colonial exploitation but also allows a new narrative to develop from a broader, multi-species perspective that eaves different creatures and subjects together with the past, present, and possible futures. ML
