I met Ole again in 1998 in Dakar, Senegal, at the opening of an exhibition of his work. The exhibition consisted of a series of small objects, made from things found abandoned on the streets, such as pieces of wood and cloth, screws, wire, nails and paint. The result was at once beautiful and disturbing. This art fashioned from the trash of the streets encapsulated the problematic nature of the street itself, literally and metaphorically.
Antonio Ole's work is invariably concerned with the contemporary political and social circumstances of his own country and the Southern African region as a whole. He makes use of all available visual means: film, photography and visual art.
In 1975 his country achieved independence of Portuguese rule. It was during this period that Ole discovered the power of film and television and he made a filmic record of the euphoria that accompanied Angola's newly acquired freedom. From 1981-1985 he studied Afro-American cultural history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and took courses at the Center of Advanced Film Studies.
Painting, however, was something he had already begun at the age of sixteen - in garish colours, applied with great energy. Now fifty, he has succeeded in combining his several talents to produce multi-disciplinary installations. His work is more than the combination of different forms of visual representation; for his expressive power derives precisely from the way he assembles them into a unity.
'Hidden Pages, Stolen Bodies' combines his assemblage work with video. In it he portrays the history of slavery, focusing on the town of Benguela. Benguela lies to the south of the Angolan capital, Luanda, and is the national symbol of the slave trade. The famous Angolan railway, the Caminho de Fero, ran to Benguela, and from Benguela it was just 20 kilometres to the port of Lobito. The Portuguese thus had an efficient slave transportation route at their disposal.
Besides video, photocopies and photography, Ole uses visual material from the municipality of Benguela: lists of slaves, maps and postcards depicting families of slaves and the disturbing details of the transportation of human beings. He photocopied hundreds of documents dealing with the history of Angolan slavery. Ole confers a new significance on old film footage and photographed documents by regrouping them and placing them in a different environment. He is seeking both to restore Angola's memory and to provide us with information. He is re-writing the history of slavery, so to speak, which there, as in Europe, had been abandoned to the dust. This dust was raised again recently at the anti-racism conference held in Durban (August 2001), where there were discussions of reparations, expressions of regret about slavery, but also urgent pleas for better information and education. Ole's work is a contribution to this global discussion.
The power of Ole's work derives from the poetic manner of his treatment of the appalling sufferings of earlier times. He does this in a way that transforms misery into beauty without becoming sentimental, and this can only speed this cry for attention to its audience more rapidly.
- Els van der Plas
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Antonio Ole would like to thank Oceânica de Navegaçâo, Limitada for their generous support.
Antonio Ole ° 1951, Luanda, Angola
Lives and works in Angola
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