This investigation has taken the form of a short documentary (about to be published), but also a series of drawings and paintings. It grew out of academic, bibliographical research, an investigation of historical sources, and, ultimately, has attempted to be a way of approaching our mediation, begun in 2017, with the community of Tanguí, in the Middle Atrato region (Chocó). The germ of the investigation is contained, to a large extent, in these images. It is a kind of portrait. It forces me to think, because I always seem to be returning to my own images, to my personal archive, in an attempt to tie together various ideas from the last five or six years.
The archive interests me as something that can remain part of the investigation. I propose making these materials available to those interested in a deeper reading comprised of many connections. So, rather than placing the images as a composition, I include them as references.
First of all, this event, as an art project linked to the “social emergency”, speaks of survival in a context that requires the continued questioning of the logic of the government agencies, international cooperation schemes, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that finance socially engaged art. The foregoing implies rethinking the ways in which these research-creation formats are introduced into the new cultural industries, which political merchants —as well as people schooled in the creation of strategies to measure impacts and manage resources— are using to produce very effective images. This type of cultural program is inserted in those places that the State wishes to enter with, above all, military force. This, broadly speaking, applies to the Colombian province of Chocó in recent years, where the redoubling of all forces has been accompanied by paramilitary escalation and the illegal occupation of land by the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC, for its Spanish acronym).
The original image of St. George, the iconography in which the saint subdues the Devil with his sword, and its multiple meanings within popular Catholic culture in America, is highly relevant to the investigation. In Colombia, St. George is not only the patron saint of businesses, but of soldiers as well. In fact, St. George underwent a transmutation: in the most contemporary version of the image he cuts off the head of the Devil, but in the original medieval version it was a dragon. The dragon, a very Christian representation of evil, has additional implications in other traditions:
The dragon is more like the Chinese depict it; it is an image, a description of the essential life force, ki or chi. The Chinese say that a picture is worth a thousand words and the dragon is no exception. The dragon is not exactly the same as the image we perceive of a dragon, but given the difficulty in explaining this dragon, a picture works better than words. The dragon, in the Tao, is that which cannot be described.
Thomas Karlsson
This iconographic image of St. George has been the genesis of a question that first arose in my mind many years ago: why is the Cuban rice and beans dish called Moors and Christians? St. George came to me via the story of the Reconquista in which, around the year 1100, the Crusaders in Huesca tried to expel the Moors, who at this point, according to Spanish history, had been occupying the territory for eight centuries. St. George appeared on the battlefield and began beheading Moors, which supposedly secured the Spanish victory. That battle, known as the Battle of Alcoraz, generated the iconography in question. The heads of four Moorish kings became a reference for the domination of the new Spanish power. The iconography began to symbolize domination over “evil”. (I chose the cover of Miles Davis’s record, Dark Magus, to accentuate the idea of the alchemical and magical struggle between good and evil.) With his sword, St. George produced this head of the dragon, which later transformed into the head of the Moors.
It is worth bearing in mind that Western Catholic iconography includes several references to beheadings. A beheading is, in itself, a military trophy. And so I became interested in this iconography of the Moors and started to investigate the ways in which it has been inserted in so many places.
A sculpture in the National Museum of Colombia by Hena Rodríguez caught my attention. The text written about it for the Museum’s catalogue and its curatorship says that the work exalts and was created in recognition of Black people, but no one seems to have taken into account one small detail: the original title of the piece was not “Cabeza de negra” (“Black Woman’s Head”) —
in itself quite controversial—, but rather, according to a plaque on the sculpture’s pedestal, “Esclavitud” (“Slavery”). This sculpture, created in 1932, won a National Artists’ Salon and, in fact, has become the object of much study. What’s more, it was included in the Museum’s permanent exhibition about four years ago. It is a tremendous sculpture, unequaled in Colombia, but it is again an updating of the iconographic Moorish head.
Returning to the image of St. George, it appears first on the coat of arms of Aragon, and from then on the story is very long: after becoming an extremely political symbol, it crosses the Mediterranean to the French island of Corsica, then on to Italy, then up to Germany before finally spreading all over the world. Starting with “Moors and Christians” rice, and after discovering a Colombian recipe called “black-head bean rice”, I have searched for more analogies and references to the Moorish head with the intention of creating a genealogy of the image ending with its connection to food. For example, I discovered a German dessert called “Mohrenkopf ”, which means “Moor’s head”, and in France a similar cake known as “tête-de- nègre”.
The chronology and the archetypal images help to contextualize a history of rice in the Chocó province. More than that —and before it even— they made it possible for me to place them in a possible space of imagination, to better understand the farming system, culture, and geography associated with this knowledge.
In this sense, exploring the history of rice has meant understanding that there is an African, and later Afro-American, rice tradition in Colombia. It has also meant tracking a species of rice that is the second most consumed species in the world, in addition to enunciating the history of the European triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and America. This species, known as Oryza glaberrima, has been cultivated on the floodplain banks of Mali for more than three thousand years. And, a large section of every slave ship was reserved to store this rice in large quantities to ensure food for everyone.
Through my studies of the history of rice, more than understanding its industrial phase or its role as a commodity, I began to understand how, from the beginning, it has been a source of subsistence and survival. Even today, a pound of rice is probably at the top of most family’s shopping list.
There may be an unrecognized relationship between rice cultivation and certain death rituals. A suggestion of this is visible in an engraving found in the land of the Sereres —in what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania—, where mortars are placed on top of people’s graves. This relationship may consist of nothing more than a simple gesture, going beyond the mortuary ritual, like the gesture shared by the speaker at a funeral held on a rice plantation in South Carolina and the Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, when he won the Gold Medal at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, running barefoot.
Musician Alfonso “el Brujo” Córdoba said that the “son” rhythm of the Chocó province is based on the sound of the rice beaters grinding and separating the grain from the chaff, like the rhythmic pulse established by carpenters using two-handed saws. These references can help to keep this meaning alive, to preserve the notion of rice cultivation as a cultural complex, in which mourning always leads back to a plate of rice served in representation of the struggle between “Mores” and Christians.
An anecdote. I traveled to Cali to write about the Regional Salon of the Pacific, curated by Yolanda Chois, and also about an exhibition by Laura Campaz and Diego Mañunga at the Centro Cultural Colombo Americano. On the bus, which entered Cali via the city of Palmira, the first (gigantic) billboard I saw was an advertisement for Aguardiente Blanco del Valle, which said: “This is White territory!” And this was in April, only days away from the national strike of 2021. I wondered, as a person interested in food security, how one frames a problem when it is this urgent. In Lugar a Dudas, on May 1, I suggested intervening their billboard located on Carrera Octava to read “We will not be White.” They accepted, but the project was later boycotted. You never know who you’re working for, or the hunger with which other people sit down to eat.
