IMCA: Eric Van Hove

Name: Eric Van Hove
Country Of Origin: Belgium
Country Now Residing: Japan
Title:

I was born in Algeria to Belgian parents. I grew up in Cameroon with a pygmy nurse.
I went “back” to Belgium at 12 years old.
I live in Tokyo.

Stenciled installation with ultramarine pigments and migrating birds’ droppings, TGD4 community development art project, Tambacounda, Senegal:

“Here is the tree of free men, the bread tree, the arrow tree, the fist tree, the fire tree,
Our times’ tumultuous waters drawns it, but its mast balances the circle of its power.”
Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1950

This installation took place under a grand Kapokier, a mythical tropical tree often mentioned in the poetry of Étienne Goyémidé and Faustin Niamolo, which is to be found on the armorial bearings of Porto-Rico and Equatorial Guinea, and was sacred for the Mayas. History gave it many names: Cotton tree, Arbre de Dieu, Bonga, Ceiba de Lana, Kekabu, Fromager, Pochota, Sumauna, Toborochi, Yaxche,...

The tree was hosting hundreds of Little Egrets every night, who after the crossing of the Sahara desert, were flocking in the white droppings on the ground under the tree. The installation consisted of the sprinkling at the foot of the tree of a layer of indigo pigments used by the aboriginals for tinting their loinclothes and the positioning on the top of this blue, cardboard letters composing a short quotation in Creol from the bilingual compilation of Gouadepoupean poet Sonny Rupaire (Soni Ripé, 1940-1991) : “Cette igname brisée qu’est ma terre natale” or Grand parad ti kou baton krey porem an kreyol gwadloupeyen:

“La vi en nou sé fé, mizé, maladi, dévenn, é lanmó karivè pou nou, kon lambeli apré movétan (...)”

(Our life is made, of misery, illness and misfortune, and death comes to us as a rift after bad weather)
Sonny Rupaire, Lameca, in “Cette igname brisée qu’est ma terre natale”, 1971

The stencil results from the nocturnal droppings of an immigrant whiteness onto an autochthonous blue. The work of surface textures cross-references through its various layers, the slave migrations, Caribbean poetry being one of its results and Senegal, its starting point.
The piece is also a direct allusion to the African ritual concept of the “Arbre à palabres” (tree of palavers – Mti mkubwa or Mbuyu in Swalihi, Penethje or Guouye in Wolof, Leki-Ndiaouté in Poular, Lohodiou-koro in Saussé, Bantaba in Bambara, etc…) where Kapokiers and Baobabs serve as gathering places for the elders once they need to discuss problems related to their community.

The tree under which the piece has been installed is to be found in the courtyard of the “Ministry of Planning and Durable Development”

visit: www.transcri.be/2005AN.html

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