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This image comes from Gabon. It depicts the signing of the independence agreement between France and Gabon, dated August 17th, 1960. The photograph is by Blaise Paraiso, one of the few African photographers working at the time. Curiously enough, Gabonese archives do not hold any images of the Independence Day ceremony and Blaise Paraiso's rich body of work depicting Gabonese political transformations have not been conserved anywhere, in or outside of Gabon. A friend of Paraiso's son, asking only that he be credited as the photographer of the work and that the image be made accessible to others, gave the image to me.

 

 

The Gabon incident is unfortunately not unusual. Across Asia and Africa, the rich body of work generated by local Asian and African photographers during the decolonial moment in the mid twentieth century is in peril. One promising development is the School of African heritage in Benin (http://www.epa-prema.net/index.php/en/). EPA works with regional archives and individual photographers to conserve African photographic heritage in Africa. They offer practical courses on conservation, digitization and restoration, as well as encouraging the interpretation and dissemination of that rich heritage. 

 

The Democratic Republic of Congo's embassy in Brussels holds a huge photographic and film archive relating to DR Congo's history from colonial times to independence. The holdings are basically duplicates of the holdings of the Royal Museum of Central Africa's Congo photographic archive. The images date from the 19th and 20th century and cover topics such as ethnography, European exploration, urbanism, rural life, religion, industry, politics and everyday life under Belgian colonialism. No one knows exactly how the duplicate archive came into the embassy's possession , not scholars nor embassy staff. 

 

 

 

Congo attained its independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960 but mysteriously, the archive in the embassy simply stops at June 29,1960. This image, dated June 29th, is the final image in the archive:

 

 

No one at the embassy knows what has happened to the missing Independence Day photos – a whole section of the archives covering the crucial topic of independence has simply disappeared. Have the photos been lost, stolen, or where they never there in the first place? All images relating to the day of independence itself, such as photos of the famous speech by Lumumba, the infamous speech by King Baudouin and others are in foreign hands – either commercial image banks such as Getty and Corbis or certain Belgian institutions such as museums and press agencies.

 

In March 2015, I will present my project Independence Day 1934-1975 in a solo show at Betonsalon in Paris (http://www.betonsalon.net). In the show I will include some 'behind the scenes' material, giving insight into my research for this work, including the amazing side stories, names of some people who have helped me in accessing difficult to reach archives and contributions by other artists and scholars whose interests intersect with my own.  The show will be on from March-June/July 2015 and we will organize an ongoing series of workshops, talks and other live events in the space of Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research in Paris. This second phase will address the exploration of the grey zones of history that resonate with global contemporary geo-politics through the lenses of art, social sciences and research, and advocate for a research in action that flourishes and spreads through live encounters and an open, protean platform. Beyond a mere discursive program, the project seeks to constitute an active network of local and international historians, researchers, theoreticians and artists around issues of archival practices and colonial and post-colonial narratives through the unusual prism of the day of independence.

About the artist

Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance and photography. Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language poised between film and theater and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. She holds a BA in English & American Literature from Brown University, an MA from NYU/Tisch School of The Arts and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.She lives and works in New York and Copenhagen.


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