Thursday 7 January 2021

Mickaël Bethe-Sélassié ~ 1951 - 2020 (English Version)

 

Rio, Brazil 1987
Rio, Brazil, 1987
 

On 5th December 2020, the Art World lost one of the most quintessential African Artists, Grandmaster of Papier Mâché and prolific in his artworks, Mickaël Bethe-Sélassié, died in Paris of heart failure aged 69. He was a mildly spoken, sensitive and creative man; his mythical characters where enjoyed by all age groups and his modesty was exceptional. He achieved so much in his lifetime closing the gap, slightly, between Africa and Europe.

Born on 15 February 1951 in Dire-Dawa, a remote village in eastern Ethiopia. He was the youngest of three siblings. His father worked in the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia's war-torn Somali regional state. In 1953, aged 2, Mickaël’s father dies and his Mother sensibly, takes the family to the Capital, Addis Ababa. Where they lived with their Grandparents.  Mickaël was encouraged by his Catholic Mother and was a keen student at Lycee Guebre-Mariam, where he achieved his baccalaureate, in the sciences. In 1971, Mickaël travelled on a scholarship to the University of Bordeaux and then later to d'Orsay. In 1975 he took a break from his studies and travelled around Europe. 

Over in Ethiopia, in 1972-1974 there was a famine in the North East known as the “Wollo Famine” and an estimated 80,000 people died. In February 1974, four days of serious riots in Addis Ababa left five dead. The country quickly became fragmented. Revolution broke out and Emporer Haile Selassie was deposed and arrested following the coup d'etat of the military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam known as the Derg. Mengistu became President in 1977.

It was a boring Christmas day in 1981, in the 13th  arrondisssement of Paris, this was to be a turning point in the Artist’s life, now aged 30. For the first time he created a series of panels for his bedroom and he describes the day as the first day of his artistic endeavours. In the early eighties, Mickaël decided to change direction from the sciences to the arts. Having no formal training he is regarded as an autodidactic artist. At first, he was drawn to sculpting but he found working with clay too restrictive in regards to scale. Eventually, he found the ideal medium. It was fragile yet robust, the idea of making a framework to work around appealed to the artist’s practical nature and the playfulness of what some may consider to be a medium for children rather than adults, he set about evolving into a Grandmaster of Papier Mâché ~



Source: Stadshof Collection

 

“Although the motifs and themes that inspired him are not immediately recognizable, they have been described as totemic and based on Ethiopian sources, particularly Coptic paintings and the motif of the cross. His works have also been placed in the tradition of Jean Dubuffet and art brut, in part because of their simplified forms and highly expressive quality. His brightly coloured, non-naturalistic figures depict a variety of types – royalty, warriors, animals – and the saturated yellow, blue and fuchsia colours of the pieces seem at least as important as their playful forms. But it would be a mistake to classify Selassie's work as art brut. His intention is highly sophisticated, and the choice, for instance, of his medium, papier mâché is the result of a long quest and a decision to make a political statement about Africa in his use of rough materials that can be found anywhere..... ” (Quote from Simon Njami of Revue Noir)

 

Having found his ideal medium, he started creating wild and vivid creatures that where large in size but light and easily transportable. Mickaël experimented with different mixtures until he devised his own unique paste. His medium was cheap and easy to find, as the paper came from discarded newspapers found around Parisian streets and local Metros. He never made sketched for his works, as the process for his creations where far more physical and one of touch rather than precision, like a blind person studying facial recognitions of a stranger. As he said, “Sculpting a work requires both spiritual and physical strength.”

 



Source: Le Salut au Soleil | Mickael Bethe-Selassie

 

His Art took him all over the world and in 1987 Mickaël spent a year in Brazil and his large colourful works sat comfortably in the Carnival city of Rio. Many of his works are housed in various collections around Europe; Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Stadshof Foundation in Belgium but it was Paris where his works where most appreciated. In 1992 he was on the cover of Revue Noir, which thankfully came to attention of Pierre Bour, Directeur du Château de Ladoucette in Drancy who later, in 2017, put on a glorious retrospective of 77 sculptures displayed over 8 rooms at the Chateau.

In 2002 Mickaël went to the Folk Village of Yongin in South Korea and his Papier Mâché works where transformed into bronzes. The following year in December 2003 the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian Institution was established and Mickaël work “Megalithe” was purchased with funds provided by the Annie Laurie Aitken Endowment and in early 2020 his works where featured on a cover for Peter Gabriel’s album Only Us.

 



Source: Only Us | Art for Us

His contribution to Contemporary African Art is colossal and his kindness and humility will certainly be missed.

 

References:

Revue Noir | https://www.revuenoire.com/en/edition/revue-noire-04/

Château de Ladoucette in Drancy |  https://www.drancy.fr/le-chateau-de-ladoucette/exposition-drancy-14-18/le-chateau-de-ladoucette-537.html

Brazil | http://www.mickael-bethe-selassie.com/Mickael/Bresil.html

Netherlands | Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam | http://tropenmuseum.nl/

Belgium | De Stadshof Foundation collection, Museum Dr Guislain, Gand | http://www.collectiedestadshof.nl/

South Korea | http://www.mickael-betheselassie.com/Mickael/Koree.html

USA | Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, Washington | http://africa.si.edu/

Peter Gabriel | https://petergabriel.com/focus/art-for-us/


Mickaël Bethe-Sélassié ~ 1951 - 2020 (French Version)

 Excuse me this is a Google Translate not a very good version of the French...I apologize but I had no help from friends because they where just TOO BUSY!

 
Rio, Brazil 1987

 
 
Le 5 décembre 2020, le monde de l'art a perdu l'un des artistes africains les plus par excellence, grand maître du papier mâché et prolifique dans ses œuvres, Mickael Beth-Selassie, est décédé à Paris d'une insuffisance cardiaque à l'âge de 69 ans. homme; ses personnages mythiques étaient appréciés de tous les âges et sa modestie était exceptionnelle. Il a accompli tant de choses au cours de sa vie en réduisant légèrement l'écart entre l'Afrique et l'Europe.

 

Né le 15 février 1951 à Dire-Dawa, un village reculé de l'est de l'Éthiopie. Il était le plus jeune de trois frères et sœurs. Son père travaillait dans le désert d'Ogaden, le cœur poussiéreux de l'État régional somalien ravagé par la guerre en Éthiopie. En 1953, à l'âge de 2 ans, le père de Mickaël meurt et sa mère sensiblement emmène la famille dans la capitale, Addis-Abeba. Où ils vivaient avec leurs grands-parents. Mickaël a été encouragé par sa mère catholique et était un élève passionné au lycée Guebre-Mariam, où il a obtenu son baccalauréat en sciences. En 1971, Mickaël voyage grâce à une bourse à l'Université de Bordeaux puis à d'Orsay. En 1975, il fait une pause dans ses études et voyage à travers l'Europe.

 

En Éthiopie, en 1972-1974, il y a eu une famine dans le nord-est connue sous le nom de «Wollo Famine» et environ 80 000 personnes sont mortes. En février 1974, quatre jours de graves émeutes à Addis-Abeba ont fait cinq morts. Le pays s'est rapidement fragmenté. La révolution a éclaté et l'empereur Haile Selassie a été déposé et arrêté à la suite du coup d'État de la junte militaire dirigée par Mengistu Haile Mariam connu sous le nom de Derg. Mengistu est devenu président en 1977.

 

C'était un jour de Noël ennuyeux en 1981, dans le 13e arrondissement de Paris, ce sera un tournant dans la vie de l'Artiste, aujourd'hui âgé de 30 ans. Pour la première fois, il crée une série de panneaux pour sa chambre et il décrit la journée. comme le premier jour de ses efforts artistiques. Au début des années quatre-vingt, Mickaël décide de changer de direction des sciences aux arts. N'ayant aucune formation formelle, il est considéré comme un artiste autodidacte. Au début, il était attiré par la sculpture, mais il a trouvé que le travail avec de l'argile était trop restrictif en ce qui concerne l'échelle. Finalement, il a trouvé le médium idéal. Il était fragile mais robuste, l’idée de faire un cadre de travail faisait appel à la nature pratique de l’artiste et au caractère ludique de ce que certains pourraient considérer comme un médium pour enfants plutôt que pour adultes, il s’est mis à évoluer vers un Grand Maître du Papier Mâché ~

 

«Si les motifs et les thèmes qui l'ont inspiré ne sont pas immédiatement reconnaissables, ils ont été décrits comme totémiques et basés sur des sources éthiopiennes, en particulier des peintures coptes et le motif de la croix. Ses œuvres ont également été placées dans la tradition de Jean Dubuffet et de l'art brut, en partie en raison de leurs formes simplifiées et de leur qualité hautement expressive. Ses personnages aux couleurs vives et non naturalistes représentent une variété de types - royauté, guerriers, animaux - et les couleurs jaunes, bleues et fuchsia saturées des pièces semblent au moins aussi importantes que leurs formes ludiques. Mais ce serait une erreur de qualifier l'œuvre de Selassie d'art brut. Son intention est très sophistiquée, et le choix, par exemple, de son support, le papier mâché, est le résultat d'une longue quête et d'une décision de faire une déclaration politique sur l'Afrique dans son utilisation de matériaux bruts que l'on peut trouver n'importe où..» (Citation de Simon Njami de la Revue Noir)

 


Source:  Stadshof Collection

Ayant trouvé son support idéal, il a commencé à créer des créatures sauvages et vives qui étaient de grande taille mais légères et facilement transportables. Mickaël a expérimenté différents mélanges jusqu'à ce qu'il conçoive sa propre pâte unique. Son média était bon marché et facile à trouver, car le papier provenait de journaux abandonnés trouvés dans les rues parisiennes et les métros locaux. Il n'a jamais fait de croquis pour ses œuvres, car le processus de ses créations était beaucoup plus physique et celui du toucher plutôt que de la précision, comme un aveugle étudiant les reconnaissances faciales d'un étranger. Comme il l'a dit, «Sculpter une œuvre nécessite à la fois une force spirituelle et physique.»

Source: Le Salut au Soleil | Mickael Bethe-Selassie


Son art l'a emmené partout dans le monde et en 1987, Mickaël a passé un an au Brésil et ses grandes œuvres colorées se sont assis confortablement dans la ville du carnaval de Rio. Beaucoup de ses œuvres sont conservées dans diverses collections à travers l'Europe; Tropenmuseum à Amsterdam et la Fondation Stadshof en Belgique mais c'est à Paris que ses œuvres sont les plus appréciées. En 1992, il fait la couverture de la Revue Noir, qui a heureusement attiré l'attention de Pierre Bour, Directeur du Château de Ladoucette à Drancy qui plus tard, en 2017, a présenté une glorieuse rétrospective de 77 sculptures exposées dans 8 salles du Château.

 

En 2002, Mickaël se rend au Village Folklorique de Yongin en Corée du Sud et ses œuvres de Papier Mâché se transforment en bronzes. L'année suivante, en décembre 2003, le National Museum of African American History and Culture, une Smithsonian Institution a été créée et l'œuvre de Mickaël «Megalithe» a été achetée avec des fonds fournis par le Annie Laurie Aitken Endowment et au début de 2020, ses œuvres ont été présentées sur une couverture pour L'album de Peter Gabriel « Only Us ».

 

Source: Only Us | Art for Us

Sa contribution à l'art africain contemporain est colossale et sa gentillesse et son humilité nous manqueront certainement.

Saturday 14 November 2020

The Dogon's Extraordinary Knowledge of the Cosmos and the Cult of Nommo

 

 

The Dogon’s Extraordinary Knowledge of the Cosmos and the Cult of Nommo

Source: Acient Origins

France, 1920: Marcel Griaule is a young man who is very well-established in his studies, especially in mathematics. He has recently served as a volunteer in the French Air Force and aspires to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grande.

Although his future already seems marked, fate has other plans for him - a new road that begins to take shape when he decides to attend a conference that same year. The speakers are Marcel Mauss, anthropologist, sociologist, and historian of religions, and Marcel Cohen, linguist.

Griaule is struck by their words and decides to devote himself entirely to the study of anthropology. Between 1928 and 1933 he took part in two ethnographic expeditions, and in this period (1930) he came into contact with a mysterious African tribe: the Dogon.

Dogon men in their ceremonial attire. (Devriese/CC BY 3.0)

Dogon men in their ceremonial attire. (Devriese/ CC BY 3.0 )

The opportunity was given to him during a period of study in Mali alongside his pupil Germaine Dieterlen, who was also a pupil of Mauss and deeply interested in the study of ancient myths. From that moment, the mystery of the Nommo is born. It is an element of an ancient heritage of which we cannot expand without having first spoken of the Dogon people.

One People, Many Mysteries

The Dogon are a tribe that lives in a desert land of Mali, near the border with Burkina Faso. It is a place that welcomed them after their escape to avoid the expansionist pressures of the medieval empires…we are around the year 1000, during the fierce battles on the banks of the Niger river.

Many researchers have already discussed the range of mysteries that surround these people, but what interests us particularly for the development of the hypotheses contained in this article is their complex cosmogony, based on faith in a creative god, Amma, and in a creation produced by the movements of the “Egg of the World”.

A Dogon schematic of the “egg of the world”. (Nothing Too Trivial)

A Dogon schematic of the “egg of the world” . ( Nothing Too Trivial )

On the basis of these beliefs, the “Nommo”, the eight pro-genitors of the Dogon, brought to Earth a basket containing the clay necessary to build the grain stores of their villages. This image, which at first sight appears quite simple and devoid of particular significance, hides in reality a very profound knowledge of the universe and of the celestial bodies.

The granary represents the universe, its scales symbolize both the males and females that generated the Dogon and the various stars and constellations: in this sense we will find the Pleiades in the north, Orion in the south, and a comet in the west. So, everything started with a “basket”, or container, that carried life.


 
The Pleiades (Seven Sisters). ( Public Domain )

Dogon Astronomical Knowledge

But the thing that most struck the two scholars was the finding that, despite the Dogon having come into contact with our civilization in fairly recent times (about the beginning of the century), they possessed incredible scientific and astronomical knowledge. Some of this knowledge was certainly the result of a cultural heritage that is millennia old, but one element in particular has decidedly current characteristics - the detailed knowledge of the star Sirius.

The Dogon were in fact aware of the fact that Sirius is a binary system (i.e. a system consisting of two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B); they were aware of the fact that Sirius B revolves around Sirius A with an elliptical orbit and over a period corresponding to 50 years; and the most disconcerting discovery was that the Dogon knew the exact position of Sirius A within the ellipse.



Sirius A and Sirius B as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The white dwarf can be seen to the lower left. (NASA, ESA, H. Bond/STScI, M. Barstow/University of Leicester/ CC BY 3.0 )

Many may wonder what is so disconcerting about all this? The amazement arises from the fact that it was only in 1862 when the American astronomer Alvan Clark deduced the existence of Sirius B using a telescope, among the most advanced for that era, and it was not before 1970 that there was confirmation of the existence of this star, not to mention a photograph of it.

Yet the Dogon knew of it hundreds of years before, and not only that, they called Sirius B with the name of “Po Tolo”; this name is certainly the most apt and shocking way to describe this system, the term Tolo, in fact, means star, while Po refers to a typical cereal that has the characteristic of being extremely heavy despite its small size; an expression, therefore, very close to reality since Sirius B is a white dwarf and, as such, has a very high density.

A Dogon diagram said to represent Sirius B’s elliptical orbit around Sirius A. ( CC BY SA 3.0 )

A Dogon diagram said to represent Sirius B’s elliptical orbit around Sirius A. ( CC BY SA 3.0 )

All this information is practically inaccessible without adequate astronomical equipment, and it is useless to specify that the Dogon had never come into possession of any such instrument, they even ignored its existence.

But the mystery does not end here, the Dogon, in fact, used to represent the planet Saturn as surrounded by a sort of halo, thus demonstrating that they knew of its rings; moreover, they knew that the planet Jupiter had around “four companions”, which correspond exactly to its four main moons.

An artistic representation of Jupiter and its moons. (CC0)

An artistic representation of Jupiter and its moons. ( CC0)

As if this were not enough, they depicted the Earth as a sphere and knew that this sphere revolves around its axis, and together with other spheres (the planets), around the sun; last, but not least, it is surprising that the Dogon, or in any case the elders of the village, described our galaxy as an immense spiral shape. We know very well that this concept began to be disclosed by Western astronomers only at the beginning of this century.

For the Dogon, Sirius B was the first star created by God and it represents the fulcrum of the Universe. All matter developed from it, including souls, following a complex spiral motion - the same that is symbolized in the intertwined baskets.

Saturn is surrounded by rings, Jupiter has four main moons, and four calendars are used: one for the Sun, one for the Moon, one for Sirius, and one for Venus. Needless to say, that the Dogon believe a truth attested from ancient times - the fact that the planets orbit around the Sun.

The Dogon know what, logically, they should not know; their knowledge is not the result of ancient legacies acquired by observing the sky and the stars with the naked eye, as happened in other civilizations, they simply “know”; this is the most disturbing part of the Dogon mystery.

‘Master of the Slanted Eyes.’ Antropomorphic representation, probably a Dogon ancestor figure. (Public Domain)

‘Master of the Slanted Eyes.’ Antropomorphic representation, probably a Dogon ancestor figure. (Public Domain )

The Nommo Cult

An old Dogon legend tells of when the God of the universe, Amma, sent the Nommo to earth. This was a half-man, half-amphibian creature which landed in the land of the Fox, a territory northeast of Bandiagara, in the Mopti region; the Nommo was red, but when it touched the ground it became white.

Mali, Dogon container This container shows the "Ark of the world", in which Nommo, the mythical progenitor of humanity, is supposed to have come down from the sky. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mali, Dogon container This container shows the "Ark of the world", in which Nommo, the mythical progenitor of humanity, is supposed to have come down from the sky. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The name Nommo derives from a Dogon word that translates as “to do well”; much more often, however, this is remembered as “The Master of Water” (perhaps a reference to the fact that the Nommo could not survive out of water), the Admonitor, or the Destroyer.

Nommo Figure with Raised Arms. (Brooklyn Museum/CC BY 3.0)

Nommo Figure with Raised Arms . (Brooklyn Museum/ CC BY 3.0 )

We do not know exactly how this figure can be placed in the various events that characterized the growth of the Dogon culture, but it is not so difficult to identify other very similar creatures in different cultures - not only geographically distant but also with respect to various historical moments.

The same type of creature is present in a history of Mesopotamia written during the III Century BC from the priest Beroso; his name was Oannes, his body was similar to that of a fish, he lived only in water, and had feet similar to those of man. Are these images referring to the same event?

Oannes. (Dr.regosistvan/CC BY SA 4.0)

Oannes. (Dr.regosistvan/ CC BY SA 4.0 )

In any case, this ancient, almost primordial figure occupies a prominent place in all African cultures; not infrequently, for example, in the most internal areas of Africa. People belonging to monotheistic religions turn to the priests of the various villages because in situations of extreme difficulty they invoke the assistance of the Nommo.

Finally, let us not forget the God fish Dagon of the Philistines, and the same symbol of the fish which the first Christians used to represent their deity. Whoever or whatever it was, the Nommo still continues to lengthen its shadow on African territory, perhaps as a messenger waiting to be able to reveal ancient truths to those who have the courage and the predisposition of mind to listen to it.

Nommo Archetype. (Nothing Too Trivial)

Nommo Archetype. (Nothing Too Trivial )

Top image: Dogon ritual dance, Mali. ( CC BY 2.0 )

By Roberto La Paglia

Roberto La Paglia is a contributing writer for the magazine Veritas Arcana  and this article has been republished with permission.