totems

In this new series of work, totems (#palimpsest), Marc Lafia playfully brings together objects of luxury, Igbo spirit statuary and virtual eye candy collections. With these he has created a series of witty and luscious sculptures, contemporary totems about global circuits of cultural exchange, international commerce, the sacred and spiritual of the totem and the object of art.

Expanding his work on the circulation of the image, Lafia uses images and objects circulated, shipped and collected on social networks and brings them into a spirit realm. To bring touch to vision he’s pastiched Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Guicci bags with images of Igbo statuary and Pintrest image collections creating aluminum sculptures of a new kind of totem, one that serves as an emblem and revered symbol of luxury as the power to possess and collect the world.

Contemporary societies increasingly possess a visible imperial centre, with icons of power being buildings, landscapes, brands and artworks. In particular, societies are drawn onto and attracted to the world-as-stage, i.e. showing off trophies, competing with each other for the best skyline, palaces, galleries, stadiums, infrastructures, games, skilled workforce, universities and so on. And so it is a contemporary totem for a contemporary society.

Living mainly in the forested areas of south-west Nigeria, on both sides of the Niger River the Igbo number some ten million individuals.

Over the years Igbo people have embraced a great variety of beliefs and art styles from neighboring tribes. The wide variety of cultural influences from regional tribes creates rich cultural diversity and Igbo worship, this is depicted in ceremonial rituals, artistic creations, music, and song and dance.

Sculpture from the Igbo people date back as far as 900AD and were made from leaded bronze and copper objects. The masks, of wood and or fabric, are used in a many rituals or celebrations. Namely: social satires, sacred rituals (for ancestors and invocation of the gods), initiation, second burials, and public festivals. Not unlike the mask, fashion brands and accessories are used to give status, protection and stature to those that adorn them. And image and art collections the same, allowing people to display their taste and intelligence.

If we think of the earth, bodies and societies as writing material on which the original writing has been effaced we can never-the-less see and imagine the traces that remain. Here the artist, like the cook, notes how materials in their imbrication undergo a process of domestication, how the tactile becomes informational, yet the traces of past material histories now immaterial histories remain.

Complex systems whether biological or non-organic are increasingly becoming part of a flattened ontological continuum. Everything now talks to everything and with machines talking to machines and the human encounter with the non human all things become massively addressable and possibly massively conversational. In our age of the Anthropocene we must learn these new modes of dialogue and commence conversation.

Here Lafia suggests we must do this materially. That our notion of the informational is yet another layering both map and archeology, both tool and object, a palimpsest making a new totem that is us.