The Art Corner: under a tree with Joseph Chege
I meet multidisciplinary Kenyan artist Joseph Chege on a UNESCO heritage island in the Indian Ocean called Lamu, under a beautiful flamboyant tree.
There are no cars in Lamu, an island on the northeastern coast of Kenya, only donkeys, tuk-tuks, and bodas (motorbikes). The island is primarily Muslim, but all locals are keen to let everyone who comes here know that Muslims and Christians live in harmony, “we are brothers” they say. When you arrive in Lamu you feel the warmth of its people from miles away. Art and artisanry are incredibly important in the tradition of the island, which feels both peaceful and chaotic. All houses have a particular architecture, and most walls are made with dead corals that look beautiful. Donkeys walk the tiny sand roads as Mullahs call for prayer. Everyone is on the streets: talking, drinking tea, selling things, moving logs, and playing. Life seems to happen right here.
At the same time, Lamu is also an island wrought with poverty and, since recently, drug addiction among young people; the pandemic gave a huge blow to the economy which almost solely depends on tourism. My experience there was both bitter and incredibly sweet.
The day I met Joseph Chege I walked for 45 minutes under the scorching sun, hoping the tide would not get too high so I could cross the beach that leads to Lamu Town, where we had decided to meet. I was excited, this was the second time I was doing an Art Corner in person. I would regret the decision to walk in the scorching sun without a hat the next day, but this is irrelevant.
I meet Chege, this warm-hearted calm-infusing human being, under a Flamboyant tree, a short but incredibly wide tree with bright red flowers. The flamboyant represents hope and tranquillity and feels like a safe haven at 11 am at 35°C.
Chege is a multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of ecology and minimalism. From sound production to photography, to graphic design, to sculpture making, his only constant, he says, has always been his love for plants. “The thing I love about plants is that they just remain. Even when its friend is being cut down, or not watered, they remain”. My heart feels warm, I always use flowers thriving through concrete as metaphor for resistance to oppressive systems.
We move on to speaking about subtle acts of resistance, and I cannot help but mention the book I’m reading whilst I’m there, Rest is Resistance by Trisha Hersey, an anti-capitalist anthem that makes the case for rest as an act of resistance, especially for black folks. What do art and resistance have to do with each other? “I mean, to me, it’s difficult to not distinguish art as a form of resistance. It just forms the basic foundation of what art should be.”
Kenya has been in a drought for 5 years, and because of it, conflict has risen in some parts of the country. The pandemic left a mark on the economy, and the government has failed to provide its people with the help they needed. Nationwide power outages have been common in the last months, corruption is still very strong, and on top of this life is very expensive. “Why do we keep saying yes to these things?” Chege says, and he reminds me of a book called Dust by Yvonne Ouwor “She says the four languages of Kenya: English, Kiswahili, Memory and Silence.” Silence being the loudest. In the sense that we are actually compromising our core values as a society.” he explains “I don’t understand it, when did we sign up to be constantly tired?” Chege says as he takes a sip of his coffee.
“It’s difficult to not distinguish art as a form of resistance. It just forms the basic foundation of what art should be.”
Joseph Chege
Lamu houses are all built with these beams that are red with black and white lines. They look incredibly beautiful, and I was told by a local guide that they are painted with mangrove skin (red), coal (back), and limestone (white). Chege tells me, however, that the mangroves are being ruined in the name of profit, and that the government is not helping in protecting some parts and letting others be used for construction.
Mangroves are crucial for protecting coastal communities from tragedies like tsunamis, they absorb wave energy at a staggering rate of 70–90%. “Why are we not attaching value to mangroves that literally protect our regions from flooding, and put oxygen in the water?” he says, “when global warming takes its toll on us you will want to have trees, you will want to have structure around the environment. Because when all this is said and done, nature remains true, it remains constant, it is the feature that’s always going to stay.” We are a society that is very ungrateful for the custodians of this earth, he tells me.
“We are a society that is very ungrateful for the custodians of this earth”
“Capitalism is not custodianship, it’s fend for myself and forget everyone else”
Joseph Chege
Kenya is also a country with a colonial past, and colonization and extraction are complementary. “The thing on colonization was that for it to be effective, they needed to erode a huge part of our culture and practices, and make us seem less than unworthy, unclean, savage,” Chege tells me. He tells me that this has made it difficult for people to embrace indigenous practices and custodians of the environment, like Nobel Prize winner and environmentalist Wangari Mathai, who was called a tree-hugger by many, before she won the prize. “I think there is a wall system in place whether you want to call it capitalism, or over sensationalism that has created a gap between man and what he should be a custodian of. Capitalism is not custodianship, it’s fend for myself and forget everyone else”. Capitalism is a machine that somehow writes our story, and once we are thrown in, the key is to survive. There is a guidebook, we say, of “be born, go to school, work yourself to death, get a pension, then use the pension to buy adult diapers, and figure out your life before you die”. When did we agree to this?
Lastly, I ask him about the project with which I discovered Joseph, the Lamu Space station, a project by Kairos Futura, an organization working with artists and designers to change narratives around justice issues, where Chege participated.
“The Lamu Space Station is a direct response to the current narrative about the future. The presumption that we can deplete all of the resources on Earth and escape to another planet is delusional at best and extremely dangerous.” Lamu Space Station Manifesto.
In this project, artists and creatives got together to imagine a future that moves away from these narratives. They chose Lamu because it “ is the antithesis of the space fantasy future,” their website says. No cars, everything is handmade, and life is dictated by the tides of the ocean.
What the artists created is this utopian world that invokes stillness and peace, but also complete emptiness and scarcity. Much of it has to do with the minimalist style of Chege, and his experience in working with nature for each of his shoots. “We wanted to create a world where there is a level of symbiosis and true custodianship with the environment”. He tells me the idea was to create a surreal kind of shock factor where the message was “you don’t need an exploration, you don’t need Elon Musk to fail, you don’t need tragedy for you to open your eyes.” But the curious thing for him was how he and his fellow cosmonauts, the other artists involved in the project, were able to mimic this symbiotic way of creating. “we learned how to be symbiotic to one another, we learned how to deeply nurture our roots.” In a place where you have space for dialogue and questioning together, you create something that is authentic.
I ask him “Why ecology?”, and he tells me that his father, a linguist, loved trees and farming, whilst his mother loved gardening. “My sole purpose as an artist is I need to be connected with the very source that makes me who I am, whether it’s using natural pigments as a watercolour pigment, whether it’s using reeds to make props and all these things that we do with photography projects, whether it’s, you know, using the whole camping experience to go out and spend nights in the mangrove forest. They call us tree huggers here. But I don’t take any offence because trees are just, you know, always ready for a hug.”
This is the last art corner of 2022 and I want to take this time as a reminder of what this column is about. Here, we are exploring the narratives that we, in this case me and the artist I am interviewing, have to grapple with every day, and how we are shifting these narratives through what we absorb (reading, art, people) and through our work. This column is with people from all over the world, but the most beautiful thing has been to discover that a lot of the time, even if we are from different places, we share a lot of commonalities in our interests and visions of the world. I will never stop being grateful for that. May your transition to the new year be smooth.
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