Following is the full Massa Lemu interview as featured in the Fall 2023 Studio Magazine and part of the Curious Minds interview series.
Massa Lemu is a Malawian visual artist and writer whose multidisciplinary artistic practice takes the form of text, performance and multimedia installations that are concerned with the contradictions of migration and the psychological effects of an immaterial, flexible and mobile capitalism on the post-colonial subject. He is a founding member of the Ozhopé Collective, which works globally and in Malawian communities to spur conversation around global environmental and economic issues.
Lemu makes interventions into objects to comment on their social, economic or spiritual aspects and occasionally uses the aesthetics of politics to comment on the politics of aesthetics. As a writer, Lemu’s scholarly interests lie in what he calls a biopolitical collectivism in contemporary African art, which he defines as a subject-centered and collectivist art practice situated in everyday life.
His writing has been published by the Burlington Contemporary, Wits University Press, Third Text, Stedelijk Studies Journal and Contemporary And. Lemu earned his Ph.D. in visual arts from the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town, South Africa, his M.A. in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design and his Bachelor of Education degree in fine art from the Chancellor College University of Malawi Zomba, Malawi.
After a semester of research leave, Lemu has returned to VCUarts charged with a growing network of global collaborators and a shared vision. His research is deeply engaged with the life of objects, their voices and the effects our fast-paced, consumer society is having on the world’s living systems. His global perspective challenges and inspires his students to think beyond formal ideas of permanence, the wastefulness of extractive industry and encourages them to build resilient, emplaced communities with globally impactful vision.
STUDIO: Can you rewind us to the past academic year, what you’ve been up to, and what’s made an impression on you over that time?
LEMU: Yes, I was on leave this semester. I went to Malawi for two weeks to do my research with the Ozhopé Collective. You’ve seen Row 1 and Row 2. Row 3 will be appearing on the website soon. I was also invited to Switzerland for the La Becque Artist Residency with one colleague from the collective where we made work and just experimented on another aspect of what we had been doing previously, because we usually make our work on the shores of Lake Malawi.
This was obviously a different context, the shores of Lake Geneva, and we were looking to how different geographies and environments might affect our work. Now we are looking back and seeing how people are responding to the images that we brought from that experience.
I returned to the United States at the end of March to take part in a workshop at the University of Minnesota. There was an exhibition titled Why Canoes? at the University’s Center for Community Engaged Learning. The questions that they were asking paralleled the kinds of questions that we asked when we were working with the canoes on Lake Malawi for the Row projects. That similarity gave us momentum to carry on with the work that we do, because we saw that there are other people looking at the same things, interested in the same issues and problems, but from different angles. Maybe in the future, those things will start to intersect.
STUDIO: You and the Ozhopé have been so focused on a very local community and environment in Malawi. Has that changed? You spoke about the perspective becoming broader because of your work in Switzerland and then Minnesota. How are those encounters changing your view of the community you are speaking to and trying to create?
LEMU: So, we think in terms of communities more than a single community because there is not one homogenous community out there. Some of the communities we encounter we co-create through our work, but at the same time the work encounters these different communities on different levels. For example, there are the fishing communities which we work with right on the shores of Lake Malawi. Even within the fishing communities, there is a subset of people who are interested in what we are doing and with whom we have conversations. It’s not everyone in the fishing community, but it’s a curious group that gravitates toward what we are doing and engages in conversations.
Then there are the broader communities; that of Malawian Society in general, which is able to see our work through social media, or the people who read newspapers where there is a different kind of conversation happening, you know? Those are communities of people who are also eager to learn more, who see and respond to the work. There is the academic community, which is broader, a global academic community where we engage in conversations through journals, or maybe the art world community through exhibitions.
There are different levels of communities, and each has different priorities. We do not want to lose sight of the fact that perhaps the most impactful is where we are making the work on the shore of Lake Malawi. That’s the primary community we are interested in engaging and observing how the work has an impact. That work then is echoed through the other communities.
We are now thinking about connecting to other communities of intellectuals, activists, environmentalists and academics who are interested in the ecological issues that we are engaging with, or the political issues that we feel are urgent in the work that we do. So yeah, the local communities and the global communities, all of these are contributing to the processes of meaning making in the work that we are doing.
STUDIO: The valences of those conversations are very interesting. Everybody seems focused on these issues now—building communities focused on mutual aid, exploring the rhetorical value of art as it’s presented to the world through the different channels you mentioned. How do you understand your ability and effectiveness in all of these different spaces while maintaining the core, local message? Does your original audience somehow force you to maintain that focus, or are you happy to expand it? Does that message translate?
LEMU: Yeah, I think there is a flexibility in the approach that we take. We allow for the open-endedness in terms of the work existing in multiple forms and dimensions as it accumulates meaning through different conversations. It is not just one kind of thing that we create.
Even if we focus on a very specific topic in a very specific geographical area in Malawi, the issues that we are dealing with are interconnected with the larger world. Other people sharing similar concerns might not experience them in exactly the same way that we experience them in Malawi, but we know that they share similar concerns, and those who recognize the concerns present in the work are attracted to the work and engage in conversations around it.
I was recently invited to give a talk at the Ocean / Uni, a group of academics, artists and environmentalists dealing with the transformations happening in the world’s oceans at the moment. They consider the militarization of the ocean, for example, big container ships, cruise liners and the pollution they create, the accumulation of plastics… Also, the effects of extractive industries like big trawlers and raking, the shipping of oil, oil drilling and associated spillages and how all of these things are destroying oceanic ecosystems.
These people recognize that if you destroy the oceans, you’re destroying life on the planet. All these issues are also connected to climate change and global warming and so on and so forth. At the conference, one of the people who saw our work on Lake Malawi invited me into conversation with a South African professor who is also dealing with how fishing communities are endangered off the Western Cape in South Africa. So, people are looking at this and it’s resonating with them, and they’re inviting us to join their conversations.
STUDIO: It’s amazing because the conversations are as globalized as the issues, but they are all doing decolonizing work—decoupling from the harmful trends of globalization. Your sense of place is so acute, like with the objects that you choose to center in your art. Many of them are found objects. Many of them are very place-specific, like the pounding bowls. How do you continue to focus on these objects specific to Malawi when you’re doing work in Switzerland, for example, or in Richmond?
LEMU: It’s really personal, you know. As an artist, I’m drawn to objects that I’m familiar with, objects that I grew up with. I have so many stories to tell with these objects because there is a familiarity and a relationship with them. Some of them I have worked with my own hands, others I’ve just been looking at for a long time.
There is a limited repertoire of objects that I work with. I tell my students that, even having lived in the US for six or so years now, most of the objects here remain strange to me. I cannot say much with them because I haven’t really had that relationship with them. They are alien to me. They are other people’s objects.
If you take that mortar, the object for pounding grain, we call it mtondo, I have so many things to say with a mtondo, and I don’t have to force out the things that I can do with it because it’s already in me. I have touched it. I have heard its sounds when my mother and aunties and grannies were working with it. I’ve listened to the songs that have been recorded and put on the radio. I have eaten flour pounded in those mtondo. I have a very deep connection with these objects.
There is another object that I’m using so much, the kerosene lantern. I can say so much in terms of the microeconomics of the lantern. My mother and father used to send me to the market to buy a few milliliters of paraffin to put in this lamp. From this small thing you get an insight into the family budget. Maybe a few liters of kerosene for the day or maybe enough for two days, depending on the available budget. After that the lamp dries out, and you have to go back and buy more.
Those kinds of relationships with objects are very personal. But on a larger scale, considering that Malawi is a country that’s still struggling with a reliable electricity supply and that people rely on the kerosene lantern or candles maybe three days of the week, these are also macro issues concerning how Malawi is positioned at a certain global economic status. You can talk about these things simply by focusing on the lantern.
There is also an aesthetic dimension to it, though. The mtondo is shaped similarly to certain drums, but it has anthropomorphic qualities. The lanterns also have anthropomorphic qualities, but you see these things only as a result of spending time with them. Not every object would elicit these kinds of responses from me, nor in the same way. It’s because of the time spent with them that meaning has accumulated and stories have accumulated in these objects.
STUDIO: It’s like the objects are mediums between the rituals of everyday life and the larger message—the microeconomic, the macroeconomic. The larger meanings that you’re communicating seem to be established through those rhythms of everyday life. Do you feel like that’s something that’s missing from a certain aspect of modern life in the U.S., or in any more consumerist society?
LEMU: Well, I wouldn’t say missing as such, because there is also a different way of responding to objects here or living with objects that maybe happens at a faster pace than in Malawi. That said, some artists are at the center and others are on the margins of the global economy. I am sure that it is possible to create art about other possibilities beyond capitalism even from the epicenter of capitalism. We simply spend more time with objects in Malawi. You buy something and you have to really use it to reach its maximum potential. Recycling is deeply embedded in how we relate to objects there.
I grew up in my grandfather’s house, for example, and I don’t even remember when my grandfather drove these two vans that stood outside in the yard. They were dead, you know! They were no longer operational, but they had been there for almost 30 years. They just stood out as relics of prestige, of the family wealth of a bygone time when my grandfather had been a wealthy man. But they were also like storage, extra rooms to put suitcases of books that people were no longer using, or old clothes. Then the weather did its job and wore them down to the point that they just became old scraps of metal. Some people came over and said, “can we buy these and recycle the metal now?”
So, they saw these scraps, the people cut them up, and then maybe they became pots or something else. They took on another life as other objects. Here, you don’t even have the space to keep those kinds of things just sitting outside your yard. But there is maybe another way of recycling that’s happening with thrift stores, for example, where you go sell clothes and somebody else goes in to buy. It’s a kind of a marginal economy within the larger, fast-paced consumer economy that defines American society.
There are different ways of dealing with objects, different relationships with objects. One way is slower, with recycling deeply embedded, and the other one is faster. There is a kind of conversation of recycling, which I think is more machinic in the sense that it’s where you delegate the recycling to another system, an official system of recycling that takes over from you. In Malawi we do the recycling ourselves, you know?
STUDIO: I’m really interested in how that is translated to the experience your students have here at VCUarts. You’ve identified a really interesting trend that originates from other places in the world but is finally arriving here in America—this trend of reclaiming machinic systems, humanizing the process. That process, that foregrounding of ritual is giving those systems a voice and using objects to communicate in a different way. Have your students embraced that trend, or is it something that’s very personal to you and the collective?
LEMU: No, it’s there, although perhaps with a different spirit in different sculptural forms. Assemblage, for example, where an artist picks up a manufactured object and transforms it, responding to its aesthetics or other dimensions that the object carries. It’s a tradition that has been present in the west, perhaps, but the aesthetic element had been more foregrounded than the others, like recycling, that artists from elsewhere are bringing into the conversation. So, if you think about the forebears of assemblage emerging out of the modernist movement, the form of modernist conversations tended to be more important than the kinds of stories that the different objects brought into the assemblage, into the sculpture.
I think at some point, perhaps with the colonial tendencies, different objects come to carry different meanings. Even when you’re using different objects, you’re not just picking them up and responding to their shape, because there are cultural meanings attached too. There is a responsibility with each object that you bring into the assemblage. Even as assemblage itself tended to be a practice that was predominant in certain societies, now the conversation is transformed because of these other ways of looking at an assemblage beyond the formalist attitude.
I tend to gravitate towards the animist way of thinking about the agency of matter, because there is a spiritual dimension to how the so-called animists respect objects or how they respect matter. It’s beyond formalism and certain object-oriented ontologies popular in the West which are perhaps still tethered to that formalist way of looking at objects. There is a magical dimension, a spiritual dimension beyond the political and economical.
Students are definitely engaging with these things. They’re asking questions about how they can go beyond simply using an object to say what they want to say, instead seeking to amplify the voice of the object itself. You know, encountering an object, encountering something that used to be regarded as not having a voice and finding that it has interesting things to say and looking for ways they can amplify that voice. These are things that I’m thinking about, and I’m finding that students are also engaged with the same questions.
Interview conducted by Micah Jayne.